@ChrisS Yeah, I don't have any good explanation for that - The same jump exists in Oct - Dec of 2012, but in 2013 the Jul-Sep period was where there was a jump, then Oct through Dec was flat.

@Reaces I'd need to go to the developers to explain the exact mechanics of what's in SEDE, but I suspect that's because closed questions are eventually deleted and would then stop being exposed in the data dump.

@AndrewB Yeah, going with Chris's reasoning here that we can close the stuff that needs closed accurately without it. We can definitely adjust the close reasons after the fact if it turns out we do need it.

@yoonix Yes, there are absolutely some people who ignore the site's scope and the prompts they're given when asking their first question (though given the stats, I'd say it's more like 30-40% and not 95%). Obviously, community moderation needs to deal with that. But I'm not sure why that's a negative about this proposal? Yes, it won't force people to read it any more than the current one does, so it's a net of no change for people who weren't going to read it anyway.

I like that idea. Right now there's the "How to ask" box and the "Formatting Help" box - it does offer a tiny bit of direct advice ("Provide details. Share your research."), but I think we could definitely stand to use the space we have there more effectively. I believe we'll need some development work to make that happen, I'll look into it.

@sysadmin1138 Yeah, that's a good point - I wonder if we can find two of those to collapse.

@MichaelHampton I'd say for dev environments, it's really not "managing systems", so that leaves it off-topic.. but if someone's setting up some Vagrant stuff for developing their Chef infrastructure, we want it, so it's a hard line to draw.

I think the benefit of the doubt is a good sentiment and definitely something that we need to have in mind, but that's more a guideline for the people in the community who are answering questions and doing community moderation - the target audience for this document is someone who's never been on the site before and needs to know what they can ask about.

@200_success By that reasoning, we ban most questions about Microsoft products. I don't think that's a terribly productive direction to go in.

@HopelessN00b I'm thinking we're getting close to too many points in the "not about" section, but I agree that this is probably where we want that documented instead of in some separate meta question. working with a service provider's management panel, such as cPanel sound like a good bullet for the not about section? Possibly with a parenthesized "go to webmasters" like it has for SU?

@KatherineVillyard If we want to get technical about it, the HAProxy box is the one serving the 50x error pages, so it'd be the one we'd need platform accuracy for. But the images on the error pages are a lot more about fun than accuracy ;)