@Iain this is so cool, what Javascript lines do I need to block to enable it permanently? :)

Wesley, I have not found the time yet to read your latest book, but I am upvoting it for the abundance of pretty colored circles as well as the Lions, Tigers and Bears.

While I agree with the reasoning, I also agree with @voretaq7's point of view that this is followed to the letter too much. Basically it leads to a discussion about changing the StackExchange (or at least ServerFault) rules for questions, which appears to be kind of a minefield.

to state that a thing is "better" than another is to express an opinion - this is why nearly everybody in the world has the Best Dad.

scripting is on-topic here, it also likely would be related to deployment scenarios, which are on-topic here either. Having said this, I should add that I neither use nor know VirtualBox, so I cannot say anything about its applicability to professional environments.

Re frustration: I don't answer to see my answers upvoted. They might as well be not, the answer's quality should speak for itself. Here at SF, we rarely have the situation where a question has so many answers that a reader would have difficulties recognizing the "best" approach. In most cases, the answers are complementary to each other, so the value of voting is not as much in helping to select the best answer but rather in recognizing the poster's effort. I see this being done on a rather subjective basis - folks upvoting other folks they like - and have to admit I do that occasionally, too.

@gparent running without the "professional" requirement would not mean that the sites would merge. I do not see many SAN or Exchange questions on Superuser. There might be significant overlap in networking, but consumer-grade stuff is run in small businesses too and we get similar questions here. A mere topical separation probably would hurt much and likely not lower the overall quality of questions and answers on the site.

@AndrewB I can't see this as a mere "numbers" thing. From my news participation ("oh no, not again!") I have seen extremely fragmented structures with micro-communities (newsgroups have been created if the traffic exceeded 100 posts a month, and that's "posts", not "questions") work out neatly because the regulars were able to cross-participate in several of them rather easily. You can break up SF and this is even evidenced by the secessions of DBA, U&L, Security and Network Engineering.

Protocol questions have historically been asked and answered on Server Fault, too. What the NE crowd is claiming are protocols which do not have that much expertise at Server Fault - which is pretty much everything in the area of carrier networking. It goes to show that NE is able to attract the experts in these areas at short notice, otherwise all the site is going to be is a network-topic fragment off Server Fault without real added value for anybody.

could you elaborate a bit on what the previous contests were actually about?

I believe it will be hard to get an "SF consensus" on this topic, but speaking for myself, I would send questions over to Network Engineering if I think the question has a better chance getting a good answer there. This would even be the case if I were to answer it.

@voretaq7 I tend to omit Apache questions and surely do not look at the corresponding tag views. But from the question tags I read, indeed a large part can be answered by reading the fine manual or another type of reference documentation. People just don't know where to look. This does not make the questions illegitimate or less valuable, though.

This is surely good for a laugh, but the important question remains unanswered: why do the others manage where we think we would not? The topicality seems always to be a problem to newcomers plus we've basically lost the entire network design & administration sector to Network Engineering recently because the coverage of SF is not being understood. If the goal is to get "interesting questions", all of this is inherently bad and needs to be dealt with. Now.

Thank you for taking the time - I did gain some valuable insights - especially from the history and the quantcast link. So the significant difference between Stack Overflow where the scope is at least as wide but without the "professional" constraint and Server Fault would be the critical mass? If so, isn't this kind of a chicken-and-egg problem? And why did Stack Overflow ever manage to overcome this barrier whereas no confidence is put in Server Fault to do the same?

@Ward I propose a frisbee-style trowing competition for Surface tablets (Windows 8 has to be installed and running of course). This needs to be carried out in a data center and bonus marks are earned by participants causing spectacular rebounds off rack cabinets.