text:
Is self-answering questions by linking to your own company website allowed?
A user has recently answered 2 of his questions by writing about the CI-software he sells and linking to his company website. One answer contains a disclaimer that he is the owner, the other answer does not. In his defence, the second answer is a bit less promotional and only links to a blog on the company website.

answer with disclaimer: https://devops.stackexchange.com/a/300
answer with no disclaimer: https://devops.stackexchange.com/a/301

Personally I consider the first answer to be a form of spam, despite the disclaimer. The second answer I'm not so sure of.
What do other people think of this? Is this a form of spam or is this allowed?

I added a disclaimer to the other answer as well. Thanks for the headsup, I just thought about those links as regular links to an external article, but you're absolutely right, I should add the disclaimer to any reference to my company's site.

@Pierre.Vriens Can you explain the reason for your edit? I'm not sure how this improves the question.

@THelper : I thought my edit would be considered as an improvement. But from your prior comment It seems I might be wrong. So therefor I just performed a rollback to your prior version. Should you want to do so, feel free to reuse any of my previous edits again in the now current version (no credits due). Apart from that: interesting question (I can't upvote it any further ...). Next (interesting) question?

Well, if we go by the Stack Exchange definition of spam, neither of them qualify (and spam flags on those posts would likely be declined):

Spam is an unsolicited commercial advertisement. We've all seen it, and we all know what it looks like. It looks like the same stuff you see in your spam folder when you look at your email.

Because each post flagged as spam comes with a -100 reputation penalty, and the risk of users being fed into the spam blocking systems, these should generally not be flagged as spam.
However, there is a different issue at hand: self promotion. The help center has a good section on this I'll quote:

Avoid overt self-promotion.
The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.
If a large percentage of your posts include a mention of your product or website, you're probably here for the wrong reasons. Our advertising rates are quite reasonable; contact our ad sales team for details. We also offer free community promotion ads for open source projects and non-profit organizations.

That captures it really well in my opinion—if you're clearly just here to try and sell your product, then you're not here for the right reasons, but if you genuinely think your product could solve a problem, it's fine to share it in a small percentage of your posts.
I would say the most balanced approach would be to vote on the posts based on how useful you find them—if you think it's unhelpful, vote down, although using a custom flag to explain that you think the promotion is inappropriate would also be acceptable generally.
Admittedly, a self-answer does raise some suspicion, but I'd personally give people the benefit of the doubt at this stage—it's easy to get caught on the wrong side of self-promotion rules, and if the intention was good, I wouldn't object.

What I think would make a better answer is something along these lines:

Q: How do I solve foo?
A: I wanted to solve this, so I investigated these approaches:

Bar
Baz

Baz works particularly well because _______. I developed this idea into a product ([insert relevant link here]) which may be helpful.

This way, you're teaching everyone else how to solve problems while still giving them a pre-made solution and a link to your project. Sharing your relevant experiences and solutions while developing the product would be fascinating. A description of what your product does... a little less so.

In my defence I am aware of the ad-adversion on SE sites (I myself dislike ads). But I was torn as I genuinely believe the question to be useful and particularly relevant to DevOps.
So I studied extensively the self-promotion subject on StackOverflow Meta, SoftwareEngineering Meta and StackExchange Meta and I belive I followed what I perceived to generally be the rules/preferences.
I also asked if DevOps-related software recommendations would be on-topic on DevOps in the definition phase. I failed to realize that self-asking the question would worsen things, tho.
Again, apologies.


text:
Shouldn't we vote Q's & A's more?
I don't think much upvoting is happening right now. Of course there are only around 80 questions at the moment, but if you look at Badges page statistics, it's not quite positive:

Of 400 users, only a little less than 100 have earned the Supporter badge, meaning having done their first upvote;
Less than a handful of users has a Suffrage and Vox Populi badge;
Only 4 questions have scored 10 or more, also only 4 answers

Just sit down and take some time to browse through questions and spent your upvotes. Of course don't go upvote blindly. Always keep looking for quality and reward that quality.
Much upvoting will motivate beta participants and will stimulating a good upvote culture which contributes to a healthy website, now and in the future. Much upvoting will also create more high reputation users, who will have more privileges and thus more people to contribute in moderating the website.

UPDATE:
To everyone reading this, there are some rules to voting. As I already mentioned, don't go vote blindly. Also do not vote on all the Q&A's of one user (like open up their profile page and vote on everything), because serial voting on a user is not allowed and will be corrected, see this answer below.
Pick a topic/tag you are interested in and upvote quality Q&A's and downvote poor ones.
If you would downvote, a question or an answer, then leave a comment! Leaving a comment will help the asker or answerer to improve and learn, which will increase the overall quality of this SE. After any edit of the question/answer you are allowed to change your vote: undo the downvote and maybe convert it to an upvote?

I'm on the fence with this, maybe it's a little early to call for votes, that's just the second day in beta :)

True, but it's never too early to start the conversation ;)

guess the only possible answer is "when it does deserve it"?

I think one of the important thing to do is to open up questions that may not grab your attention at first and decide if it should be kept or not. We are in private beta, so we need as much participation as possible during the next 20 days.

Hey ZevenOchem, please review my minor edit of your question, if you don't like it at all just perform a rollback (or further refine it). Groeten!

Goedemorgen @Pierre.Vriens, thanks for your contributions!

Maybe convert? Even better would be to post an extra comment to explain why such edit is still not sufficient to remove your downvote. However, the challenge is that after you downvoted WITHOUT leaving comments, there is no SE-facilities for the user who posted the question (or answer) to "ping" the downvoter with something like "please review my edit, trying to address the reason for your downvote". Now THAT is what leaving comments after downvotes also solves, get it? PS: maybe also integrate this in your question? Or should I rather include it in my answer?

I'd revise your statement slightly: shouldn't we vote on questions and answers more? [in either direction!]
The oft-quoted blog post for this is Vote Early, Vote Often, and the advice really is important on a private beta site like this - all the features of the site (privileges, sorting of answers, badges) stop working properly when the system isn't getting input on whether posts are good or not.
Don't be scared about downvoting posts that aren't useful (link-only answers, poorly researched questions and other low quality posts) - I personally would love to see the site have high standards for questions and answers, so voting is critical to reward good content and discourage bad content.

Updated the title ;) And thanks for the link to that blog post. I vaguely remembered there was some article about this as I have been in beta's before, but I couldn't find it anymore...

As someone who committed as a Beginner or Learner, I vote on the questions and answers I understand, which means at the moment I limit myself to conceptual questions. I skip most of the "how do I do X in Jenkins" and similar questions, because I don't have a way (yet) to correctly judge the questions and answers.
I do try to read as many questions and answers as possible, in order to learn and get familiar with things.

He (or she) who realizes he (or she) DOES NOT know a lot ... DOES already know a lot!. So after you (think you) learned something new, why not go check if there is any tag related to it already, and submit a suggestion for it. Could be a kind of testing for yourself if you can really explain it to somebody else, no? Greetings from the other side of BRU ...

I agree with the ontent of your question, though there are a few things in it that I wanted to complete ...

spent your upvotes.

... ideally every day you can use up to 40 votes ... So if your profile says "last seen 2 days ago" (like currently is the case for 7ochem ...), that means you lost the opportunity for 80 votes ...

Of course don't go upvote blindly

... indeed, because nobody wants to be a victim of serial upvoting, like what earlier today seems to have happened to this poor user. And even though it could well be that after this poor user "did post a bunch of questions, someone may have found them usefull" (as in a comment below this answer), it is not allowed as per the rules about that (which "I" did not invent), and which are documented here:

When a single user continually votes (up or down) on many of your posts within a short period of time, the system considers these votes to be invalid and removes them. This could happen for a variety of reasons, such as a user finding a user's great answer and visiting all of their posts to upvote them, or a user getting into an argument with another user and downvoting their posts indiscriminately in revenge. No matter the cause, this sort of systematic targeted voting is not considered normal behavior and the system will not allow it.

Comment on downvotes!!!
Really, seriously, please! Any time I notice an anonymous downvote on any of my questions or answers, it makes me think like Gggggggrrrrrrr². Because IMO only motivated downvotes (by leaving a comment to motivate the downvote) is what counts: those are the ones that will challenge the user who created the question (or answer) to try to improve the post.
And then there are 2 types of anonymous downvotes:

For questions ... which make me think like  Gggggggrrrrrrr³. Because they are so cheap (the downvoter does not "have to pay" something like "-1" rep decrease, as is the case for downvotes of answers ...). My remedy for those = just ignore them (why bother, just move on).
For answers ... but those don't even make me think like Gggggggrrrrrrr anymore. Simply because even though they should be anonymous, in reality they are not (not!) ... trust me.

Update
The poor user mentioned above is no longer alone ... yesterday I've been hit by a similar serial upvoter. If you're fast enough and go check the weekly top-voters page, you can see 1 user ... who yesterday had 40 votes (heading for a special badge?), but since the voting corrected from this morning got reduced again to 32 votes (only). 8 votes withdrawn, that seems to match with my rep decrease of 8 (serially) upvoted questions this morning. Now what, shouldn't the poor user above (and me too?) be rewarded with some badge that we recovered from a serial upvoting attack? BTW: how does such serial upvoter get corrected, eg via some temporary voting ban?

Hahaha, touché @Pierre, had a busy weekend ;). And yes, there are some rules to voting. People shouldn't open up a user's profile and start upvoting everything. Look for topics that interest you, not users.

@7ochem "DevOps" never stops, it's really a 7/7 and 24/24 thing ... BTW, it could well be that the "poor user" was the victim of somebody testing in production, to check if the "voting fraud" detection procedures (during nightly SE housekeeping) had been enabled during private beta already. Also, talking about voting (again): are you familiar with this? Doei!

@Pierre.Vriens or just that kenorb did post a bunch of questions, someone may have found them usefull, specially the long list about jenkins and upvoted each of them in a short period of time. Vote done in good faith, but which did trigger the system. Only a moderator can tell.

@Tensibai : ok, aka ACK. Note I performed some cleanup of some of my recent comments here. PS: I seem to be a victim of a serial (anonymous!) downvoter of most of my questions .... if we don't understand the problem (=the reason for the downvotes), we cannot fix it (address the downvote) ... Oh well, life goes on, so does DevOps ... Ggggggggrrrrrrreeeetings!

Hey @Tensibai ... wanna retry your prior comment as per my update to this answer?

Well: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Why are people restricting broad questions on culture and process?
I see moderators restricting broad culture and process related questions. DevOps is in large part about the culture and process, if you are going to restrict question to only technical and specific, this is not going to be a DevOps forum. We need broad and open ended questions on process and culture like that in the infancy of the site, because those questions will pop up in google searches and will draw audience to the side.
Please let me know, why are you trying to over-moderate so early?

Could you link some of the questions?

@MichaelGrünewald
http://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/256/what-are-ways-to-mitigate-the-effects-of-mythical-man-month
http://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/196/how-to-find-the-constraint-in-a-software-development-shop
http://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/196/how-to-find-the-constraint-in-a-software-development-shop
http://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/71/how-to-prevent-failure-from-introduced-changes
http://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/4/how-to-change-existing-policies-in-an-organisation

Related to this question (in a51) http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/26466/devops-site-description-too-narrow

People (moderators have a diamond next their names) are not moderating culture or process question per se. They are moderating too broad questions.
There's is reasons for this, a question aimed at having an accepted answer, if it's primarily opinion based how do you choose the best answer ? How do you vote for an answer in a way that will be useful for future readers ?

his is not going to be a DevOps forum

Hopefully not, SE sites are not forum in the usual meaning of internet forum. The goal is to build a collection of quality question and answers, where the votes denotes the community preference over the best answer.

We need broad and open ended questions

No we don't, a forum would need them, but not a Q/A site, if the idea you have about Devops.SE is a redis place to talk, you're sadly at the wrong place.
There's already some general guidance for SE format in the help center about subjective questions

That's just the default subjective questions body. And those are guidelines, not rules. The actual on-topic scope of the site (mentioned in the 1st paragraph) is yet to be defined: http://devops.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic. Based on this I too believe some over-moderating is happening.

if it's primarily opinion based how do you choose the best answer ? - from the criteria for evaluating proposals in beta: 2.5 answers per question is good, only 1 answer per question needs some work. On a healthy site, questions receive multiple answers and the best answer is voted to the top. In other words some degree of disagreement is even required :)

@DanCornilescu multiples answer are wished yes, to bring another angle usually, but antagonists answers help no one. So some degree yes, when it's too open, you will have a bunch of opinions or anecdotes with few to no value. Moderating/deleting them is a waste of time and if we miss them we leave misinformation online which is BAD in my opinion.

If we moderate and close the questions too quickly, we won't ever have a chance to find out if these questions produce solid answers or not.
I would recommend that we only close questions as being too broad, after the answers demonstrate the fact, especially during these first 20 days.  After that we will have demonstrated which types of questions are actually too broad and which ones are not.

I like the empirical “after the answers demonstrate the fact” approach – as long as the volume makes it tractable!

@MichaelGrünewald  So far, too many answers doesn't seem to be a problem we have.

My concern may become we won't leave private beta if we don't demonstrate we're able to moderate this site. And some questions doesn't need to wait answers to know they're too broad.

Tensibal, I would suggest to moderate questions on topics you are familiar with. If you are more comfortable with the technical questions, there is plenty on Jenkins to moderate, but that does not happen so far. But culture and process questions are closed immediately. That attitude can easily cut the community in half and we lose too many people to remain relevant.

Many questions out there cannot be answered with no less that 10 to 20 pages of text. That's too long. http://devops.stackexchange.com/help/asking

@JiriKlouda Again, that's not because they are culture, it's because they are very broad, an answer can't exceed 30k characters, and that's already veryyyy long. And please use @ notation when  your address someone so we ahve a notification.

@Tensibai We also won't leave private beta if we don't have enough questions and answers.  Personally, I only agree that the question linked to the word "questions" is too broad. Both of those other questions have pretty clear answers IMO. You reduce failures by removing points of human error (i.e. automation). And container orchestration solves the specific problems which arise from having "too many containers."

@JiriKlouda And stop thinking I'm uncomfortable with the subjects or whatever. You're the one attacking persons, I'm judging the posts and usually express my concerns and give advices on how to better focus them. If you have a real example of something closed which should not, open a Meta question about it.

@Alexandre Which questions so far require 10-20 pages of text?

@avi re "the specific problems which arise from having "too many containers." <- listing those problems is already a novel in itself. I don't see how this could fit in an answer. Just addressing container comunication between hosts is already a large subject...

Wait for the answers then, they might surprise you. Once you see novel size answers or 5-10 answers leading nowhere, it should be easy to close the question as too broad.

@Tensibai We have the tools to delete answers and protect questions. There is nothing in the SE bible that says you can't moderate after the fact. I would think that over aggressive moderation is more of a concern than proving that we can moderate issues after they arise, and then prevent the same issue from happening again.

@JiriKlouda Take one, and showcase this in a meta post then. You're advocating that's a mistake, but for now 5 people did agree to close those question and there wasn't 5 to reopen them... Showcase why we are wrong thinking this would turn out of control when this is based on experience of other sites...

@Avi well, if you're so inclined, reopen those question and prove me wrong in what I said above. this question has been reviewed and still wait a vote to reopen... This showcase how we can improve questions by closing it first and discussing them after

I can find 5 people to agree to anything. I am not arguing there are no broad questions, you can see I supported your judgement on one of those and commented how to restrict the question to be less broad. What I see niw are knee jerk reactions where people dismiss and close questions as broad without even waiting to see or trying to be helpful by commenting on how to make the question more specific.

@Tensibai If i was able to reopen them I would, but sadly it is easier to close a question than it is to reopen it. Human nature being what it is.

@JiriKlouda may I invite you to join the chat room guys ? comments are not ideal to discuss :)

@avi 5 votes to close, 5 to reopen... I'm not against reopening anything if you can show me a real argument on how it could be answered in a few paragraphs.

Just in case, the chatroom is here

@avi General questions about "How to do X in git", "How to store my credentials", "What is the difference between DevOps and ". There are countless and lengthy articles on each of those subjects, which is a sign that the questions are way too broad.

We don't "need" open questions.
This place is not a forum or a chat room which are suited to long discussion and exchanges. On the exchange sites, people write answers and, hopefully, one is accepted.
If you ask how to do configuration management with Puppet, we would need an answer that is at least as long as the getting started: https://puppet.com/presentations/getting-started-puppet (17 pages long)
I hope you understand why that is not a good question. Here is not the place to introduce a whole subject, or to teach about how to do something, or even discuss what is best.
Refer to "How to ask" for guidelines https://devops.stackexchange.com/help/asking These guidelines have been written and improved over time and with experience on many over stackexchange site.
Also keep in mind that the very fact that answers are voted is a case against "open questions". If someone ask how to do secret management and we leave that question open, what will happen is that 1) we'll get 50 different and very lengthy answers. The reader will have to read through them, figure out why someone suggested something and why someone suggested something else. And then 2) in in a year or two, the secret management field will have changed and these answers will probably be invalid (not obsolete, they'll be downright wrong in regards to the new standards). The preferred way to do secret management will have changed and you have to hope that someone posted an updated answer and hope that it gets up-voted enough to have some visibility.
Specific questions are better, if you ask how to manage rotation key secret in Consul with Spring Boot it protects you to some extent from those change over time in tools and procedures. If someone is still using Spring Boot with Consul in 4 years, well.. they will have a very specific answer to their problem. That's a good thing. To the rest of the community which will have moved on to "NextGenSecretMgmtTool", this question about Consul will just appear obsolete and won't tell them how to secret management and won't suggest to use Consul.
PS: I have nothing against Consul, all I'm trying to illustrate is that tools and techniques change over time and the answers written usually won't.

Open technical questions are not being moderated like open culture and process questions. I took the time to look and there is plethora of open and broad technical questions that are not moderated at all.

That is true. My statement was, in part, inspired by the "How to manage application credentials" and one question about git. Open technical questions are doing better at the moment because we sure put a lot of time into it collectively this afternoon.

I am just trying to say that technically competent moderators are not shutting down technical broad and open questions they do understand, but instead going after culture and process questions they do not understand so well.

Ah, perhaps that is the case! If it is, I hope we can improve.

I have a feeling that sometimes when a question does have an answer, but it doesn't include a technical solution, it is automatically considered as too broad. This is not correct.
For example see What is Value Stream Mapping?. Yes it is a question that many books have been written about it, and a full answer can very easily surpass the answer length limit. But this question (and its answers) are just what this SE needs, and it really didn't belong anywhere else before.
Just my 2cc

I really regret that you are judging persons you don't know, note for meta vote: it is used to show agreement/disagreement more than a quality judgement about the post, don't take it as criticism of your post of what you're saying, it's just position toward it. There is no rep involved on Meta.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Are questions about ECS a good fit?
I'm quite knowledgeable about using Amazon ECS (container hosting solution) and I'd be able to write questions and answers (if required).
What is your opinion on such questions? Would they be a good fit, or would it be too "operations/infra" ?

Shoot, I was hoping you were talking about the ECS  I used to work on...  Would be a bad fit for devops though.

As long the question is clear and helpful for others and it's not too broad, you're welcome to post your own self-answered questions.
See: How to ask and self-answer a correct, high quality Q&A pair without attracting downvotes?

My main concern would be too generic questions, the goal is not to rehash a system documentation.
Now if you have specific (focused) uses cases you struggled with and wish to share them, that's absolutely OK in my opinion.

Yeah, don't worry about that. We have about a year of experience with ECS so far and we did encounter problems or scenarios not covered by the (too) generic documentation.
I was thinking about actual usage questions like how to manage software versions VS tasks definitions versions (no best practices, afaik) or how to manage environment properties within the tasks.

Yes; with the caveat that the asker should keep in mind that they are engaging a community of DevOps experts and not necessarily a community of ECS experts.
There may be knowledgeable individuals such as yourself among us, but our entire set won't be comprised of ECS experts. We, overall, will be especially well-versed in DevOps processes relating to ECS, but maybe not-so-much the nitty gritty of how containers work, for example. Even those questions may not be off-topic here -- depending on their specific scope -- but they may receive an answer from a different perspective if asked on SO/SE, or the upcoming cloud proposal.
Technical Stack Exchange sites of this nature often have some overlap with SO/SE especially, and that's okay! Knowing what set of expertise you want to engage when asking a question is part of learning to use this network.


text:
AWS tag should be alias to amazon-web-services
There are two tags: aws and amazon-web-services. I think aws should be synonym of amazon-web-services (similar as on other sites). Is that right?

Done.

The following tags will be remapped:
aws → amazon-web-services x 5


text:
What is the best way to close a question that is fully answerable with a single google search?
Some questions being asked could likely be answered with a quick google search, or just looking for the correct plugin.
Is there a clear way we can mark a question to be closed while providing the google search result as the reason/comment? Perhaps as a field when choosing "not enough research"?

Be aware: questions asking for "the best" may get closed as "opinion based" ... Maybe slightly adapt the phrasing of your question?

Context here is everything. Your average newbie will have trouble picking the suitable hit, let alone applying it correctly.

Lazyness on the question or its answer being on a google search means the question should be downvoted (not useful), not that it should be closed.
RTFM/Not enough research/lmgtfy reasons have been disallowed on Stack Overflow for this reason, if you feel a question is not useful downvote it.
Quoting Stijn's comment to complete the answer:

The underlying thought is that a Stack Exchange site aims at being a
  comprehensive resource, so an answer existing elsewhere on the
  internet is not a reason to not also have the answer on a Stack
  Exchange site.

The underlying thought is that a Stack Exchange site aims at being a comprehensive resource, so an answer existing elsewhere on the internet is not a reason to not also have the answer on a Stack Exchange site.

Be careful about rubber-stamping questions with vague statements like "this can be found in a Google search" or summary accusations like "lazy question" or "not enough research".
This doesn't actually explain (to the recipient of these remarks or anyone else) exactly what the problem is with their question. And for anyone looking on, this gets passed down as just short of an edict for closing anything that "can be found in Google" — close reasons have a tendency to do that.
It's not.
The idea of questions being "too easy" started with our English Language site when we it was envisioned folks would flood the site with questions like "What does the word trivia mean?" — so we (preemptively) worked up a close reason about using a dictionary… then folks added the thesaurus… other added Elements of Style… which soon became a discussion on every new site about which "standard references" would warrant a question be closed summarily. When the Star Trek Compendium and Wookipedia became required reading, we removed the close reason entirely.
That's where the "this is googleable" meme started.
Dismissive comments with no context or guidance are really no better than saying "I want to close this question but can't be bothered to explain why." Don't assume every new user has read your FAQ or poured through the reams of meta discussions — because they haven't.
So why DO we close these questions on occasion?
If you're putting minimal effort into asking a question you expect someone else to spend hours or even days answering, you're showing some major disrespect for the folks you're directing the question at.
You should be a bit wary about calling on others to write up a great answers when you haven't formulated a problem statement that assures it can be answered correctly by folks from whom you are seeking help.
At the same time, a community cannot universally impugn the motivation of every user who might dare ask something "easily googleable". The author may simply be trying to help the site, asking something they hadn't seen asked before. You can either answer it or let someone else answer it. But if someone is continually asking questions that you'd rather not see propagate throughout the site, down-vote it — voting is the ultimate sorting mechanism.
But usually you can help the user understand why their question might not work in this type of Q&A. Here is an example:
How can I improve a question about comparing technical solutoins?
(different problem, but handled the same way)
With a thoughtful comment, you can usually suss out exactly why the author's question may not be ready for this Q&A format. Usually you can drill down to exactly what problem they are trying to solve, and then invite them to ask that. Or if they're just an enthusiast looking to engage in conversation, we have a chat room for that.

Your first few paragraphs is why I was suggesting an easy way to provide the google search link, much like how when a question is closed as a duplicate, the duplicated question is linked.


text:
How can I improve a question about comparing technical solutions?
I wrote a question asking about the downsides of an alternative container solution which I read about in a blog.  The question was closed as opinion based, but surely there are objective pros and cons to any technology choice.
How can I improve this question so that it would solicit answers such as, "Docker does X well which a Deb package can not do." or "A deb package solution only works for situation Y, but in situation Z it wouldn't help you."?
Edit: The initial question has now been heavily edited based on the accepted answer here.

@Tensibai Now that the question has been heavily edited, do you still think its unanswerable?

It is still asking to compare apples with oranges, but I think it is reasonably scoped to be answered now. There's still possibility of an opinion war, but I think the scope should keep it reasonable. Voted to reopen.

Side note: you can ping close voters under the question to let them review the new version as there's chances it will take long with the current review access.

@Tensibai How do you ping all the close voters? I don't want to make comment spam for each one.

Sadly you have no other way, if not you can just wait to see if enough people agree to reopen, the Q is just missing 2 votes now.

Stack Exchange works really well when you ask very specific questions about a problem you encountered in your day to day work — something that can be at least somewhat definitively answered as rankably "most correct."
The handling of "big list" questions varies site to site, but what they all have in common something akin to

"I don't have specific problem in mind, but just tell me everything you know and I'll pick through the answers later."

That is essentially what a "compare [this] to [that]" question is asking.
This is not a discussion forum, so when folks start answering with random anecdotes and bits and pieces of information, they are only guessing about what information will help you specifically. That's not the best way to use Stack Exchange.
How do I improve these questions?
Start with a very specific problem statement. What problem are you trying to solve? Why doesn't your current solution work? What are you looking for… specifically? If you haven't already started looking at the alternative solution yourself, your question may simply be too soon for a site like this — often expressed tritely as "what have you tried?"
But if you did your research and got stuck, I'm sure folks here would love to share their combined experiences overcoming your very specific problem.
Here is an hypothetical example to illustrate:

I am using [software-A] but I'm not really happy about how slow the workflow is in moving multiple users between databases.  I looked at [Software-B], but I don't see anything about power-user keyboard shortcuts. Can some who is familiar with both tell me if [Software-B] has a quicker process for this, and maybe compare the workflow between the two?

This need to be really put forward. We have a lot of questions on hold right now because they are too vague. "How to do authentication?" is not a good question, "How to do authentication - we're having THIS issue and we want to prevent THAT type of exploit", that's better.
Your paragraph on "Start with a very specific problem statement" should be included in the Ask a question page. That page is not giving enough directions at the moment.

Question has been updated, based on this answer.


text:
Are questions about configuring some feature in some software on-topic (or not)?
I see several questions, related to "How to configure this software, this feature?". Should such questions be considered as off-topic (and closed), or not?
I understand we want to concentrate here the knowledge which can help DevOps to do their work, but in some cases SuperUser and Unix&Linux SE sites are more appropriate places to ask "software" questions.
My question is explicitely about the software configuration, run and so on.

Hey Romeo, please check my attempt to improve your question (mostly to make the title better reflect its content). As always, feel free to further correct or rollback if you don't like my edit. Also, I think this is an extremely interesting question, which IMO is not to be considered as a duplicate (hope my edited title makes that more obvious also). Therefor I suggest for this question to be voted for reopening it. If you agree: do you pull the reopen trigger, or do you want me to do so?

I assume this will depend on the software and the question. Personally, I would let this space grow a bit more before we start closing those questions.
Some tools, I believe, belong here more than in any other sister site (I'm thinking about CI tools and State management tools). It is relevant to have other DevOps' (the people) feedback when configuring such a tool.
That being said, I hope that this site will attract a variety of questions, not just questions about software configuration :)

Absolutely. Software is a core component of devops - if this exchange is to be relevant to devops practitioners, we need to welcome software questions with open arms. Sure, "How do I copy files using robocopy" might be too generic to be ontopic but "How do I ensure that I do not miss any alerts from (well known devops tool X)" might be very relevant to readers.

IMHO "How do I copy files using robocopy" should be out of topic here. We should not accept questions with answers we can find in documentation....


text:
Enable syntax highlighting
I'm trying to add some language hints for syntax highlighting to a post, but they don't appear to work. According to @JeremyBanks, syntax highlighting is not enabled on this site.
On Stack Overflow, these work as expected:

Here on DevOps, they don't work:

I expect code snippets to be common enough in posts here (e.g. shell scripts), so please enable Prettify for the site.

This is now enabled, but off by default - you'll need to use the language hints to trigger it.
Eventually, it may make sense to set up default languages for specific tags, but much too early to determine that now.

Would you mind adding a relevant link to "language hints", which contains some explanation about where and how to do so?

Done http://devops.stackexchange.com/editing-help#syntax-highlighting


text:
Defining site on-topic scope in help center?
Closing votes because "This question does not appear to be about DevOps, within the scope defined in the help center." are happening:

But the What topics can I ask about here? page in the help center only has generic info:

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before.
  It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.
If your question is not specifically on-topic for DevOps Stack
  Exchange, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site. If no
  site currently exists that will accept your question, you may commit
  to or propose a new site at Area 51, the place where new
  Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.

Should that content be updated?

--"uploading images appears to be broken" probably because of the AWS outage...-- ok, strike that: Is uploading images on DevOps broken?

Image now uploaded. Thx for the reminder.

Not yet. The scope of the site is still in flux; establishing what sorts of questions "work" here is something that time and experience does a far better job of than anything else.
For now, if you think a question is useful and somehow related to DevOps, ask it; if you see a useful question, answer it. We'll learn fast enough what topics appear on-topic but are not practical here, and which topics constitute the core subject matter of the site - those will be the material from which we'll eventually build the documentation.
See also: Don't anticipate problems.

Asking as someone mainly active on SO: should I "forget" about site-specific policies on SO and let this site determine its own set of policies organically? For example: tool recommendation questions.

You can't leave your memories at the door even if you wanted to, @Stijn. Instead, try to remember why we do things the way we do them elsewhere... And if you don't know, find out before you blindly repeat the rituals here. Tool recommendations are often useful questions, but they still need to focus on an actual problem and the answers need to solve that problem. The issue we were unable to overcome on SO was a long history of folks asking for the "best" library,   with aging answers and circling wakes of spammers trying to feed off of the rotting corpses; that doesn't have to happen.

Solid advice, thanks. It's easy to forget why we do things, after a while.

While this is all well and good I am a software developer and I'm not really sure what devops means. Its not a phrase I use generally and would generally class it as a buzzword rather than a technical phrase. The fact that it is the name of this stack exchange site suggests that I am wrong in this but it means when I get here (and I got here via a Hot network question) I have no idea what sort of questions should be asked here. Wikipedia seems to define devops though is pretty broad in what it suggests it covers. Shouldn't at least a rough statement of what this site is for appear somewhere?

I wrote this when the site was still in (early!) private beta, @Chris. It's likely high time for the current users of the site to be adding some guidance... But see also: Do we need a question to define what is behind the term "DevOps"?

@Shog9 the future is calling back into 2017. 2.5 years on the world is still intact, but the old What topics can I ask about here? page as well ... the main point of my question is, however, why the close options for off-topic are so limited when there is no definition of on-topic. It's also perfectly fine for these definitions to evolve over time. Shouldn't the basics be there at least for now?


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What should the name of our main chatroom be called?
Every Stack Exchange site (Not all) main chatroom has a unique name that is related to the main site itself.
for Example:

SuperUser: Root Acess
Gaming: The Bridge
IOT: Chat of Things
Unix & Linux: /dev/chat

and etc
What should our main chat room be named?
The Real Essential Questions of Every Beta

Whats an interesting name for the chat room?
  Every site comes with its official chat room. This is created automatically and can be reached from the Site Switcher on the top left. The chat room is the third place of your community, after main and meta. It is like the lounge where everybody can get together to discuss, complain and have fun. Personalizing this space to reflect your community and what you are, is one of the small steps to take towards building an active and engaged community.
  Try to get a few ideas up, discuss and vote on them. The name could be something esoteric in your field, or something that every person may understand. Whichever it may be, go ahead and start the discussion!

I think we can all agree:
ChatOps :)

The idea is fun, but I feel it's omitting the Dev part of the community.

How about DevSecChatOps just to be inclusive :P

Start to be long :p

@DaveSwersky
ChatOps is good one. :)
What about DeployChats?

I personally like "ChatOps" because it is a real thing in DevOps- a common chat room in which one can execute real commands on servers (e.g. Slack.)  Companies that practice ChatOps use it for communication between Dev, Ops, and many other groups.  One man's opinion :)

Seem community consensus is for this name, I'll rename the Chat Room

Just in case, I feel DevOps is already a good name.
Unsure we should change it in fact.

Maybe we can go another route and name it ContinuousChat?

DevOpsChat or DevOpsTalk(s)?
You can tell I'm a dev, can't you? ;)

How about MessageBus or something similar?

I would suggest BOFH -- short for Bastard Operator from Hell.  The BOFH series has been a favorite for sysadmins for eons.  While it can probably offend everybody at some point it also seems healthier to me than crying in our beers.

"Huh? I'd used 4 Meg already, How could I have 4 Meg Available?"
I say nothing. It'll come to him.

They quibbled over MEGAbytes!
P.S.: I realize this is a bit late of an answer, but since none of the others have stuck there's still hope. :)

Sounds too OP only oriented and likely to start debate about offensive name. (Despite I like the idea of not crying in the beers)

I may be out of synch a bit, but how about UserFriendly?
Can't not have some humour in there...

Strictly personnal position,  I do like it :)


text:
Do we want to "set the tone" with "jenkins" questions?
Seems to me that the huge explosion of questions about jenkins is not really the tone for DevOps.

I don't feel so, Jenkins is widely used as an orchestration and build tool. That sounds perfectly on topic.
The beta just opened, it sounds logical an influx on question about widely use tools come in. I feel those question are better suited here than on SO when it comes to jenkins configuration.
We should let some time to see how things evolve before frowning upon subjects.

I know this question is almost two years old at this point but I would also like to add that there is a lot more Jenkins expertise on this SE site than on others that have some topical overlap with DevOps, such as Unix & Linux, ServerFault, and SuperUser.  Unfortunately people still sometimes ask Jenkins questions on those SE sites - and sometimes Jenkins questions even get migrated to those SE sites, which is really frustrating to me, because they would receive much more attention from experts on DevOps or even StackOverflow.

As long as the questions show good research and some level of expterise, I don't see the problem.
Though the rate at which the questions are being asked would seem to indicate that they aren't as well written as they could be.

Continuous Integration is definitely a DevOps topic, so I think questions on tooling are relevant.  I don't think we should exclude a whole topic, though I agree the quality of questions should be maintained on a case-by-case basis.

As with any tool_du_jour - evaluate the question based on individual merits or lack thereof. If the question is clearly not related to Ops in some way, it doesn't belong here. If the question is about Jenkins for Jenkins sake, it doesn't belong here. If the question is about using Jenkins to automate, I'm thinking sure, why not. Especially if people are integrating orchestration pipelines.


text:
Should we start moving on-topic questions from SO and Serverfault to here?
Over the years many DevOps questions have been asked and sometimes even answered on the other common stackexchange sites.  Should we make a concerted effort to move those questions over here, or should we just wait for it to happen naturally when relevant?

Unless dev ops questions are explicitly deemed off topic on those sites, we have no cause or right to remove content from another site… along with the reputation/ownership that goes with it.
Besides, the users who asked those questions aren't necessarily members on this site. The wholesale importing of content from elsewhere is not really a great way to build a new community. Questions imported from elsewhere would likely be orphaned if the author does not have an account here. The tags wouldn't match. They may not follow the posting guidelines here. And anonymous content always has that odd, back-dated feel of long-forgotten questions that no one really cares about any longer. If someone were to post another answer to one of those old threads, or even ask for a bit of followup, no one would receive the notification as they do now.
Essentially, we would be loading this site up with a lot of questions asked and answered a long time ago… without imparting any of the benefits of reputation, ownership, or experience into the community that is supposed to take care of it.
That is why we don't do that.

No.
Sites can, and do, exist with overlapping scope. Migrating here, especially at this early state, is premature. We should let this site grow on it's own content.

what about unanswered DevOps questions? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/392666/1800-unanswered-devops-questions-at-so


text:
What is off-topic for the DevOps
Borrowed from Web Apps meta
I would like this post to be a compilation for the FAQ of what is off-topic for this site. With the purpose to prevent a lot of discussion early on, about what we do or don't want to see. Off course, the community has to decide what it should be, but it does make a difference if the early examples leave out things we would want to be off-topic!
Any thoughts?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because scoping problems should be conducted in the face of actual questions that have been asked rather than creating a lot of hypothetical rules that haven't shown to be a problem at all.

@RobertCartaino But wouldn't closed questions dissapear in a rather short time? Wouldn't this question be more valuable long-term by its answer?

@DanCornilescu As far as I know the roomba doesn't remove question with positivily scored answers. related post on MSE

(drive by wit) funny that the question about off topic would be off topic...

Don't anticipate problems.
This site is only 45 minutes old and we've already started a thread to decide what posts should be closed here.
I can understand the desire to get to work trying to figure out the entire scope of this site in one exhaustive thread, but as a general rule for building a new community, it is typically better to wait for problems to become invasive in actual practice before we start actively seeking to create a lot of rules discussions around hypothetical situations of how people are going to do this site wrong.
If you see a problem that is concerning for you on the actual site, by all means, raise it here. But it is simply waaaay too early for an all-encompassing "what does not belong here" thread when no actual problems have been observed on the site itself. It's just not a great way to build a new community.
That is why I closed this thread.

I fully agree, just answered as per the talk at the proposal time for general  guidance ;)

I assume I can extract from my answer on Area51:
While a question is on topic here or not would be quite easy to guess, for how I see it it would be question about near anything as long as it's related to one of:

Automation/orchestration in a wide range (all tools, from MesoSphere/Consul to .cmd files IMHO)
Continuous integration
Integration testing
Unit testing of automation scripts
Configuration management

Out of this, it will probably best suited to one StackOverflow, SuperUser, etc.
In fact the on-topic here are all the questions on a razor blade on StackOverflow or SuperUser as they involve programming and computer management (mainly server, but I won't block workstations questions)

So far most of my questions about "culture" and "affecting change" have been closed as being too broad. Not that I mind, but where do those questions belong to? :/

They've been closed because they are too broad, that doesn't mean off-topic. You should try to find a way to turn them into a focused area so it can be answered without writing a novel :) Happy to discuss it in chat.


text:
Is uploading images on DevOps broken?
I just tried to upload an image in a question on meta.devops but it failed with:

Failed to upload image; an error occured at imgur | Close

Is there something specific that needs to be set up for a new beta site for this to be working?
Note: it doesn't work on other SE sites either (just tried on SoftwareEngineering, same error.

S3's down in US - East, I wager that might be the reason

Can you try with different image (different type)? Does the same image uploads on other SE sites?

Indeed, it doesn't work on other SE sites either (just tried on SoftwareEngineering, same error).

IMO this question is a possible candidate for being closed ... It's aboot a problem (or bug or something) that cannot (I assume ...) be reproduced anymore, and therefor not a lot of value for future visitors of this question ... unless of course it repeats in the future.

@Pierre.Vriens I don't disagree, but do we have to do this now? It's not like we're running out of room for Q&As or anything like that. As long as the post isn't misleading or damaging in some way it can stay. I might even think of it as potentially useful: if someone runs into an image uploading problem this Q&A would offer a possible cause to maybe check out and/or maybe a better place to look, no?

Fine for me. You might as well consider it as an example of a Murphy-law situation .... anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and it shall go wrong when it shouldn't go wrong ... I mean: bad luck that this incident (or whatever) happened around the time DevOps.SE got launched ... Also: what are the actual followup-steps taken by SE to prevent it from happening in the future, sounds like a DRP-topic (if you know that TLA), no?

Right. BTW Assaf's chat comment was golden: Look how quickly I can clear this room.. [ahem] S3 IS DOWN!!!

@Pierre.Vriens: DRP as in disaster recovery planning I presume. The accepted answer to the post linked in Robert's answer has a few notes.

Amazon S3 US-East-1 is down. That is the cause of many of today's issues you may see around the network and the Internet in general.
Meta SE or the thread below is probably the best place to watch for updates:
Intermittent Failed to upload image; imgur is rejecting the request.


text:
Shouldn't we rather answer/vote on answers instead of downvoting questions on devops.meta?
IMHO we should resist the urge of quickly downvoting questions on devops.meta and instead answer or vote on answers - so that the results of the respective discussions (if valuable, of course) remain visible for reference as opposed to being wiped by the roomba only to be asked again later on?.
I mean, for example, questions like Should we start moving on-topic questions from SO and Serverfault to here?

The answer shhould be yes, at least according to this SE meta post A Proposal for More Constructive Downvoting on Meta: Express Disagreement by Answering the Question

Ideally, yes, but it's hard to change people's behaviour when it's so ingrained.

Well, the roomba won't remove a downvoted question with upvoted answer IIRC, so there's no real problem giving a position by voting...

According to this MetaSE post about auto deletion a question won't be deleted if it has an answer positively scored.
So there's no problem showing disagreement by voting on questions, the worst thing happening to them is that they get out of the devops.meta homepage.
That doesn't remove the need to answer it as best as possible to explain the overall disagreement when it's the case.

Yep. This makes it a better answer than @avi's.

Yes, we should only downvote meta questions themselves if the meta question is poorly asked, or not constructive.


text:
Burninate [continous-integration]?
IMHO we should burninate continous-integration (typo) to prevent its proliferation, correct one is continuous-integration
It only covers one (on-hold) question presently.

Wouldn't people with enough reputation have the privilege to edit/rename/merge/combine tags eventually?

Yep, but the op itself needs to be tracked/cordinated - this is the tracking method, at least on SO, from where I copied the tags. Also - we don't have those high-rep users on this site yet :)

Burnination requests are not necessary when the tag is an obvious misspelling and the number of questions is small. Simply edit the question to fix the tag, and at night an automated clean-up script will delete the tag completely.
Should it happen that a misspelled tag is used on a lot of questions, then flag one of the questions for Moderator attention. Moderators can fix the tag without flooding the front page with a bunch of edited questions (and pushing off actual new content).
Someone has fixed the tag you mentioned in your question, so normally by tomorrow the tag should be completely gone.
Related reading on Meta Stack Overflow (we might eventually copy that content to this Meta): How do tag removal (burnination) requests work?

One correction: If you are renaming a large number of tags, don't start editing them one at a time. 'Flag' one of the posts for Moderator attention, and they can correct the error without bumping a bunch of posts to the 'activiity' page unnecessarily.

@RobertCartaino Edited to reflect that, thanks.

@Stijn Yup, typo tag is gone now. Thx.

@RobertCartaino As per the current status of this question (the tag is gone ...), should this question be retagged then with something like "completed"? I mean such red tag or something only a mod can use I believe.

If possible to combine/merge all the different misspellings and permutations on the word "continuous" (of which there are many) into a single tag, it would make the OCD users happy, including myself.
If you see a single misspelled tag, you can edit it yourself. But if the misspelling has already propagated beyond a few, you can 'flag' it for Moderator attention to fix it.

This might be achievable using tag synonyms, see http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/70710/what-are-tag-synonyms-and-merged-tags-how-do-they-work

@DanCornilescu No, tag synonyms are intended to link two completely separate words meaning essentially the same thing (think 'car' vs 'auto'). Once you get out of private beta, it becomes more difficult to inadvertently create new tags, so for simple misspellings, text completion will help guide the user to the correct usage.

@RobertCartaino ACK.

@RobertCartaino is it really necessary to edit discussion items to turn my lack of knowledge into knowledge I didn't know? :/

@Evgeny Yes, Stack Exchange is wiki-style collaborative system. You left an (incomplete) thought that stated "I don't know how this works, but..." so I filled it out. I did not change the intention of what you wrote, but made the information complete and correct. Not only is that appropriate, but it's the entire purpose of having a Stack Exchange site.

Right, I do understand. Guess that is the reason why I hate participating in SE sites so much. It doesn't take into account the human element. Things like hurt feelings, the extrinsic motivation that suddenly doesn't just dry up but can actually be taken away (if it would be a game, people would scream and shout), assumptions and expectations that are turned to be incorrect (like meta is discussion, and my opinion matters, it even has my name on it), etc.

@Evgeny If you hate participating so much, why do you continue? (rhetorical question; that's for you to decide) Before I came to Stack Exchange, I had a good deal of experience copy editing and fact checking. Most people just thanked me for making them look good. But for the 0.1% who feel like "DON'T TOUCH MY STUFF!", then a site whose very mission ls to curate a live, wiki-based collaboration is probably not for them; they're better off starting their own blog or something. No slight or hurt feelings were intended; take care.


text:
Reputation # for closing questions
It seems that there is a slight problem with having the ability to close questions enabled to everyone starting from reputation 1.
Since this is still a beta, and there are relatively few active members and many "silent" members - some questions are closed without any explanation before answers are ever written to them.
This is annoying. If only closing questions was dependant on slightly higher reputation, say ~200 or so. Then it would be reserved to members who actually participate in the discussion, and not those trying to mainly sabotage it.
There is relatively little benefit from closing questions completely in the beta. And there are enough people with moderate rep to remove the really spammy questions.
Thoughts?

@Pierre.Vriens Downvotes on feature requests on meta usually indicate disagreement. There's no need for everyone who disagrees to comment "I disagree" if they have nothing else to add, and it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad.

@Pierre.Vriens The discussion about having reasons with downvotes is a very common one, and probably one that is best suited somewhere else than this comment section. You could create a new meta post if you want to encourage people to leave comments, but remember that users are encouraged to vote, and a comment is not required.

Note that I don't mind downvotes. I mind "votes to close".

The reduced reputation  requirements are to bootstrap the site during the private beta. They return to normal when the site opens to the public.

Current Reputation Requirements
Private vs. Public Reputation Requirements Compared

problem with [everyone] having the ability to close questions…

That's not true. Closing a question still take a consensus of five people to close a post. And so does re-opening a question if we get it wrong.
Less participation during the private beta?
Your suggestion to slow things down and limit access to the editorial tools used to build this site misses the point of a fast-paced, closed, private beta. Before opening a new restaurant, you typically invite 40 to 80 of your closest colleagues to a closed, invitation-only event to try out the menu, work out the kinks, give the place a bit of a lived-in look, and to give your founding staff bit of experience (reputation) to get them off to a running start in preparation for opening day.

there are relatively few active members and many "silent" members

I'm not ceding that ⤴ point, but if that's true, I would call that a failed private beta — or at least the folks who signed up explicitly for this event are gravely misunderstanding why we are here.
That's how sites get closed.
You are a founding members of a new community. A private beta is (primarily) a site-building exercise to establish what types of questions work (and don't work) here. But that needs more participation — not less — to try new things and fail quickly by closing (and reopening) those experiments that just don't work.
The worst thing to happen to new sites is when initial efforts take off in a bad direction… only to be met with apathy or a diminished ability to oppose or try something better, setting a more sustainable course for the site.
That means a lot of participation — to fail quickly and try again — and that means more participation, not less.

Interesting viewpints / info . I always wonder where in the SE-space I can find some type of help (or whatever) info to better understand those kind of things, like rules, lifecycle, etc. Any links to somewhere in (I assume) area51-land?

@Pierre.Vriens There's a Help Center linked in topbar of the site, and meta Stack Exchange discusses and debates these points in excruciating detail.

merci + PS: MSE doesn't like me (check my status there to understand), which is also why I try to avoid visiting that site unless I really have to.

I disagree with the rep increase need.
It's necessary in my opinion to have those close happening now so we can raise the concerns and discuss it.
However where I agree it's the lack of comment when closing. While we're still in private beta we should have a comment for the reasoning behind the close vote, specially while using 'off-topic' which doesn't give any help on how to improve the question.

Actually I was also surprised about "only 1 rep required" (or close/reopen votes). But I'm assuming that part of the explanation is that this is still a "private" beta at this moment. It'll  be interesting to see how the required rep is going to change when "public beta" starts.
What I do know for sure, based on experience, is that when the public beta finishes, and the site officially "gets released" (oeps, DevOps compliant???), then the required reputation for each review queue goes up.
It happened to me on "Software Recommendations": during public beta I had access to some review queues, but when the site launched officially, I lost that access. Guess how frustrating that was ... "Thank you SE friends, is that your way of saying thanks to early beta participants?".
PS: maybe this is something implemented with "Feature Flag Toggles" that are operated by somebody like Robert Cartaino???

For public beta, the reputation for closing/reopening will be 500.

It's 3000. Just go to a typical non-beta site and type /privileges behind the url, for example: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/privileges. Note that for the StackOverflow site some reputation-levels (like propose tags) are different.

If we are allowed, I would be really happy with a 200 rep required to close questions. We have 23 users so far with 200 rep. That should be enough.


text:
Could someone create a `software recommendation` tag?
DevOps is about culture but is also about tools , I think this site needs to contains questions like "What devOps tools are available for ... ".
Exemple from AskUbuntu.com
A software recommendation tag or tool recommendation tag is much appreciated, I don't have required privilege to add it.

I'm on the fence about this as there's already a software recommendation SE site. I'm not sure endless lists will be useful. If you have a specific problem ask how to tackle this problem, the tools will be named when necessary.

It's more like a wiki page .. to show a comparison between tools, I'm aware of software recommendation SE but I think devOps tools recommandation should be in the DevOps SE too.

related (nearly duplicate in fact)

@storm: You currently have the reputation needed to create tags—you only need 150 rep.

@Aurora0001 :  Thanks , at least I learned something new :)

Done by following Shog9's advice from the question Are DevOps related SW recommendations on-topic (or not)? to allow them for now.


text:
Which are the Community Ads for DevOps.SE on other SE sites?
Many mature/graduated StackExchange (SE) meta sites allow posting Community Ads for promoting other SE sites (or site proposals) dedicated to more or less related subject matters.
What is the (complete) list of all such ads posted for DevOps.SE that members of those sites can upvote to help promote this site?

The following is the list of the known community ads for our site (please try to maintain the alphabetical order and the consistency of the list entry format):

Drupal
Server Fault
Software Engineering
Unix & Linux

Note: Stack Overflow doesn't accept community ads anymore, see Do we need community promotion ads?

The ad image needs to be hosted on the Stack Exchange Imgur instance to work as a community ad; I think you'll need to upload them to i.stack.imgur.com for them to meet the guidelines. That will break the dynamic counter, unfortunately — perhaps a custom designed ad would be good if anyone has some design skills?

Same guidelines were there last year, probably to prevent trouble with hosting in unreliable places. There is a check in place, but only runs at initial ad creation, not at subsequent edits. The dynamic picture worked just fine, I saw the actual ad myself a few of times on one of the sites.

That's not to say I'm not in favor of a more decent ad - I'm all for it. I just completely lack the artistic gene :)


text:
Are questions that are related to raspberry pi in scope of devops?
Are questions that are related to raspberry pi like this one in scope of the devops stackexchange site?

A tricky one :D   Let's see what the community has to say.  I wouldn't mind Raspberry Pi qns unless and until it is DevOps related. :)

If the question specifically involves both development, operations and Raspberry Pis, I don't see why not. I don't think that question is appropriate because it's very generic and could just as well be an operations task or home automation.


text:
Is RPA (Robotic Process Automation) a topic for DevOps? (and so on-topic here)
It seems like that automation is possible not only through intelligent scripts but through software robots as well. They call it robotic process automation.
Robotic process automation (or RPA) is an emerging form of clerical process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers.
A software 'robot' is a software application that replicates the actions of a human being interacting with the user interface of a computer system.
Question: do you consider questions regarding boundaries of RPA and DevOps on-topic for DevOps and so here as well?
First examples I can think of:

How DevOps can support RPA or are these completely different domains?
Given that DevOps toolchains are very different but represent combinations of more or less same tools, can RPA become an effective way for advanced automation in DevOps environements as well (or, why not)?

https://www.bterrell.com/robotic-process-automation-rpa/DevOps-on-their-heels

With automation playing a major role in DevOps it is quite conceivable IMHO that RPA will eventually be involved in DevOps as well (if it doesn't do so already).
And, as you mentioned, DevOps has potential to contribute to development and evolution of RPA as well.
Therefore I'd say RPA-related questions, when in a context also related to DevOps, of course, should be on-topic to our site.

No to mention that those robots are probably software driven. This means one can use DevOps (DevOps in the course of automation) to do DevOps (Actually implementing and using the Robots).


text:
How can we improve our How to Ask page?
I've been crawling in the unanswered questions page for some cleaning and I did close a bunch of questions as unclear what you're asking. The notice for this close reason links to How to Ask and I feel we can probably improve its wording to something more specific to our site.
Specially for subjective question, saying again that links to search results are necessary, for code question a Minimal reproducible exemple, for docker question, the full dockerfile (as it has been often enough the problem was elsewhere in the file than the excerpt show in the question).
Do you see other points to add and how would you wrote them ?

After viewing the "How to ask" page the following improvements could increase value of this page:

Link it more prominently on the community landing page; I must admit I have discovered it for the first time exactly because it appeared in the "Blog" section in the right upper corner
Use bold for headlines to make increase readability
Link to the tags page in the part where you recommend to search and explore.
Why not introduce examples DO's as prominent questions (bullets with links) and examples of DON'Ts - like a list of antipatterns and offtopic

To 4, some brainstorming (note we might ourselves need some iterations towards alignment on these):
DO's

Report problems about combinations of tools and environments; single tool questions might be better placed in a community decicated to that tool. Also, pure programming questions are off-topic here.
Establish if not obvious how answer you look for could help you increase value, or reduce cost
Mention background of your role regarding this task, e.g. what are trying to accomplish
Use code examples, or Gist, or even a small example GitHub with a Dockerfile project if it would help to test your setup
Use formatting
If you are not sure after considering this list, ask in Meta first

Examples for good questions:
1.
2.
..
DON'Ts
(compilation of mostly frequent deleted off-topic questions)

Avoid asking technical questions without code examples/detailed information about used environment.
Post unformatted code

Given the breadth and scope of DevOps, I think this site should be more tolerant of a wider range of questions.  Tool usage and development is straightforward, but more subjective questions about culture and practice are absolutely relevant to DevOps.
Perhaps to keep it from being an opinion free-for-all, we could ask that users keep to their own direct experience when asking about fuzzier, more subjective topics?


text:
Request and question about application tags (gunicorn/flask) in web applications

I have a question about my DevOps Stack Exchange post: Why is environment variable mangled in docker compose environment file
I would like to add the gunicorn tag since it is the Web Server Gateway Interface HTTP server I use in the web application based on docker I have a question about. On the other hand, a lot of the individual applications used in a web stack do not have their own tags (unicorn, nginx, ruby on rails). Is there a specific reason for this?

I would like to add the gunicorn tag since it is the Web Server Gateway Interface HTTP server I use in the web application based on docker I have a question about.

Done. I've added the gunicorn tag to your question.

On the other hand, a lot of the individual applications used in a web stack do not have their own tags (unicorn, nginx, ruby on rails). Is there a specific reason for this?

I suspect the answer is more along the lines of "no-one needed them yet" than "we don't want them". Tags are only created when used for a question, and they can't be preemptively created, in expectation that questions might need them in future.
I think it's simply the case that no-one has wanted an nginx tag yet, so it hasn't been created. There are definitely questions that could have used that tag (e.g. this question), so feel free to suggest that it be added and find any other relevant questions that should be tagged differently. Tagging tends to be more organic than planned, so please do go ahead and suggest any changes as appropriate (you should be able to suggest edits to other people's questions to add tags, even though you can't yet add new tags to your own questions).


text:
Could someone add k8s as a synonym of kubernetes?
I tried to add a synonym, but only admins are allowed to do that.

Sure.  Also, doesn't it sound a bit too hippy? :P

The synonym makes a lot of sense but I don't understand why you went and edited a bunch of kubernetes tagged questions to change the tag to k8s? https://devops.stackexchange.com/posts/1783/revisions

Done.
The synonym of k8s is now kubernetes


text:
Please Add a VSO Tag
Should there be a tag for VSO.  My organization exclusively uses the Microsoft stack and so I have questions I would like to tag with VSO to indicate that I'm using Visual Studio Online, as opposed to the on premise TFS/VSTS for my build/release/test agents

Tags are created when added to a question, you need 150 reputation to create tags.
In those cases where you don't have enough reputation to create them, drop a line at end of your question on main site so someone can add it to your question.
I've added the vso to one of your question, you can now go and complete its wiki and excerpt.


text:
Is this a question that would be better suited as a community wiki?
Regarding the question: What are must-read books for DevOps engineer to become a true expert?
I see its being down voted, and I can understand why. However, I personally feel like this would be a great starting point for a community wiki answer, much like the 'list of useful memes': What are known useful and misleading memes in the DevOps culture?
Would it be appropriate to leave this question open, and simply convert the current answer to a wiki so we can all add to it over time?

I wouldn't put the meme and book list on the same usefulness steps, former is a list of concepts, the second is a library index which will probably fade out with time as the general idea evolves. Add this to the point everyone will have its own appreciation on what books are good or not and you'll end up with edit wars on the list. (I did cast the final close vote btw as the question is absolutely ill defined and really too broad and opinion based)

Hmmm. I see your logic, though I still feel the same could be said about the memes: relevant more or less to some more than others, and the meaningfulness could fade over time. That being said, I would agree they are different in scale. You're right, the memes would apply to far more people, and be meaningful far longer. 12 factor app is a good example. 7 years later, and its still just as relevant. Not many 7 year old tech books for DevOps could claim the same relevancy.

You're right. That "computer science analogy" is a really good one. Thanks.


text:
posting scripts for the community
I have a powershell script that is useful for interfacing VSO builds/releases with jenkins.  Is this something I can contribute to the community via a wiki or should I post this elsewhere?

If you really want to, you can expose the problem as a question and post your script as a self answer.
It's usually quite hard to write a good question once you have a solution for it, try to think as if you had asked it before writing the script to keep it open enough for someone else to add another answer tackling the same problem.
Quoting the help center about self answer:

If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you
  would like to document that knowledge in public so that others
  (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and
  answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.

So it's absolutely the way to go if you want to share your script. There's no reason to make the post community wiki for this kind of cases.

okay I'll do this then.  I just didn't know if we wanted to set a precedent of how the community can share scripts that would solve common problems


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Will this DevOps Q&A site ever graduate?
I really worry whether this Q&A site will ever become official as the number of visitors dropped significantly the last two week, from more than 1000 to less than 10 a day. Do other people have this concern as well? What about creating and executing a plan that will increase the number of visitors and to let this Q&A become official eventually?

The drop you are seeing is due to a bug: Traffic (views, visits) isn't correctly registered on Site Analytics or Area 51 so I don't recommend making any decisions based on these stats.
As for being "official": Stack Exchange is moving toward allowing small sites such as this one to have own themes which should put them essentially on par with the rest of the network. The ongoing discussion about removing "beta" label may be resolved by such changes, too.

Besides the analytics big mentioned before, I am intrigued by the comment made by OP : " What about creating and executing a plan that will increase the number of visitors and to let this Q&A become official eventually?" - what would you have in mind ?

@BruceBecker could you check my answer? What is your opinion on this?

Looks like a plan :)

Our current challenges as a community to get out of beta, are: to increase the number of questions per day and the answer ratio:

Plans

Number of questions per day
In order to increase the number of questions per day we could leave comments at Q&As on StackOverflow and ServerFault that request users to migrate their Q&A to DevOps SE:
According to me your Q&A is more on-topic on DevOps SE. SO and SF are about software and system engineering respectively.

Answer ratio
Every user could try to answer one question a day, even when there is already an answer.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Is it acceptable to post someone else comment as an answer to increase the percentage of answered questions?
So now and then, I check the unanswered tab to see whether there are unanswered questions. A couple of them contain comments that include an answer.
For some of the Q&As I have asked the person that placed the comment whether they could post it as an answer.
Unfortunately, in the majority of the cases the answer remains unanswered as some users do not post answers.
Now I wonder whether it is acceptable if I extend a comment that is actually an answer, write it in my own words and post it as an answer.
On one hand it feels bad to post someones comment as an answer, but on the other hand it is also tedious that the number of unanswered questions is increasing while there are comments that basically answer the question.

Yes. If you're able to understand the answer expressed in some other venue (whether comments on the question, another forum, the official documentation...) then writing up an answer that makes it available to future readers is an admirable thing to do.
Give credit where credit is due, of course.
See also: What should be done with questions that have been self-resolved as a comment instead of an answer?

And then flag that comment for deletion!


text:
How to check what was the previous tag and why it has been removed?
I am sure that back in the day I added tags to the following questions:
https://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/untagged
It looks like that these have been removed as they have only the untagged tag.

What causes a question to be tagged as "untagged"?

@Tensibai is it possible to get a list of these removed tags or should I just check for untagged question so now and then. While typing I think I should do this.

That's it I think, I'll ask other mods if some have an idea out of browsing the question in archive.org :)


text:
What tag should be used for tools that harden the platform like ChaosMonkey?
According to Wikipedia, ChoasMonkey is used to test resilience of IT infrastructure. What about creating a resilience or resilience-testing tag? Note: in the mean time this tag has been created and assigned to this Q&A. If this tag should not have been created then it could be removed.
Why this question?
It turned out that a couple of tags were removed, while I was not notified. In order to prevent that Q&As that will be untagged again in the future I would like to discuss some tags first before creating them.

Tags are removed if not used for 6 months IIRC. There's not much to do about it. Both propositions are too vague for tags IMHO (I doubt someone will search within this tag specifically or follow it)

The generalized term being used in the industry is "chaos engineering", see https://principlesofchaos.org/, writing from Netflix, writing from Gremlin.  Tag should be chaos-engineering.

I would like a chaos-monkey tag or "failure as a service". I work with that occasionally. Validating stuff and failing it.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Is this Q&A in scope of this stackexchange?
Is this Q&A in scope of this stackexchange site?
On one hand it could be the case as, but on the other hand it is really about how to create a graph based on database records. From the latter perspective, it could be out of scope.

I don't see anything wrong with the post

Is it completely DevOps to you or do you have some suggestions to improve it more? I still feel it could be fine-tuned a little bit more.


text:
Assessing DevOps & Data Science and vice versa topicality
First, to review the definitions from Wikipedia.
DevOps - DevOps is a software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops). The main characteristic of the DevOps movement is to strongly advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction [..]. DevOps aims at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, in close alignment with business objectives.
Data Science - Data science is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured [..].
Now let's consider two cases.
A. DevOps for Data Science: use DevOps knowledge base to deliver shorter cycles in data science experiments, more automation and scalability as well as reproducible experiments. Business case: "works on my machine" is a known problem also in data science teams and transition from first experiments to production is not always easy.
B. Data Science for DevOps: use Data Science knowledge base to define and implement the vague "Measure" in DevOps principles. Using Industry 4.0 approach, you could evaluate data from the whole toolchain. Of course companies collect and analyse time series data, but afaik this is much more focused on production, or limited to the scope of separate tools. Business case: holistic data driven insights - not replacing but augmenting human interaction - in large scales environments (think of dozens of scrum teams and hundreds, even thousands of [micro]services).
Now my questions (please try to judge in terms of Q&A community strategy):

Are A, B both more or less offtopic here or only one of them?
Would you recommend proposing a separate community for either A,B or both?

I, personally (understand not as a devops moderator), see no reason why A or B would be off topic here.
We are using part of data science to create alerts on behavior change from application metrics (one of the most public attempt I know of is Skyline, the anomaly detection part of Kale by etsy.
Data Science formulas like standard deviation, median, meadian average on rolling period, are already in various tools like graphite/grafana or Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch 6 even include a "machine learning" engine, closely related to datascience.
So when the two topics interact, deploying a kafka cluster or using DS tools to analyse metrics, I see no reason to ban them from devops.se.
That said, there's probably a lot of questions about data science applied to a devops metric which are better suited to CrossValidated SE site as their relation to devops is not meaningful for the question when it's only about the statistical tools themselves as well as a bunch of cluster deployment things are as well suited to serverfault than here.
The fact something is on topic elsewhere on the SE network is not relevant to our own topicality, the main question remaining is: Are we ok and apt to answer deep statistical questions ?.


text:
What does the community think about requesting SO and SF to include DevOps to one of the migration options?
I created two Q&As to ask SO and SF to include DevOps to the migration options? Does DevOps community agree with this? I think that this could increase the the number of questions that are asked on a daily basis on the SE and second it will improve the focus on SO, SF and DevOps SE.
December 22, 2019

I think its a good idea :)


text:
Announcing a site sponsorship for DevOps Stack Exchange
My name is Jascha, and I'm a Product Manager for Advertising at Stack Overflow.
I'm excited to announce that New Relic has generously agreed to sponsor the DevOps site for the upcoming 3 months, as a part of our site sponsorship program and after successful experiences on both our Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence sites. New Relic wants to support the DevOps Stack Exchange site as part of an ongoing effort to provide resources to the DevOps community.
And to reiterate some of the clarifications we've made on the previous posts surrounding this site sponsorship program:
How does a sponsorship affect this site?
Site sponsorships are administered much like the "tag sponsorships" you may have seen on other sites. Apart from the visual updates and site promotion, you should not see any significant changes in the scope or the operation of this site. Site sponsorship is essentially "strategic philanthropy" where industry partners like New Relic can give back to DevOps communities by having a presence on the site, and to provide a place to help ask and answer questions.
Let's get an immediate concern out of the way
Sponsors do not "own" these Q&A sites — they work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now. Any ads a sponsor might submit still have to go through our strict ad editorial process, as has always been the case. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.
Update January 2021
We're happy to announce that New Relic has agreed to sponsor the DevOps Site for another 3 months (Jan 2021 - Mar 2021).

Previous sponsorships of the same kind have led the beta sites Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence to get a custom design, like graduated sites. Will this happen for DevOps too, or not, given the relatively short period of sponsorship?


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2020: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on DevOps over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
1
5

Users destroyed³
1
0

Users contacted
1
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
138
107

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
5
3

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
68
26

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
91
16

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
869
227

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
54
26

Questions reopened
5
0

Questions protected
0
3

Questions migrated
3
0

Questions flagged⁵
0
99

Questions closed
89
1

Question flags handled⁵
93
6

Posts undeleted
8
12

Posts locked
0
5

Posts deleted⁶
77
589

Posts bumped
0
231

Comments flagged
9
7

Comments deleted⁷
56
87

Comment flags handled
15
1

Answers flagged
2
86

Answer flags handled
81
7

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of DevOps without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.
Wishing everyone a happy 2021!


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What happened in April 2020 on devops.se?
According to site traffic stats, April 2020 seems to mark the start of a decline of this site:

The traffic was roughly steadily climbing (out of each year Christmas and new year), the first dent around October 2019 is well known and it was when I stepped down as moderator.
But Early 2020 seemed to catch-up and restart the previous trend, up to April 2020 where things fall down terribly.
I thought about the pandemic as a reason but it seems in contradiction with SO Blog post showing a surge in traffic networkwide.
Early 2021 show the usual uptick as every year, so I left it just for the sake of completeness.
What happened on this site ? And is it only this site or a more general trend ?

I think it would be useful to compare traffic stats with mods of other communities. An overall number for SE isn't too helpful here.

It's been a time when CM were monitoring every site's Meta post with "meta tags" (red ones like featured, support*, etc.), I was kinda hopping someone has insight about this site and that a CM can shed some lights about the overall status of sites.

I agree with @Adam. I think the most useful insight would be to compare other (preferably beta) communities to see what their traffic is like. Is it possible to see specific question tag traffic? It would be interesting to see what our most popular tags are, and if there is any correlation to a loss in traffic for a specific tag to the overall site traffic.

Well, I think a query in SEDE can give that. For the stats, sadly I can only compare with SO, I don't have 10k elsewhere, maybe a mod could ask in TL?

Interesting! I wish I could put a bounty on this.


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Should [cicd] only be used when a question includes both CI and CD explicitly?
I came across this question about a GitHub action in a monorepo and it was tagged with cicd and continuous-integration. Because it involves GitHub actions, it naturally involves CI but not necessarily CD.
If a question is tagged with cicd but doesn't discuss CD, should it be retagged with continuous-integration?
I guess this should also raise the complementary question of whether cicd without CI should be retagged with continuous-delivery or continuous-deployment.

I'd say the real question is: shoudl cicd be burninated as it is a meta tag encompassing the two others.
Now in term of usage, peoples are more likely to tags things with cicd and I assume watcher of these 3 tags overlap at nearly 100%, so in term of user-friendlyness, I'd let it as is and don't removed tags overzealously unless they are totally unrelated.
I was on the fence about rejecting your edit, removing the git where the problem is specifically aroung committing within github action is kind of harming the question. Adding monorepo is debatable but does no harm, adding github-action is a great addition.
Back to cicd in this case the problem is around  preparing the deployment files for kubernetes, so it is absolutely about conitnuous devivery, the fact the author didn't expose its deploy job coming later doesn't mean there's none.
So at the end of the day, I'd avoid removing this tag unless the question is neither about CI or CD.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. With a question that could have so many different tags, you have to be objective about it. Git is not discussed in any way within the question; same for continuous delivery. There are other tags that fit the question far better than those anyway. Either [tag:continuous-integration] and [tag:continuous-delivery] should merge into [tag:cicd] or there should be no overlap.

This beg the question of what the tags are for in your point of view, I think we have a far different approach to them. Check your own question here on meta, retagging implies tags, that overlaps.And seriously, if "and push changed files to another branch/repo" is not about git I don't know what it is. The whole question is about keeping the file history in git when doing a push... (and the solution is to not force push).


text:
So what topics can I ask about here?
There's a help page titled What topics can I ask about here? here. The page tells me:

Not to ask questions that have already been asked
That I can answer my own question
That my question must be on topic for the site
If my question is about recommendations I should ask elsewhere
If my question is about server configurations I should ask elsewhere
If my question is a generic PHP question I should ask elsewhere
Before asking anything elsewhere I should check whether my question is acceptable there
If there's nowhere to ask my question I could make a new Q&A site for it

That's it. There are eight pieces of advice none of which answer the question posed by the page title: "What topics can I ask about here?"

Quoting the tour:

DevOps Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for software engineers working on automated testing, continuous delivery, service integration and monitoring, and building SDLC infrastructure.

We never gone further than this description and the exemple question. That's pretty generic, but roughly this place from its inception was around the "non opinionated" part of IT management.
For everything pure code (CI/CD, config management, infrastructure automation), things are  usually OK. When it comes around "devops culture", the main problem is scoping the question in a narrow enough way to avoid risking a poll. (Early days had plenty of talk around that).
Pure software questions are better asked on StackOverflow, pure system management are better asked on SuperUser, pure organization topics are better asked on the Workplace.
The scope of this site was kinda narrowed on purpose as a place where the question wouldn't really fit the existing sites while still being answerable without being opinion based.
That doesn't give a list of what's allowed and, as far as I know, updating the help center "what's allowed" would require a consensus on this meta first.


text:
Announcing a Pro Tempore election for 2021
Summary: DevOps Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on April 26 to bring in two more moderators.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:

Starting on April 26, users can nominate themselves.Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)

On May 3, if there are three or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll simply appoint the candidates. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)

If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on May 11.

(Note for current moderators: there's no need to nominate yourself even though you'll likely get an email saying you should. The system assumes the first election is a graduation election, which would mean moderators would need to be re-elected. This isn't that sort of election.)
If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.

That's a bit strange to have a "pro tempore" election. I mean, the people gets elected, that's no more a temporary role until election takes place, right? I very well know the pro temp. has no expiration date at all as former mod here, but it makes things blury, would elected mods need to run again in case of site graduation ?