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@JimB We all know that it's disingenuous to oversimplify it like that. Experts are here because they feel valued, appreciated, and to be part of a community. When they take the time out of their day to answer a question from another person, only to be met with venom, then it takes a toll on their willingness to participate. It's quite common to see a question akin to "I want to do thing X, it's not working". A common response is "X is incorrect. Try Y". This has about a 50% chance of causing a new user to jump into a profanity-laden tirade. Delete those, sure, but it still hurts.
smitty is more like MMC or Server Administrator from Windows-land, in my opinion. Those are "control panels" for Windows, but they're made to be there. cPanel, webmin, and their cousins are an abstraction that the underlying utilities know nothing about and are often the cause of just as many problems as they solve.
Web panels are off-topic, period. This has been discussed every few months for as long as I can remember. The community consensus has always been to remove them with extreme prejudice. This seems like it's less of an effort to reign in a "rogue moderator" and more like an effort to influence the community's standards for professionalism.
I had a similar issue recently, on a thread I think you were on. Someone asked how to use Windows ICS to create a tunnel through an existing VPN so they could access restricted subnets. I probed in comments about why they didn't just configure their VPN to allow access to the subnet, and discovered that they were just trying to circumvent corporate security policy on a system they weren't allowed to administer. I wonder if we need to incorporate a "We won't help you do bad things" reason too.
