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@AndrewB Jon dug some up, see meta.serverfault.com/questions/8055/… - the reaction I recall seeing (though unsure where, maybe slack?) is that they don't matter because they're old.
@Ward Well, I think his other concern is that some questions got swept up that aren't actually about control panels, but just happened to mention them (or have them in a filename, etc), so the close reason comment wasn't appropriate for them.
@Hyppy I think we're talking past each other. I understand that it's controversial now, but it doesn't need to have been - this all could have been avoided by having a discussion within the community about how to proceed; then Shog would have been able to tell what was going on when he ran across the closures. That's all I'm saying - can we not agree that this would have turned out a lot better if that had happened?
I feel like this really doesn't need to be this controversial - I get that many people here are upset at decisions being made from outside the SF community, but is "there should probably be a discussion on meta before blanket-closing hundreds of questions" really such an imposition? (and yes, there was discussion of tag cleanup, which was completed months ago and does not cover the kinds of specifics that are needed for question cleanup - saying it was already agreed to is disingenuous)
@MichaelHampton Fair enough, but I think we have enough tools at our disposal already for squashing crappy questions about crappy control panels without needing to add additional complexity to our close criteria; I don't feel like we really have need of some kind of a software blacklist, as good as it might feel to prominently display. And one of these years, the unicorn of an interesting, well-researched, well-asked control panel question might just show up (Ok, I'm kidding myself).
The problem isn't applying community standards to moderation - it's that a moderator shouldn't undertake a large cleanup campaign without discussing it with the community first. Your efforts are appreciated, but the fact that we're debating the closure of specific questions that got swept up in your cleanup after they were closed instead of beforehand, as well as debating the wording of the comment you're using (which is open to interpretation in two different ways) shows that we clearly could have done this better with some discussion and additional eyeballs beforehand.
@JennyD That tag cleanup was a different effort which was completed months ago - and the highest voted answer on that question, Michael's, implies that if we were to do a cleanup campaign we'd have some legwork to do to determine which questions were worth sending to webmasters. I'm not saying a cleanup wasn't warranted or due, I'm saying that the right way to do it is to discuss in meta first.
@BigHomie The topicality of these kinds of questions has definitely been discussed at length, but a cleanup campaign has not been - when we've done those in the past, a meta post lets other people weigh in on the criteria we use to evaluate what gets closed/what gets edited and improved/what gets migrated to a site that wants them, lets people scan the tag for anything they think can be salvaged or that doesn't fit in the criteria, and communicates to everyone visiting the site (including community managers) what's being done by the community (instead of by a single moderator).
I have yet to see a single one that was both high quality (or even medium quality!) and answerable by normal system administrators - Do we see many of those at all (about managing the panel), even bad ones? I agree that I haven't seen any good ones (though I haven't been looking), but I'm not sure if we should declare a software package as off-topic just because it's crappy; if we go down that road we'll need to apply the same treatment to, say, sharepoint and nagios too (I kid, I kid). Why not just add them to ignored tags and let them sit unanswered?
@TheCleaner Sorry, busy week last week - my current thinking is that we have three cases to cover: "you're on the wrong site", "you're doing it wrong", and "you're in way over your head, we can't help you in 30,000 characters" (which is what your answer covers well).. does that sound right? I think we can do a generic one for the first, and get wording together that covers both the second and third.
I'm trying to come up with good wording along these lines, but I keep running into thinking that these are covered by "minimal understanding" - do we have some good hypothetical questions this needs to hit? "my environment that someone else set up has a strange problem that I have no idea how to troubleshoot", maybe?
