@blankip I will also caution you to not stoop to personal attacks, nor to making assumptions about the knowledge or experience of those you're interacting with.

@blankip I can sympathize with you that you're stuck in a tough spot here. Truly I can. You're being asked to put lipstick on a pig. That fact, though, doesn't mean that XAMPP is on-topic because you're being forced to use it. It's still, even in your situation, a system that is wholly unsuitable for production use. Now, as to why it's not suitable for prod usage, see this QA: serverfault.com/q/453617/20815

If the community decides after hearing your rationale that they do want to allow these questions, I'll do it gladly. Until then, though, you'll just need to come to grips with the fact that your question is off-topic.

Yes, we do actually assume that question askers do have full control of the systems they're asking about. If they don't, they're users of the system, not administrators. Server Fault is not like most other SE sites, in that it is by professionals, for professionals. We've collectively drawn a line in the sand, and have agreed that XAMPP questions are off-topic. If you want to try and sway community opinion on this, you're always free to post a meta question with your reasoning.

@blankip Do you need more clarification? I genuinely want to help you understand what happened here. We're not a bunch of militant power-hungry jerks. We all participate here because we have a desire to help people. Sometimes, though, helping people well means telling them things that they don't want to hear. I believe that's what happened with your question.

I can assure you that there is consensus on this issue not only among the moderators here, but also among the community in general. Evidence of that is visible in the voting on this exact question and answer. Look, I know this wasn't the answer you wanted, but this was the risk you took when asking on a site that values doing things right and building secure, well-supported, reliable systems. XAMPP and the other one-click installers don't fit into that picture.

Furthermore: I couldn't care less if XAMPP is used in production. Whether or not something is used has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it should be used. Windows Server 2003 is still used on hundreds of thousands of servers around the world, in spite of the fact that it's EOL and is not receiving security updates. Does the fact that it's in use make it a good idea? Absolutely not.

@blankip I will give you two quotes from the XAMPP website. 1) "XAMPP is the most popular PHP development environment" and 2) "The goal of XAMPP is to build an easy to install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache." Do you need any more evidence than that?

@Xalorous Why would you show your boss or a customer? These QAs are here for you to learn from. If you need to "prove it" to a manager or customer by showing them an answer from some stranger, there are trust issues to work out.

Why do you think the top-rated question is at all statistically relevant to what is typical on SF?

I've answered your explicit question below. Is there another implicit question you're hinting at that you'd like to ask as well?

I'd agree with you that if all we care about are the rules, then sure the comment should be deleted. I guess my in my answer, I was trying to express a more nuanced, personal view, that if a comment helps the answer-er to clarify things, then one should consider thanking that person for their correction.

@MDMarra I've undeleted the comment. I think it should stay...