@martin's - additionally, it seems as if you think that all we care about are these large deployments. That is not the case. In fact, many of the high-rep users (myself included) have fairly small environments. Speaking for myself, my flock can be counted on two hands. Doing things right is just as important in small deployments as it is in large deployments, so the vast majority of questions can be applied to both.

@martin's - we absolutely do not limit questions to "big iron" deployments. We actually get fairly few questions about large and/or expensive deployments. Additionally, workstation questions are on topic, as long as the question pertains to the administration of those systems by someone who is doing this professionally. Take AD software deployments for example, or group policy. Those are both workstation-oriented topics that are on topic and have been asked and answered here many times.

@martin's - I'm not sure why you keep ignoring my points about XAMPP being off-topic to to it being a developer tool. I've mentioned it several times and you haven't responded to this point, so I'm starting to think you're just avoiding it.

@martin's - please see this direct quote from the XAMPP site: (emphasis mine) "The philosophy behind XAMPP is to build an easy to install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache. To make it convenient for developers XAMPP is configured with all features turned on." We appreciate your helpful Q&A, and to be honest, it's a shame that you deleted your answer. That said, there is a ton of "helpful" information out there that, in spite of its helpfulness, is still off-topic.

Except as delivered in XAMPP, it's a developer's tool. XAMPP is not meant to be used in any capacity other than that. Therein lies the misunderstanding. It is not difficult to deploy a simple, updatable, secure LAMP stack. Steps for doing so are well-documented elsewhere.

@martin's - you're taking things completely out of context. Please read my comments about XAMPP being developer tools. If you have something constructive to add here, please do so, we'd love to hear it.

@martin's - you'll notice that the post you refer to is from 2009. That's an eternity in the life of an online community. Over time, it became clear that the '09 version of the FAQ was not adequate, and that we needed to clarify things. This led to several rounds of FAQ re-writing by the community. If you have suggestions on how the FAQ can be improved, we're all ears.

@martin's - there are very rare occasions where, say, an XAMPP tag would be on-topic, say if a windows admin was trying to figure out how to automatically deploy XAMPP to his software developers.

Makes sense, and I'm for it. I guess I'm just cynical about how many people will actually read it.

I had a similar experience, in fact I think I was >10k before realizing that we had the FAQ tag. Perhaps that needs to be more well-publicized.

Cripes. I use MAMP extensively, and I'm sure others here do the same. XAMPP/MAMP/etc. are fine tools. To be used in development. They fit into the same class of applications as Eclipse or Visual Studio - they are developer tools and as such are off-topic here. Regarding SO, as mentioned elsewhere, they have a long history of migrating questions to SF that are off-topic here. In spite of many MSO discussions on the topic, they were still unable to grasp the topicality of SF, which is why the SO->SF migration path was removed.

I wish there were an easy way to do this, but even with a long-form FAQ, how many people would actually read it? We have a hard enough time getting people to read the short FAQ. Perhaps we just need to make sure the link to tagged/faq is displayed prominently for those who need further clarification on question topicality.

Also, I should note that your posts won't be deleted if you delete your account. They'll just become somewhat anonymous.

Please, take a deep breath and wait a second before throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Nothing was done that was in violation of anything in the FAQ. You did the right thing in bringing your concerns to meta.SF. You may not agree with the way things are done here, but by participating in the discussion, you can perhaps help us understand your use case, as well as coming to understand why questions about XAMPP tend to get closed.

As I commented below, this is not about elitism or any other such nonsense. It's about doing systems administration the right way, which doesn't include *AMP installers. There is certainly no disdain for the LAMP technologies themselves, but rather the manner in which they are deployed (outside of a standard package updating system) and configured (very insecure) using these one-click installers.

@martin's - in a way, yes, it is about what SF likes, in that we have a strong like of doing things the right way (where right includes things like security, patching, maintainability, traceability, etc.). One-click LAMP installers are surely nice as a developer's tool (which is their stated goal), but using them in production is most definitely not the right way to do things.

In the case of the first Q you mentioned, I voted to migrate to Unix & Linux.

If you are that worried about your data, you ought to be just as concerned (or even more) about your backup procedures than on the server itself.

Alright, fair enough. Kudos for not needing a rant. Unfortunately you're an outlier here, as we get many, many people that come here asking about ridiculous ideas, and they won't accept the answer that they're doing it wrong.