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@NormanGray I wouldn't even consider hiring a SysAdmin who didn't know how to setup at least one kind of VPN. They are well within "the basic", heck PPTP VPNs were covered in one of my college classes. Also, when in doubt, animal books.
This is satire, right? This is EXACTLY the sort of off-topic forum-like response that drives so many people away. No only are you winging about the situation unnecessarily, but you took the time to write it all up in a post without lending a single thought toward the actual topic of discussion.
I'm sorry to be curt or rude, but before we discuss the "allow non-processional" idea, you need to look at what get's closed, find some examples, and base your recommendation off something substantial. I've heard the "just let people ask anything" argument many times without a lick of evidence to support the opinion - and every time I've asked for examples I've got nothing or crap. People who have provided many answers in the past and then stopped have been expressed concerns over the never ending stream of non-professional help vampires.
@Adam Just to be clear, we've identified a set of "problems" we have, but nobody has found answers to any of them. I really need to write it up in some kind of canonical post, as you're far from the first person to be irked by the symptoms of these problems. We've had some really bright minds pour over it too. And the same paradigms work for other sites, but don't seem to work for SF.
@Iain Granted, but for whatever reason it's read as the latter, and people are generally 50x more likely to tell friends about a negative experience than a positive one.
The main problem I have is that by allowing a wider range of content you force potential answers to wade through more of what they don't want to answer before finding something they do want to answer. The site allows for a degree of user filtering by voting; but people don't vote (if you can solve that issue it would solve other problems too). Filtering by tags requires extra Answerer effort to setup, and is less effective than you'd think. Lacking filtering, the effort required to Answer will rise until nobody wants to put that much effort into providing an Answer on a recurring basis.
