@Lnafziger I wouldda gone with "The neighbors bitching about its existence"

@Articuno I think answerer expertise does count for something (coming from the perspective of SuperUser, which also has a lot of 'experts' with varying levels of experience and expertise) but it should not be the primary source of justification for any particular explanation.

@Articuno as long as the answer isn't obviously insane

@Articuno See this question on meta: meta.aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/328/…

When they clearly state that their information is based on experience, I think it can be very helpful

@Articuno if there's a testable hypothesis in there somewhere, it should be backed up by data. if there's no such hypothesis the question should be closed as primarily opinion-based. otherwise: if there's a testable hypothesis and an opinion is provided, the answer should be downvoted; if an opinion is asked for an opinion provided, it's probably OK, but only if it's substantiated by more than "I've been doing this a long time"

possible justification sources (at their essence) include: pathos (appealing to emotions); logos (appealing to a logical line of reasoning); or ethos (appealing to the stature or experience of the speaker). ethos should be used sparingly, and should never be used when a logos argument is possible instead.

@Articuno can you provide a specific example of what you're thinking about?

@allquixotic Well said, unless someone is explicitly asking for an ethos answer, some logos is really needed to back it up

@Articuno there's a reason why the answer you refer to has 0 upvotes, while the other which discusses an article has 4 upvotes.

I wouldn't say that answer should be deleted, but it's worth a downvote if you feel that the anecdote being made is not helpful or not universally true enough for anyone to rely upon it

on the other hand, if you have similar, independent experience and have never met or worked with that guy or his institution, feel free to upvote it

upvotes on an opinion could be interpreted as "other people have had the same experience"

if the only thing you have to go on is opinion, and many people are giving you the same opinion and they have never met eachother, you could take that as an OK reason to believe that opinion.

@Articuno right

it would be a different story if there were 6 comments from other instructors saying they have similar experiences (but then you have to question about sockpuppeting) but yeah, I think most people will know that "just my opinion" is not necessarily equivalent to "this is objectively true"

@Articuno sometimes you aren't allowed to withhold judgment -- if you're forced to make a decision and you have finite time, and your possible options are to do nothing and (a) get fired or (b) some serious consequence that is suboptimal in all situations will result from your inaction, you may be forced to make a decision absent an objectively true statement in support of any particular action.

if you've never faced such a situation, you're either a Vulcan, or you have never lived on the planet Earth.

I understand that his opinion isn't particularly reliable, especially considering that a much better answer that at least links to and discusses an article about it has been previously written

however, at least "Steve V." did not even attempt to disguise his anecdote as anything other than what it is

he uses the word Anecdotally, which any sane person should interpret as "this is my personal experience, so you may well experience the exact opposite; don't assume this is gospel"

we deal with this problem more than usual on SuperUser. a large percentage of our user base is Indian. for some reason, many people who learn English in India do not develop a proper understanding of suggestive or prescriptive verb structures, so they resort to command (imperative) form, which comes off sounding like they're telling the person what to do.

imagine: you ask a question, and someone answers by offering their personal opinion, but the way they word their answer sounds like they're your boss telling you what to do. some people take it at face value and just do that.

instead of writing "I think" or "you may want to", they'll just write "do X".

in any case, I think explaining why is always important. regardless of whether your answer is coming from personal experience or from an empirical study or from the laws of physics themselves, you should always explain why you are making any claim. justifying it and breaking down your explanation into smaller chunks will make it much more likely to be helpful.

I have written many answers (on other sites on the network) that are primarily based on my experience, but in every case, I take great pains to explain why I believe certain things, as well as stating all the assumptions I'm making about the user's situation.

it also helps to sometimes explore alternate perspectives -- you might take a particularly contentious claim, make your case for it, then take a reasonable-but-wrong (IYHO) opinion you've heard elsewhere and explain why you don't agree with it.

@BretCopeland Tell your compatriates that migrating SuperUser to CloudFlare is A Bad Idea. -_- They've tried it, what, three times now? And each time it fails and people get spurious errors. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It works just fine without CloudFlare, tyvm. ^.^

@allquixotic pretty sure the team is aware of the issues and are looking to solve it. Doing nothing in the world of constant DDoS is not an option.

@BretCopeland Huh, you guys are getting DDoSed? That sucks. But oddly enough, the only times I've seen the service of SuperUser get denied is when you put it under CloudFlare. Otherwise, it's happy as a kitten in a blanket.

So, whoever's DDoSing you is doing a pretty awful job, because SU is always up, unless CloudFlare.

yeah, but DDoS protection isn't the only thing they do for us. It'll make latency a lot better for people on the other side of the world, and probably save us money for not having to build a European and Asian datacenter like we've talked about.

@allquixotic that's definitely not true.

maybe all the times you try to access it, it's up

but I work here, and believe me, I hear about when we get DDoS'ed and go offline.

Although who is actually best at taking us offline is our co-location provider.

@BretCopeland heh, okay. :) but I wonder if CloudFlare is actually the best CDN of choice, because I read that CloudFlare has to eat something like 500 Gbps of DDoS traffic at any given time across their network. I'm sure they have a lot more bandwidth than that, but that has to be a significant drain on resources and contribute to latency in their cloud.

it's "big target syndrome"...

CloudFlare makes themselves an enormous DDoS target because so many sites that various people hate run behind it; so it gets DDoSed by a ton of separate interest groups that have nothing to do with one another, leading to one huge headache for CloudFlare and everyone behind it.

kinda like having a virus scanner monoculture: the new virus modus operandi is to defeat that one virus scanner, and suddenly there's an outbreak.

@allquixotic In this case bigger actually is kind of better - Closer to the backbone & Bigger pipes => Better ability to absorb what's thrown at it.

Plus the geographic diversity means that DDoS attacks are actually spread out geographically - you'd need a substantial botnet in a specific region to take out that region (and the rest of the network would still hum along OK)

just being honest, talking about this bores me. I'm a dev. If you have complaints about our infrastructure, you should send it to an SRE.

@BretCopeland ...who will probably throw a surge protector at your head.

@voretaq7 plugged into itself.

@voretaq7 still, not my problem.

@allquixotic the looped power cord is an effective wingtip device :-)

@BretCopeland ...it is if they grab your surge protector :)

@BretCopeland couldn't load anything until now

may be external to SE though

...will this be week #3 of "The entire fucking northeast is having connectivity issues again!" ?

@ratchetfreak maybe your packets are being delivered by boat.

I want my packets delivered by rubber sled.

My packets were being delivered by UAV, but the FAA shut down the operator :(

Ben Folds® Rubber Sled™ "That damn thing's faster than a three-peckered owl!"

why wouldn't you want your packets delivered faster than a three-peckered owl? those things... are they fast? shit.

lyricsmode.com/lyrics/b/ben_folds/rubber_sled.html