Also, the Winter Bash hats will be back soon for your double-hat needs.

@200_success The idea of that is to get a way to close questions that are variants on "I dropped my database and have no backups, halp" or "I'm using a six year old version of Ubuntu due to neglect and something's broken", and to not use it to close good, legitimate questions about environments using ancient hardware and software. See the discussion between me and two of our mods here for context - I'd like to get some better wording on it if you have any ideas!

I like that much better, edited.

On "professional" - I want to find good wording that asks for the right kind of questions, while taking away the focus on the user.. what's there might not do that well, though. On "_aaS", that section definitely needs better wording. I'll work "legal advice" back in, though I feel like circumvention is covered decently by "unauthorized use/misuse" - is that missing something important, do you think?

Yeah, I want to find better wording for the sections you're talking about. Will give it some more thought!

@Iain You really need to know what happened? Okay, then: I linked this comment to the community team's chat room, which presumably prompted 2 or 3 of them to vote. But I'm pretty sure I don't have enough staff to pump 59 upvotes onto meta.serverfault.com/questions/6701 - so, again, I think you're projecting your opinion onto the community at large - 7 or 8 downvotes is not the entire community.

@Iain Just because you and some other extremely vocal members of the community don't support it doesn't mean that the entire community doesn't support it. Seriously, if you are as fed up with this community as you seem to be, please take a break.

@Iain That's been discussed at great length already, see the paragraph that starts with This isn’t going to directly address the volume of meta.serverfault.com/questions/6701

@MadHatter I'm absolutely open to better wording than what's in the post. I think the bad questions that we get come from people who aren't reading this stuff anyway, and I think we'll have no problem whatsoever determining what the bad questions are and closing them. If someone's asking a bad question that would be on-topic if asked in a better way, we should be sending them the signal that they need to improve their question, not to leave forever because they aren't professional enough for us. I'm really not seeing how that one change will lower the quality bar.

@MadHatter I think we're talking past each other a little bit - I want to make sure that the questions that we get are good questions for problems that sysadmins have - but instead of targeting "should this person be on this site", a much better approach is to look at the quality and topicality of the question. Nowhere am I saying that we should lower our quality bar, which seems to be what you think I'm trying to do.

The primary thing I'm trying to accomplish is to move the focus from the person asking the question to the question itself - "professional" invites us to look at the person, when we should be looking at the question. If an amateur asks a great question about how to set something up for a mailing list, then yes, I'm saying it should be in scope - because a well-asked question helps both professionals and non-professionals with the same problem.

@voretaq7 Hey, I put notes on that one that I wanted it rephrased for a reason. Crowdsourcing! ;)

@MichaelHampton Yeah, I really want better wording for that bit.. I'll give it some more thought, I bet we can figure something better out.

Ahh, gotcha. I think it's shorter overall, but I'm definitely in support of trimming it further - the more direct it is, the better the chance that a drive-by user might read and understand it. But yes, I should clarify, I was going for both the language changes and trying to make it a simpler/clearer read. This comes at a cost of losing a bit of the granularity, granted, but that's stuff that we can cover elsewhere to keep it simple in the thing we want everyone to really read. Definitely open to suggestions and critique on those points, though!

@ChrisS I think "consumer" targets for "home" pretty well, and might even be closer aligned with what we want.. someone's linksys at a small business might be better off at SU anyway (and someone's enterprise gear in their basement might be a better question than much of the professional stuff we see). Not sure you mean on the "new section" - do you mean the "not about" section? The one above is a bit shorter than what we have currently.