@qris It should add a link to the other question to the top of the post when it's marked as duplicate - are there cases you're seeing where that's not happening?

@ChrisS Not bad at all - seems like we can at least give it a shot without it and see how it goes.

My thinking is that we could use a replacement close reason that drops the "professional" wording, but still keeps the gist of "uhh, you're way out of scope here", which communicates clearly that the question should not be re-asked here even if it's improved in ways it would need to be improved for it to be good enough to migrate. For instance, blatant homework questions, or a poorly asked question which, when cleaned up, would belong on SU. I think we get enough of those that it'd be a headache to "Other" for all of them.

@Sven The idea is to drop the professional requirement, since it's being used as a hammer to close a lot of questions that are perceived to be from "non-professionals", whether they're devs or sysadmins who are asking something that we think a professional wouldn't ask. We should be handling Qs on whether they're topical and answerable, instead of trying to make all questions that come in be interesting/complex problems (and punishing the ones that aren't). Using the "professional" reason how we have causes us give a bad impression to potential contributors, and doesn't stop bad questions.

Thanks for clarifying - you have my vote!

Great answers, thanks! A couple little follow-ups, if you don't mind: you can expect to see me taking an active role in the front page - I think I understand what you're saying but just to confirm, this means squashing the kinds of questions you mentioned earlier as meriting immediate closure? Questions about things that aren't really system administration - Would you include "questions from someone who says they're a developer, but they're doing sysadmin work" in that category?

@MarkHenderson I undeleted it.

Please don't delete vote the referenced question, so that people with less than 20k rep can actually see what's being discussed.

@MadHatter I think we can all agree that things are on the wrong track as they stand, right? It's part of the community team's job to help communities that are on the wrong track. I get that you're upset at what you see as outside interference, but that's clearly a tough balance to strike, as Iain has commented elsewhere that in his opinion, there should have been action from the community team sooner.

@Magellan I'm not Chris, actually. I'm just saying that if you're disagreeing with that, then it makes more sense to register your disagreement where that's actually being discussed, as opposed to here. Especially since the complaints you seem to have with it are directly addressed in that post.

@Magellan If you disagree with that, then disagree on that question.

Can we keep discussion of bullet point 3 on the question that's dedicated to that?

@Wesley Well, without doing some serious manual labor to blindly classify question quality before and after the google boost.. does it seem more likely that our "normal" question sources reduced by exactly the amount that the boost added, to keep the total volume even, or just that the boost didn't add much?

@KatherineVillyard the emphasis on "scaring off" the clueless is misplaced and frightens the competent more than the clueless Yes, a thousand times this. Well said!

@MadHatter To my mind, this election is about whether the SF community or the wider SE community gets to decide how SF is run I think this is a bad way to look at the situation. The people who want the community to build stronger locks and higher fences might be the people who are yelling the loudest within the community, but they aren't the whole community. An "us vs them" mentality, where "them" is outsiders but people inside the community are on the "them" side, is pretty self-defeating.

@Sven we have edited around our various FAQs and help texts and whatever for years now without any positive effect All of those edits have been angled toward "how can we make it clear to the people we don't want that we don't want them?" This a different approach - I understand if you have doubts about how well it'll go, but it is a different direction than what's been tried in the past.

@sysadmin1138 By the way, I showed Tom the graph, he was amused :)

@MadHatter I'm more referring to "easy" questions than poorly asked ones, but regardless, I think we're both looking at the same problem and seeing different solutions. Too many people sticking their heads in for the people in the room to deal with? I'm saying get more people to deal with them and spread the load, and you're saying barricade the door.