The Comms Room - 2014-11-17

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12:11 PM

"So long and thanks for all the fish, so sad that it had come to this, we tried to warn you all but oh dear..."

12:41 PM

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8 hours later…

8:18 PM

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Q: 2014 Community Moderator Election

The 2014 Community Moderator Election is now underway! Community moderator elections have three phases: Nomination phase Primary phase Election phase Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are. Please visit the official election page a...

discussion moderators election

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Q: 2014 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary. Here's how it'll work: During the nominati...

discussion featured election

8:32 PM

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Q: Moderator coverage

Moderator coverage seems somewhat patchy with for example North America being well covered but Europe less so. Are there any UTC times that would benefit from more moderator availability ?

discussion election-2014

8:53 PM

@RobM any chance you'd like to discuss this situation a little more?

@Iain welcome also

Am I welcome? I also concur that it was an abysmal migration.

Sure, all are welcome who are aware of the context

It's pretty simple, and these things have happened before- the serverfault site is very narrowly scoped, and excludes questions from people who aren't already pretty familiar with what they're doing.

My concern is not with that, but perhaps with how the actions taken in comments today don't really help further our Be Nice Policy

I don't see anything which is impolite or not nice in any f the comments

9:00 PM

For example: I brew beer at home. I joined homebrew beta recently (a site for brewers). I don't know a lot, but when I ask dumb questions I get good guidance/answers, not a lot of static/heat.

I interpret a fair bit of passive aggression, personally

They are happy to accept questions from amateurs. We're not

> Server Fault is a question and answer site for professional system and network administrators.

> Homebrewing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for dedicated home brewers and serious enthusiasts.

Well, ServerFault is/was/is allegedly aimed at and restricted to a professional audience, yet we get flooded with crap from people who don't know a damn thing, and haven't even bothered to read the many resources in the help and tour and about pages which specifically state server fault is for professionals, not for people who need halp learning to server.

Don't migrate crap was coined by Jeff one of teh SE co-founders btw

So the irony of Server Fault, to me, is that you don't go there to get your question answered, until you can answer many of your own questions about how to be a Sysadmin?

9:02 PM

I don't know about the tone- I saw the word "crap" and assumed he was talking about the question

it is a basic tennet of migration

Ladies and/or gents: I'm not here to start a war. I don't concern myself with how you conduct the site. I am merely trying to discuss openly.

I don't disagree with any of you; I'm trying to understand the philosophy

@HopelessN00b maybe the answer is we fire up a site for amateurs?

there's plenty already

within or outside of the SE network?

@haney that would be SU

9:04 PM

> Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users.

mmm, I am not sure that we clearly convey which is for what then, if this remains an issue such that even an employee screws it up

SU isn't really for amateur sysadmins, but their scope certainly includes their questions

any thoughts on how we can get better at making it clear?

Well... reality aside for the moment, SF is supposed to a site for professionals. Someone who doesn't even know how to view the logs on a server is very, very, very far from a professional. Which is the problem with that particular question. The aggression you're detecting is probably because SF regulars have been saying this for years, to no avail, and the ones who are still around (which is a minority, mind you) are sick of saying it.

@HopelessN00b I don't blame them one bit. How many times do you bang your head on a wall before you assume it isn't gonna give?

that sucks

9:05 PM

Life's a bitch

Sometimes; just had a tornado rip through my town 3 hours ago for example.

Maybe a site for dev ops would do well

I find dev ops folks tend not to be super pro server peeps, and so it would cover the amateur side nicely

yes - it'd take all the crappy questions away from SF

@Haney There's a real mix of ideas about what "devops" even means.

exactly. It's the new "cloud"

buzzword bingo, anyone?

For example, the question I migrated would do well in a dev ops site

"how do you deploy it, how do you handle errors? Oh you don't? RTFM" and so forth

@Haney I'm sorry that you're so butt hurt about this but as ever this is going nowhere

9:08 PM

I'm 0% hurt

In fact I'm far from hurt

Just trying to get a feel for the situation

It's simpler than I think people are making it sound

My goal is not to repeat the mistakes, and to inform others. So I'm gathering thoughts here.

@Basil what are you getting at?

Basically, if the person asking the question doesn't have enough experience to know the basics about troubleshooting, they're not a sysadmin. The question was closed because of that and only that.

Oh, no argument there

I thought we were past that

I'm not arguing for the question; it was clearly a poor migration

I thought you were trying to define the mistake

9:10 PM

I'm trying to figure out how to make it more obvious for everyone in the future that it's a poor migration

Hell no, I got that much figured out :)

We have a page that does a pretty good job of explaining what is on and off topic

link me?

let me get a link to it

thx

@Haney serverfault.com/help/on-topic

9:11 PM

yeah the key there is professional capacity

I wonder if we could create a system where the first time a user is asking a question on SF we could pop up this link and ask them to review it

it would stop appearing once they clicked through to it for example

I mean having read that doc it's very clear to me what I should and shouldn't ask or migrate to SF

Do you think that'd be helpful at all?

@Haney Something... Anything... to get users to see the site scope before they ask a question.

Let me check with CoGro on some stuff

(Community Growth team)

They're saying such an approach is not effective. I'm asking how they know (AKA has it been tried before on our other sites)

"the users who can't be bothered to read the docs are the ones that can't be bothered to ask good questions"

They also say it has been tried before, on SF specifically (unbeknownst to me)

Michael Hampton

@Haney We have such a page already. It's the only one of its kind on the network. Unfortunately it hasn't helped very much.

Yeah

What I'll leave you all with is the knowledge that we are in the middle of a serious Quality project, designed to improve the overall quality of questions on all sites including SF

Michael Hampton

@Haney I've heard. I even threw in my own idea last night.

9:26 PM

it takes time but it's showing positive signs. SF is part of the rolling question rate limits we recently released; basically new users who ask bad questions get shut down for days/weeks/permanently.

Michael Hampton

One side issue is, given the volume we're seeing now, I don't think users have enough daily close votes.

@MichaelHampton I believe that's configurable per site.

if you put in a meta SF post for that, and it gets some upvotes, we'll look at it for sure

Michael Hampton

Yep, I'll get around to it

Sorry I don't have better news

But thank you all for the chat

I will avoid migrating bad stuff in the future

Michael Hampton

I missed all the drama. I just saw "very low quality question" and boom.

9:42 PM

@Haney My personal experience has mad me believe that migrations are only very rarely at all useful. If the person can't even put enough effort into asking the question where it's on topic, the overwhelming probability is that it's not a question worth migrating.

2

9:54 PM

@HopelessN00b ain't that the truth, le sigh

Yup... another "seems like a good idea" runs head-first into the brick wall of reality. Oh well. Such is life.

Michael Hampton

To be fair, there are a lot of SE sites now. There's Stack Overflow, Server Fault and now Super User. That's a lot to remember.

Whole reason my kick-in-the-balls-over-TCP/IP project never got off the ground. I could never figure out where to ask questions about it. Is it a programming problem, a sysadmin problem, a user problem? All three? Oh well.

Michael Hampton

My electric shock over the Internet project is in limbo too.

It's trivial social engineering to get an online user to lick a live electrical wire, man. But no matter how hard I've tried, I never could quite talk someone into kicking themselves in the fun bits. :(

Michael Hampton

10:08 PM

Yeah, but I don't want to have to talk someone into doing what they should have done in the first place. And some places have a law against helping people get out of the gene pool...

well i can't do the splits any more so I couldn't get to where you're asking even if I wanted to. Which oddly enough, I don't.

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