The difficulty is where is the line drawn? If one person's obvious home use question gets answered then the next person will expect the same and it all devolves into arguments why was x allowed and my y is not ... Broken windows is relevant.

Here on SF there are also too many new users and too few answerers as well. More than 50% of questions go unansered and the gap is growing.

One of the founding reasons for a separate devops.se was that Serverfault was not a good fit for many of it's users and questions, This is still true. Closing it and merging it to SF will do no one a service. My comment here about devops.se remains true.

The game needs a larger number of players than are currently active to work as designed. Right now there are insufficient players to answer ~50% of the questions that are asked so it's not surprising that the more janitorial aspects of the game are unplayed.

> Would a thread asking info to port some ancient COBOL routines to C++ 19 also be closed by a mod? Almost certainly - that is off topic for Server Fault it may fly on Stack Overflow though. This place isn't Usenet or a mailing list or a forum. There are no threads/thread handling/discussions - just Questions and Answers.

Sadly, nothing you say has not been said before many times. The people who used to actively moderate the site mostly drifted away because of the issues you describe. 3 votes isn't really going to solve the problem of too few people doing the voting.

@Paul Statistical noise.

@Paul See my last comment on the question above. SF is SO's Hell Desk. Most of the questions are asked by people who just want to get on with hacking their code. Using google and thinking is too time consuming for them and their primary goal.

@Paul It's not related to the review mines but the length of them is a consequence of the lack of people who play that part of the game. Thel ack of reviewers is a signal that things are less then good,

How quickly bad/spam/duplicate questions get closed is also something to consider. My impression is that all categories hang around far too long as there just aren't enough people who care any more.

Most of the so-called 'junior sysadmins' probably wouldn't consider themselves to be so. check out their profiles and see where they have most reputation. It will most likely be SO which makes them developers. When I did this a few years ago >60% of questions were asked by people with more rep elsewhere in SE. Te remainder were either amateurs or it could not be determined.

One thing we don't know is how many people ask a question of $favoriteSearchEngine, get directed to SF, find the answer to their problem and move on (having viewed all of the relevant adverts etc.) . The widening gap between questions asked and answered is not good. I wonder what that would be like if Michael Hampton stopped playing the game. Maybe the folks at Octopus deploy can tell us whether their money was well spent in sponsoring the site ?

Compassionate downvotes help speed up putting questions out of their misery too