I come here too because I can assume a certan level of expertise among the users here. But this community is useless if its members aren't willing to share that expertise. I only post questions here when I have problems I can't solve on my own - clearly (by my low participation) that doesn't happen very often. But when it does, I'd like to find solutions and that would be a lot easier if I wasn't tripping over users who think they're better than everyone else. In the time it takes to vote down a question they could just as easily have answered it.

@RobM Some of the users commenting here have definitely shown themselves as elitist snobs. You are not one of them, in my opinion. I feel your comments have been constructive and useful. Still, JamesRyan's point is still valid, even if it does not apply to you specifically.

@JamesRyan I for one confess to having way too much free time - but that's voluntary. Actually, I should be working on a freelance web dev project right now. You cobble together one site for a friend and suddenly you're employed in a whole different sector of the market...

I think I agree with this entirely. Though I feel that there are many users who don't interpret "professional" the same way, or who are extra picky about it. I know, as an asker, I regularly feel inclined to be short in my questions, because I have a tendency to be wordy. So I won't explain in detail every troubleshooting or research step I've made because I don't want to overwhelm the community with trivia that is not pertinent to getting an answer. Is that a bad policy on my part? Or should such questions be given a chance to explain more in depth before being closed as "not useful"?

The real problem is new users who are not familiar with the system or who are not following it. Those users quickly get rejected and then the admins complain about woefully dropping traffic statistics. If the suggestions I have made already exist, then they are inadequate or faulty - certainly they are ineffective. How can they be made more effective? How can the system be made more effective without alienating new users? And yes, a lot of my points are made towards SF but are SE policies. I'm not active on every SE site and I'm going to address the problem where I see it, on the site I use.

I disagree entirely with your opening statement. The whole point of communities open to public viewing like this is for people to find useful answers without having to ask the question. That is also why repeat questions are deemed so bad. Also, 99% of lurkers aren't lurking to find out how the community works, they're lurking to find answers. You assume that they're going to figure out the community along the way, but obviously they don't or this wouldn't be an issue! I'll take the ad hominem with a grain of salt, but why not spend some effort trying to solve the real problem?

@FalconMomot That is where I have to disagree entirely. You prioritize "weird and messy" as long as it is with equipment you deam appropriate. That's snobbish. I'm sure everyone would love to operate on a pair of $10k XenServers with a 10gig backbone to a redundant NAS, but not everyone can. Just because a business is small and the IT budget (or boss) only allows them to run VMWare free on a beefed up old desktop doesn't make them any less professional, nor does it make their concerns any less real or valuable. You have perfectly demonstrated the "Country Club" mentality I have a problem with.

+1 for MS actually fixing the problem on their end. I haven't deployed Forefront before, but I read a lot about it when researching the o365 project. For my part, I think I'll avoid SSO like the plague in the future. It makes offsite logins to o365 painful with minimal (and buggy) benefit to onsite personel.

Glad to hear it worked well for you. In my case it was another example of the boss giving me a task outside my experience with an impossible deadline - so the real headache was from him jumping down my throat for being behind schedule. ADFS is a lot easier to deploy in 2012 as compared to 2008r2, and MS's hybrid deployment guides for local AD/Exchange Online which I followed were decodable. Selecting the appropriate type of deployment is a little more tricky and if I ever do it again I'd probably come to SF for advice on that - if SF is open to that kind of question in the future.

Well I think it depends on whether SF wants willing-to-learn IT "greenies" in the target audience or not. I assumed yes, since as long as they work in the field such a person qualifies as a professional in my book. But hey, at least you got some answers before your first question was closed ;) 4 months after it was asked! not everyone is so fortunate. I'm curious how your migration went - I was doing the exact same thing about that same time (Nov-Dec 2012). It was a headache, to say the least.

This was a useful post. Still can't vote for it! ;) You describe this issue as some sort of identity crisis and I think that's probably accurate. So the question for the SE admins is - how can we identify and then clearly define what the SE/SF target audience is? That's points 1&2 of the SE admin conference call question. And so far nobody seems to be able to offer a way to identify or define that target audience. Not even me, sadly.

In most of my perusing of questions, rarely have I come across a "bad" question as you describe it. Maybe I just show up on the good days? But I have seen numerous "middle" questions treated as bad questions, and even some good questions treated as bad questions. I personally would also much prefer the example "correct answers" you gave than a down vote with no explanation. Sometimes a little more explanation is all that is needed to make a middle quesiton a good question and the asker is just trying not to be too wordy or overwhelm other users with trivia.

@AndrewB You're right. In the case of SO, those features worked well for me. But perhaps there is a little room for adjustment when those same features have hindered my progress in the SF community. Adjustment to the features, or adjustment to me - either/or or both.

@AndrewB Yes, train wreck. Looks like that's what happened. I believe the disconnect in my undrstanding of the "standard SE site operation" is because my experience between different SE communities has been markedly different. I have received a warm welcome and lots of useful feedback to my questions on SO and I consider its community to be completley unrelated to SF. Oddly enough, on SO I'm a complete newb to web design (and welcomed) and on SF I've got a decade of IT experience behind me (and eschewed).

@Dan Thanks for your support. I know I don't explain myself very well, but I'm glad that a few people got what I was trying to say.

@MarkHenderson Thank you for explaining better than I can what I was trying to say.

Perhaps my experience is unique, but since the beginning of my IT career I've had supervisors hand me an assignment well outside of my qualifications and give me an unrealistic deadline to complete it. The fact that I have repeatedly managed to deliver is less a testament to my skill and more a testament to friendly and helpful expert communities who have pointed me in the right direction - sometimes only by linking me to the right documentation. Often enough I have found the answer in a previous question, so I rarely join a community myself except when I have exhausted every other resource.

@FalconMomot Except that it's completely arbitrary. I had 1 reputation this morning, before I went back to months old questions I had asked that had remained unanswered (and unvoted) and answered them myself with the solutions I eventually came up with. I suppose I could do that all day if I wanted to pad my resume. Also, I'm finding myself only able to flag questions, not comments and not answers. I can edit other people's posts (i.e. add key words) but that's an unusual part of this particular community that I'm having difficulty getting used to. I'm not a moderator.