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After reading others answers/comments I realized that I have the power to influence at least 1 aspect. I can try and exemplify the behavior that I would hope to recieve when asking a question when I try and answer or help an OP. This does not mean there is an issue with the community, and it does not make me better than anyone else. If I want to change the perception, the only thing I can do is to try and contribute positively. i.e. The Golden Rule
@kce This is very well written and makes sense. Thanks. In my own experience, I have 3 issues with contribution, which Chris calls out in a comment to my question. 1 - I am a casual contributor to SF, part due to my skills in sysadmin have detered over the years since changing my professional focus to development and part due to other responsibilities consuming my life. 2 - I find it hard to find questions that I can answer because of poor filterability. 3 - My impressions of this behavior/policy as closed/elitist. I don't believe the people are elitist, it just comes off that way.
@AndrewB Very well, I'll concede your point on the lengthy debate. I have not followed the history or am familiar enough with the current state of the community to draw that conclusion. I am unable to edit my comment on SF to remove that statement though. Maybe a moderator can edit it for me?
@Iain I started to edit this question again (3 times actually) and struggled with fixing its wording. Instead, I'll let the discussion continue/die off for now. In the meantime, I have provided the OP of the linked question with some suggestions.
@AndrewB Thanks, I commented on his question with some suggestions on how he could improve his question and suggested he may want to alternatively checkout superuser.
@Iain I apologize for coming off as claiming the community is broken. I do not believe that. I believe that people have the best intentions. I will reword my question to focus less on the community and more on the sites.
@Iain I think the beauty of the stack exchange sites is the ability for professionals to show their professionalism by helping others, even if they are currently less of a professional in the field as another. Chris calls out some difficulties that may impede our abilities to do that, and discussing those difficulties could allow us to generate feature requests to improve these sites.
@Iain I'll accept the broken windows theory, and I am not saying that this question is good "as is." Moderation, and the voting to close a question is analogous to policing our community. What I am trying to discuss is the means in which we police. I think through a constructive discussion we may be able to come up with a better means of "policing" the community.
I understand and agree with you, believe me. From my perspective, I am giving this guy the benefit of the doubt though, and assuming that he has some extenuating circumstance that has led him to this non-ideal problem/solution. There are limitless possibilities to how he got into this situation, and I feel like being too quick to close a question isn't the best approach here. I was curios if there is a different stack exchange site, and I should not have suggested it being a DevOps site, but I don't know where else I would send this OP.
Thank you for your clarification and your rewrite. I have updated my question with my thoughts on the subject. I will try and think of how to update it further such that I am not taking a stance of defending a help vampire as the link you gave defines them. I completely agree that help vampires are not a good thing, I am hoping to have a discussion about the site and community in a constructive and insightful manner.
I understand, and appreciate, your point. Would the question be better valued/served on a different stack exchange site? Maybe one that is more geared towards DevOps or something?
