text:
2021 Community Moderator Election
The 2021 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://devops.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.


text:
2021 Community Moderator Election Results
DevOps Stack Exchange's second pro-temp moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the two new moderators are:

They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.

Thanks to everyone who voted, I'm a little confused if I'm a pro-tem mod or an elected one here, although I guess it doesn't much matter.  But, if we get devops out of beta, there'll be another election, right?

Hi Peter. Yes this was a Pro Temp election. There was an election and voting the only difference is if there had only been two qualified nominees they would have just been appointed since this was a Pro Temp election. In the future when DevOps moves out of Beta there would be a graduation election.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
We've been promoted!
Congratulations to everyone over the past 4+ years who has helped keep this community going including, past and present moderators, queue reviewers, and most importantly all of the contributors! Your questions, answers, and feedback has grown our community and helped developers near and far. To all the DevOps engineers around the world, may your IAC be versioned, your monitoring be transparent, your pipelines fail gracefully, your deployments be idempotent, and should you need guidance, may you find a home of answers amongst your fellow DevOps Engineers. Cheers!!

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


text:
Can we create tag [ipfs]?
I'm becoming more active in the community and that comes from being atm working with IPFS and some other devops/sysadmin tools.
Generally speaking I see tasks related with IPFS in Ethereum community but given that I'm not working with Ethereum, this seems to be the most appropriate community. Others, like Robert Longson, think the same.
Could we create an IPFS tag? That'd be great... thanks!

Have you found a question you want to tag IPFS?  Any questions can be tagged with any appropriate tag. Start by asking questions about IPFS, the tag will follow!

Yes Peter Turner. I've asked two questions related with IPFS already

For posterity, in case anyone's wondering: Looks like Peter created the [tag:ipfs] tag and added it to those 2 questions on December 20 :)


text:
Please create tag for [aws-ssm]
May we have a tag created for [aws-ssm]?
I asked a question relating to AWS Systems Manager here, but I can't create a tag without enough reputation.
Ansible to get AWS SSM Parameter Store and fail on Secure Strings

done: [tag:amazon-ssm] .. welcome to DevOps SE!

@PeterMuryshkin - Thank you! Would you mind changing it from [amazon-ssm] to [aws-ssm] to match other tags like it?


text:
2021: 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 preceding calendar year.
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 say goodbye to 2021, 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
0
6

Users destroyed³
1
0

Users deleted
1
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
99
87

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
7
4

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
34
23

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
78
17

Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue
127
126

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
558
173

Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue
38
75

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
77
30

Questions reopened
3
0

Questions flagged⁵
1
116

Questions closed
94
0

Question flags handled⁵
100
17

Posts undeleted
4
5

Posts locked
0
2

Posts deleted⁶
70
722

Posts bumped
0
245

Comments flagged
0
26

Comments deleted⁷
76
79

Comment flags handled
20
6

Answers flagged
2
77

Answer flags handled
74
3

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: 2020: 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

Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^

Easy Peasy, this site moderates itself, I hope we have a few people step up when the elections come around.  You get to use the cool mod controls, be a member of the most exclusive club on the Internet and don't have to make a lot of tough decisions.


text:
Merge DevOps into ServerFault? (polite for: close down DevOps SE and find the best SE for the freed Q/A?)
There are few questions from users >200 points on DevOps.
There are on the whole 5000 questions, and new questions get few views and few answers.
I thought using DevOps SE would be better for DevOps issues, but there are too many new users like me who do not know that this Stack Exchange is almost dead. They just go there, ask a question, and find out about it later. This waste of time should be avoided.
This SE should be merged into ServerFault (310.000 questions) even in cases where ServerFault does not fully fit as a name. Or give a better SE, I do not see it. (Perhaps it could be Stack Overflow itself if ServerFault does not want the questions.)

I have already asked the same question on ServerFault, now it is up to this community to discuss. Server Fault does not want to have the "crappy questions" from DevOps to some degree, I take that comment there as representative. But would it not be better to decrease the quality of Server Fault slightly and therefore get rid of the confusion of two very near SE's?
See Merge DevOps into ServerFault? (polite for: close down DevOps SE and find the best SE for the freed Q/A?)

This stackexchange is not quite as dead as it would seem.  I've moderated Christianity.SE for a few years and here for a year, I'll admit, there's a lot more to do there, but there are a lot more questions asked here.
The problem is not enough answerers here.  But I have the same problem when I ask esoteric questions on ServerFault. So I don't think it behooves anyone to have this site moved over to ServerFault (which I don't believe is a thing)
The important distinction is that questions here should be answered from a DevOps perspective i.e. the answer is not "Log in and do a thing", but "Write this script to do this remotely".
Now, we don't often hit this aspirational goal, but maybe we should refocus. Way to many questions are "How do I do this in Jenkins" or "Where's this button in the AWS console".  I'd rather not see those questions.
Maybe we should just close more questions.  I'd be up for a re-focus.

Strange, I thought anything that has to do with DevOps is best placed here, that also means your examples, since they have nothing to do with a "fault of a server" and are everyday work of DevOps. I would rather say there is too much DevOps on ServerFault, the naming of ServerFault is flawed, it does not fit to DevOps very often. But since the ServerFault community is used so much more for DevOps, I do not see a chance to keep this DevOps up in a senseful way. But why should everything in life be always senseful :).

Yeah, I don't know why this community was created, I might have signed up for the beta since my role at work is mainly DevOps.  FWIW, I'd prefer if this site were just for ansible. I think the topic is big enough and the product is mature enough to have its own stackexchange.

It is also another thing: DevOps, as a name, is too boring. All Stack Exchange sites have creative names while this site is boring in the sense that it is just what the job branch is called like. Perhaps it is really time to just close it completely, archive all and make ServerFault the official DevOps site from now on - even though it does not always fit to a "fault of a server". I cannot say anything about ansible, no idea, but rebranding DevOps to that focus, perhaps? Mind: ServerFault, StackOverflow and SuperUser are the main communities that ServerFault suggests to put it all in.

@questionto, only 5 or 6 have creating names.  The "original trilogy" were collaboratively came up with and StackExchange itself was just something Joel Spolksy thought was cute.  Do you know what DevOps is? it's ok if you don't - few do.  but it would be more appropriate to ask these questions on StackOverflow than ServerFault.

Well for me the name ServerFault is the main problem - if I understand DevOps right. It is not up to me to understand everything, there is confusion in the DevOps for a reason. The question and answer is for the public, not for me, I will not and should not decide anything. I also guess that it all comes down to StackOverflow in the end even though normally, it should just be about programming. For example, Google Cloud Platform asks you to post your questions on StackOverflow, not on ServerFault or DevOps.

@question ServerFault was just a cutsey name from back when branding was an issue, before Area51 communities.  I've been on all of them since the beta.  The beauty of it is like libraries at a big university.  There might be one big library with a million books in it.  But you still have Engineering and Agriculture and Geography libraries on the same campus.  It doesn't mean you take all the Engineering books out of the main library and put them in the Engineering library.  But it does mean you may need to walk a little ways to get what you need if it's specialized.

Well if it was like this. But instead, it is more confusing; DevOps has many beginner questions from users who do not know the landscape. Often, those questions are not good (mine as well, btw). Specialised questions from high rep users rather go to ServerFault. The insights here and on ServerFault on this question here are enough for me, thank you for your answer at all. :)

@questionto42 check https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22356/isnt-devops-a-duplicate-of-server-fault, this question has been asked way before this site was launched. There was reasons to launch it, mostly because the target questions were off topic for SO/SF/etc.

@Tensibai It is about now, not about why it was created (I have not read your link, admittedly). The problem now is that DevOps takes some few beginner questions while the mature users are is on ServerFault - since they know about this.

The fact is still the same, questions on topic here would be off topic on SF and closed as such, this stack has been open exactly for those questions mixing code and system administration along with some methodology of work.


text:
Splunk will soon be sponsoring DevOps Stack Exchange
We're excited to announce that Splunk will be sponsoring DevOps Stack Exchange beginning July 7th through December 31. We wanted to give you a heads-up and walk you through what it will look like.
How and where will the sponsorship be displayed?
The sponsorship will be shown on the right side of the header at the top of the site in a manner that's similar to the mockup below:

What else changes?
Nothing! Quoting from the original MSE announcement on sponsorships:

First — sponsors do not own these Q&A sites. Sponsors work alongside
our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the
questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections
as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a
garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits
still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has
always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all
Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for
sharing and attribution.

Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who would be interested in their products know about them.
What if I think I've found a design glitch/bug?
If something looks off, please report it as a bug so we can investigate and squash it.
That's it. If you have any other questions or concerns, please leave them as answers below.
Also, thank you. These types of partnerships help us bring more resources to our communities, and they wouldn't be possible without the work you've put into making DevOps Stack Exchange successful.


text:
Proposal for mass-migration from StackOverflow?
I'm going to propose that we request for a mass-migration from StackOverflow here, specifically, any question which has one or more of these tags, and no other tags not listed here,

[terraform]

[terragrunt]

[ansible]

[chef-infra]

Kubernetes

[kubernetes]
[k3s]
[kubectl]

[semantic-release]

[semantic-versioning]

[docker-swarm]

Cloud providers

[amazon-web-services]
[azure]

[continuous-integration]

[continuous-deployment]

ci

[gitlab-ci]
[github-ci]
[jenkins]
[travis-ci]

If we'll accept it. Or, if the mods accept it assuming no one will answer here. I can propose it to SO and SE.

Great suggestion! I would say we could expand that list further as well, but that is a great start!

I don't care too much.  I know most of this is on topic over at StackOverflow and ServerFault somewhat, but I don't necessarily get answers to my questions there either.
Technically, this should be a better place to ask DevOps related questions.

Sorry, re-read your post, you want a mass migration to this site?  Well that would be a nice jumpstart - and probably justify the splunk advertising dollars. The last person to suggest something like this suggested we can devops.stackexchange.com.
Please, by all means ask for it!

Has this been done with ServerFault before? Are certain topics migrated to that site as well?

As a note, questions can be on-topic on multiple sites. A question that's on-topic on Stack Overflow should not be migrated to another site (such as this one), even if it is on-topic on the other site as well. Migration would only be potentially justified if the question is not on-topic for Stack Overflow but is on-topic on the other site. I'm no expert on the scope of either site, but such questions would first have to be disallowed on SO for them to even consider migrating them here.

I think this would be a bad move.
Most of these tools are related to Sys-admin or developer roles. So they might be better on StackOverflow or ServerFault.
"DevOps" is more related to culture and organization. This was well said in another answer:

methodological questions, culture questions, questions on management of change, DevOps mindset, applying DevOps techniques to various parts of the value stream, to various businesses, etc.

It would be unfortunate if we have e.g. two sites for developer tooling (since it is also on-topic on StackOverflow). The same for sys-admin and cloud like ansible and AWS infrastructure, it is on-topic on ServerFault and it would be unfortunate if we split it on more sites.


text:
Middle Sidebar Advertising
As you all know, advertising is an important source of revenue for Stack Overflow and it helps us support all the sites across the Stack Exchange Network and the resources that go into maintaining and improving the experience on the platform. We are going to be introducing middle sidebar ads, which have been on the main Stack Overflow site for years, to some of the tech sites including DevOps.
The middle sidebar ads have the same standards as any other ads on the platform. Ads are non-intrusive and static. Ads go through a vetting process to ensure they are appropriate for the communities on Stack Exchange. If you see an ad that may not follow our established standards and guidelines, you can let us know by using the "report this ad" functionality. Here is a mockup of what these will look like when two ads are showed (the existing ad placement and the new middle sidebar ad placement):

This ad space won’t be available for display until May 10 because we wanted to give you a heads-up before you started seeing them. Ads are an essential line of business for us and we’re committed to giving you advanced notice whenever we introduce a new form of advertising on the network sites. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.


text:
Hashicorp is now sponsoring DevOps: Sorry there wasn't a head's up
Why don't processes ever go on a road trip?
Because they're afraid of breaking down!
Thank you for that joke Spencer G. Philippe’s influence is rubbing off. Anyway, that is why I am here: cause one of our processes indeed broke down. I am addressing an issue that some of you have probably noticed already: we landed a sweet sponsorship for DevOps from Hashicorp, but we screwed up and failed to give the prior heads-up that we promised.
We could blame the coffee machine for brewing decaf instead of espresso, or the office dog was too cute to focus on work. But let's be honest; we don't need scapegoats or fluffy distractions. In reality, it was a simple mix-up, a human error, or, as Spencer would say, "a momentary lapse in communication brilliance."
We do have a process internally between teams to inform us when sponsorships are confirmed and a message was lost between stakeholders. There were some recent shifting of teams involved in this process, and no matter how iron clad you think processes are, things will slip through the cracks.
We genuinely apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused. We are currently looking for the holes that this process fell into so that we can patch them up and restore order for future processes.
What you need to know about this sponsorship
Hashicorp will be running their sponsorship from now until December 29, 2023.
How and where will the sponsorship be displayed?
The sponsorship can be found on the right side of the header at the top of the site, just as it looks now.
What else changes?
Not a thing! Borrowing from the original MSE announcement on sponsorships:
First — sponsors do not own these Q&A sites. Sponsors work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.
What if I've found a design glitch/bug?
If something looks off, please report it as a bug so we can investigate and squash it.
That's all. If you have any other questions or concerns, please leave them as answers below.
Lastly, thank you. These types of partnerships help us bring more resources to our communities, and they wouldn't be possible without the work you've put into making DevOps successful.
If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.
PS We don’t have an office dog; we are a remote company, so we have many dogs, cats, and other furry/feathery/scaly friends. I do have a bunny. Hopefully, she’ll serve as a distraction and I share her as part of our apology. Cleo (the bunny) is sorry too.

Meta isn't just for questions (as in things that end with a "?" as you said), since it is also the place for announcements — which is what this is, @Pierre.Vriens ^_^

I think the problem here is that devops.se is a little too chill for Spencer G. Phillipe references and bunnies.  Cute bunny though!

The company name is "Hashicorp", rather than "Hashicorps", so you may wish to edit accordingly.

@SteveStorck I took the liberty to edit it.


text:
Should we migrate obvious programming questions to Stack Overflow?
This question
How to print struct variables in console?
is really just a programming question, even those the data that is being printed looks pretty devopsy.  But as we know, there are a zillion questions on stackoverflow and one like this is probably either a hard-to-find dupe or risks being completely ignored, even more than our little corner of the SE-verse.
That being said, do you want us to migrate the questions to SO or leave them here?

Yes, I think so. Even if it is a duplicate, I think questions like these are more tailored to that site.


text:
What kind of grafana questions are on topic here?
I'm monitoring Grafana tag on Stack Overflow, and it has quite a bit of questions, that are in grey zone of on-topicness, to say the least.
Should all (new) non plugin development questions regarding Grafana (and related sub-projects, like Loki) be migrated here? With condition of them not being closable for details or focus issues, of course.
If no, what kind of questions will be on-topic and should be migrated here:

installation

local/server setup
docker/Kubernetes/Helm

helm provisioning
panel configuration
dashboard variables
questions about Grafana in clouds (their own, Amazon Managed Grafana, etc.)


text:
Banning AI Generated Content?
Do we want to ban AI generated content?
Sites can now request to enable a banner to warn about their policy on AI-generated content
or might it actually be helpful here?
In my experience, AI generated answers to devops questions (especially vmware integrations with ansible) have been just wishful thinking.  Both I and the AI wish that these features existed, but only AI has the wherewithal to reference the code that doesn't actually exist. Being human, I would find that a frightfully pointless waste of time.
So maybe answer yes or no to this question and we can go ask the CM's to make us a banner - or we can get no response (like usual) and we'll leave it alone - or simply collude between the pro-tem mods on this.


text:
2023: a year in moderation

It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here might be 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 — folks like you. 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 in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.
So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, 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
Community User¹
Community²

All comments on a post moved to chat
0
0
0

Answer flags handled
58
38
0

Answers flagged
0
38
58

Bounties canceled
0
0
0

Comment flags handled
10
11
0

Comments deleted⁸
19
1
49

Comments flagged
0
0
21

Comments undeleted
0
0
0

Escalations to the Community Manager team
0
0
0

Posts bumped
0
900
0

Posts deleted⁷
79
451
112

Posts locked
0
18
0

Posts undeleted
1
0
6

Posts unlocked
0
3
0

Question flags handled⁶
27
21
0

Questions closed
88
0
0

Questions flagged⁶
1
1
47

Questions merged
0
0
0

Questions migrated
7
0
0

Questions protected
0
2
0

Questions reopened
1
0
0

Questions unprotected
0
0
0

Revisions redacted
0
0
0

Tag highlight language set
0
0
0

Tag synonyms created
0
0
0

Tag synonyms proposed
0
0
0

Tags merged
0
0
0

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Close votes" queue
30
0
3

Tasks reviewed⁵: "First answers" queue
234
0
28

Tasks reviewed⁵: "First questions" queue
618
0
95

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Late answers" queue
91
0
5

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Low quality posts" queue
38
0
6

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Reopen votes" queue
2
0
1

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Suggested edits" queue
54
2
22

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Triage" queue
0
0
0

User banned from review
0
0
0

User review-bans lifted early
0
0
0

User suspensions lifted early
1
0
0

Users contacted
0
0
0

Users deleted
0
0
0

Users destroyed⁴
3
0
0

Users suspended³
1
15
0

Footnotes
¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² This refers to the membership of DevOps without diamonds next to their names.
³ 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.
⁴ 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.
⁵ 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.
⁶ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁸ 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: 2022: 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

Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^


text:
Intel Will be Sponsoring DevOps SE
We're excited to announce that Intel will be sponsoring DevOps Stack Exchange, April 2nd through June 29th. We wanted to give you a heads-up and walk you through what it will look like.
How and where will the sponsorship be displayed?
The sponsorship will be shown on the right side of the header at the top of the site in a manner that's similar to the mockup below:

What else changes?
Nothing! Quoting from the original MSE announcement on sponsorships:

First — sponsors do not own these Q&A sites. Sponsors work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.

Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who would be interested in their products know about them.
What if I think I've found a design glitch/bug?
If something looks off, please report it as a bug so we can investigate and squash it.
That's it! If you have any other questions or concerns, please leave them as answers below.
And lastly, thank you. These types of partnerships help us bring more resources to our communities, and they wouldn't be possible without the work you've put into making this site successful.


text:
What kinds of question are on-topic here? (The Help Center is currently silent)
At the time of this writing, the /help/on-topic page for the main site seems to only contain cookie-cutter text about what other network sites might be suitable for questions that are off-topic here (the section that starts with "If your question is not specifically on-topic for this site, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site.")
Perhaps there are other network sites that are also like this, but for me, this is the first site I've encountered where that Help Center page is completely bare of actual particular guidance on what kinds of questions/topics are on-topic for the site.
I'm not a contributor to this site and I'm not familiar with its topicality or subject matter. I just came to notice this when writing an answer to a question Meta Stack Overflow: Proposal for updated guidance for [kubernetes] tag.
Is there a particular reason for this? If I may humbly ask, could you please put this as a high-priority item on a to-do list?
I've seen different "types" of /help/on-topic pages. Ex. One interesting type is the one on superuser.com, which starts with a broad category and then chops off a bunch of things. I wonder what approach is suitable to writing this Help Center page for this site.
I think this is important to do because now whenever I want to try my hand at contributing to a Stack Exchange network site, the first thing I do is look at /help/on-topic. The question that echoes in my mind here is "If I don't know what kinds of questions are on-topic, how can I have confidence that a question I want to ask is on-topic?".
Possibly related: Proposal for mass-migration from StackOverflow?.

The definition of the site is as cut and dry as the definition of devops.
Which is to say, not very.
It's probably easier to say what devops isn't.
It is isn't logging in and fixing something.
What does that leave?

All the tools and platforms that help with fixing things with a layer of abstraction between you and the thing you're fixing so that you can get things done efficiently and at scale are topical.

Every public or private cloud platform thing is going to be topical.

Anything that helps with CI/CD pipelines is topical.

Anything that automates deployments or configuration is topical.

I think we have to contact the community managers to update that page, at least I've never updated it on the sites I moderate. If someone wants to start a CW page for things that are on topic (which is a more complete list than this - I don't think it should contain any specific technologies though) I'd be willing to get that page updated

For a start, it would be good to know whether this site is about DevOps (the concept/methodology) or about DevOps (the Microsoft Azure software). This is currently left completely open by the "on-topic" page. Then, in the former case, it is not at all clear whether e.g. questions about tools to help with DevOps, about the behaviour of people applying DevOps, or the history of the science behind DevOps would be on-topic.

@O.R.Mapper the only thing I'd definitely exclude are subjective-style questions.


text:
2022: 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 preceding calendar year.
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 say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, 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

All comments on a post moved to chat
1
0

Answer flags handled
63
12

Answers flagged
0
73

Comment flags handled
9
0

Comments deleted⁷
57
60

Comments flagged
0
9

Posts bumped
0
586

Posts deleted⁶
63
381

Posts locked
0
11

Posts undeleted
2
9

Posts unlocked
0
1

Question flags handled⁵
28
7

Questions closed
112
0

Questions flagged⁵
3
33

Questions migrated
9
0

Questions protected
0
1

Questions reopened
8
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue
63
10

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue
290
63

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue
749
105

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue
76
36

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue
32
8

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue
8
3

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue
106
36

Users destroyed³
6
0

Users suspended²
0
13

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). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
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: 2021: 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

Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^


text:
What should we do with questions about bugs in programs that are fixed by developers?
If there's a question like this:
known_hosts module reports changed when nothing has changed
Where the OP submitted a bugfix to the developers, which was accepted and fixed - or even in cases where a bugfix is found by answerers and eventually committed - what should happen with these questions?
I don't think it makes a ton of sense to leave them in any state.  Should we close the questions? Flag them and lock them?  Any suggestions?
I don't think we should leave them alone, especially if the community bot is likely to promote them to the main page.


text:
Do we need more moderator involvement on the site?
Assuming many users won't read this, but if you do, please chime in,  I check in on the site frequently, finding the queue empty and nothing to do and still managed to get an email from Stackexchange Community Support saying I need to step up moderation.  The other site I moderate, Christiantiy.SE has quite a bit to do every day, but here not so much.
However, we could be more particular about the kind of content we allow on the site, we could start asking people to up their game on posts where all we see is some code and "have you tried this"?  We could start demanding explanations for why things you try are the things that work and delete answers that fail to meet some criteria.
But we definitely don't want to do it without any community support or else we'll just crush the site with red tape and annoy everyone.


text:
DevOps job role's question got closed?
After the question about job role boundaries of a DevOps engineer has been closed, I'd like to share that I feel a strong disagreement and disharmony about that.
Indeed, the question is not of a technical matter "what X do I need to do to make Y work after I've tried Z and got an F error".
Nevertheless, the facts of the real world are as far as I can relate:

there are many "DevOps engineer" jobs out there (despite of the fact that this must be a misunderstanding)
partly, as our new member confirms, there are organizations where a DevOps engineer is sort of an extended system administrator. This is also by the way imho a sad circumstance that we have more system- and ops- related questions than development related questions similar to "how do I prototype containers in my IDE" either "how do I automate virtual infrastructure prototyping in context X".

So then I think it's very legitimate to ask a question at the biggest Q&A site for DevOps, what are the boundaries in this job role.
Closing such questions will keep us away from focusing on the actual DevOps culture which is one of the main drivers why we have this community.
Therefore I can't understand how much is the question not having enough focus (this was the reason to close) also given that obviously some folks have found the accepted answer helpful, and there is one another good answer.

Hi Peter. I was one of the close voters. I think this particular question is very broad, as it asks for boundaries of a job role, which can be different across organizations and across teams too sometimes. I also think DevOps is not a title, its a philosophy (but that's a very personal opinion). + I think you did a very good job at answering it.
Having said that, I dont have any issues if enough reopen votes get cast on that qn, cause I think your answer deserves more audience :)

Because as you put it: Devops as a job role is not something universally agreed on and is mostly used as a Buzzword. Hence it's not even answerable with educated guess from experience.
What this question could gather as answers is everyone "my 2cts" and an endless debate of people willing to correct others answers because they disagree.
I'd say the boundaries are probably implied enough in What is the difference between Sysadmin and DevOps Engineer? answers.

I concur with your disharmony; the job title is becoming more prevalent, despite the fact that its use goes directly against the philosophical tenets of DevOps.  That warrants pause, because people are asking for advice about a real-life situation.
However, the use of DevOps Engineer as a job title is so variable between organizations that it would be tough to give practical advice beyond "check your job description".  IT's a quandary.  I haven't seen the specific question, but questions like this need narrow scope to best be answered in this sort of forum.


text:
I will be inactive for at least one month
I will be inactive for one month after reading this Q&A https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/392867/2777965 and perhaps I will leave SE.

I can just relate, take care of you, I know how draining that can be.

Ping as follow up, did you see the last activities on meta.se?

@Tensibai could you include a link?

I'd start with https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344178/the-q1-2020-community-roadmap-is-on-the-blog?cb=1 and the various featured posts on MSE :)


text:
What does exactly organic growth mean in context of our site?
In many cases, I hear that an SE site should grow organically. Basically I agree with it. Still I would like to understand which factors do influence that process.
One scenario is for example which I can imagine, a user search on a search engine like Google for "deploy kubernetes",  "devops kubernetes". In fact I can't see not a single SO/SE link there.
Also, for "java exception error" I get one Google result link from SO but it's nevertheless the first one.
So it seems like organic growth does not depend of googlability of these sites?


text:
How to attract practitioners of DevOps as mature member candidates to bring their expertise to our DevOps SE site?
In a related DevOps SE Meta discussion, @Bruce Becker suggested:

.. we might not have enough mature members yet to handle a lot more
  traffic, .. [] I do have the impression that practitioners of DevOps
  would rather expound on their blog or podcast, rather than come here
  and help build community by answering questions and curating content.

Can we do anything about this? Do you think many practitioners might be not aware of our site, or do not see a benefit for them in it? Could we do something about that - like asking those we know personally who might be a good match for the Q&A format and sharing knowledge to join?
Other ideas?
I hear very often the argument that the site should grow organically which I generally agree, but I do not how exactly this works. I'll ask another question because I do not like the attitude (might be my personal misinterpretation) variant "organical growth => black box process => nothing to do about it => wait".

If you're asking about promotional ideas, then integration with other forums may be helpful.  For example, tweeting out "good" questiosn and answers on a periodic basis might draw some eyes to the site.

SO has 23 tags containing "devops" in their names.
SF has 4 tags containing "devops" in their names.
Could there a banner/infobox be implemented at each of the according questions' pages that gives a hint/link to DO?

Here are two post where I suggest a solution

Adapting privileges for low site activity
It is in the best interests of all sites for StackExchange to have a more hands-on approach to topicality


text:
Reasons why users join the site but do no ask many questions?
My own experience is that I've started joining Q&A sites mostly to post questions. Though, I kept asking more questions.
Therefore I wonder that we have quite many members, and still growing, but the question rate is going down.
Why is so? Would be great to get your feedback!

How comes you have joined DevOps SE?
Do you have currently no DevOps questions?
Would you like to ask more questions?

Further reading from academic research findings by Slag et al., 2015 - "One-day flies on StackOverflow: why the vast majority of stackoverflow users only posts once":

StackOverflow (SO) is a popular question and answers (Q&A) platform
  related to software development. An interesting characteristic of SO
  is that about half of its users makes only one contribution to the
  platform in total.
In this work, we study this group of users, which we call one-day
  flies, and we investigate why they do not continue to contribute to
  the platform. By achieving this understanding we can find ways to
  enable users to become more active.

The real reason why the question rate has gone down over the past few weeks, is because of the massive close votes in the past month or so. And that in turn has caused a lot of questions to be considered as abandonded and hence automatically deleted ( read more: https://devops.stackexchange.com/help/roomba ... ). And because of all that ... the question rated dropped ...

@Pierre.Vriens do you mean, existing users are kind of scared to ask "wrong" questions? if so, is there a way to improve? after all, we keep getting new users.

I'm here for the association bonus

I just joined this SE... and I'll give a frank answer here:
I joined up looking for DevOps. What I found are questions and answers on tooling.
Looking at the current first page I see questions regarding..

Prometheus, Kibana
Jenkins, Github
Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes
AWS, Azure

--> Those are just tools/technologies/stacks...
I'm not saying that they don't have a place here, but there are plenty of other places (many also on other SEs) where people can solve their technical difficulties. I see little added benefit of creating yet another separate SE for this.
Personally I would be interested in methodological questions, culture questions, questions on management of change, DevOps mindset, applying DevOps techniques to various parts of the value stream, to various businesses, etc.

hi and welcome! thank you for sharing. Yeah probably such questions are tough to lay out and answer in Q&A format beyond exchanging opinions. Nevertheless would be great if more such questions appear.

My main motivation to join StackExchange sites is just this: I want to be able to upvote good answers.
Usually, I only ask a question when I

thoroughly searched for an answer,
feel that I'm clear on the general context and thus able to ask a concise question
desperately need this answer, but
still have ample time to write a question and wait for answers
think it likely that I'll receive a helpful answer.

Maybe I should be less shy about asking questions, I don't know.


text:
Call to DevOps SE moderators: migrating unanswered DevOps questions to our site
As I've found out, it's possible under certain conditions to migrate unanswered DevOps questions to our site as lower boundary of the eligibility to do so.
Say migration is from source to target.

(1) Any user with 3K+ reputation at source is eligible to access the "Migrate to site.." option (this is the case for at least some of our moderators and SO)
(2) Target that is a pre-defined site from the list of sites which might have been defined before our site existed. => if this still applies, migration is not possible.

As of 2017, the "flag question" option displayed the "off-topic/Migrate to site.." option if you had 3K+ reputation1:

While (1) is easy, if (2) applies, our moderators would need to elaborate how our site can be put on that list.
If this is solved, migrating a couple of questions a day could:

deliver answers to unanswered questions
fill up the gap we need to qualify from Beta

Additionally, there might be "too old" questions older than current 60 days limit, which might be worth re-asking or finding ways to override the rule seen from our site's perspective.
1 As you can see, at that time "Software Engineering SE" was called "Programmers SE". :-)

I heard on another SE that betas cannot be added to the list.

oh no, that is really too bad!.. :-/ Also I've seen that the startup SE has been opened and closed two times with overall very good metrics except the average number of questions. A pity I'm locked at the central Meta.

@030 an update from SO moderator: "Steps: Find good (well-asked) questions on SO that have been closed (we don’t migrate questions that are on-topic for SO: on sites with overlapping scope, it is asker’s choice), and flag these questions for diamond moderator attention. Make sure to mention that DevOps agrees with the requested migration (maybe link this Meta question). If there’s a large batch at once, maybe ping me with a PasteBin or something containing links." https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/392666/1800-unanswered-devops-questions-at-so?noredirect=1#comment748090_392666

@030 a quick shot -
there are 134 closed SO questions matching keyword DevOps https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=devops+closed%3A1 and 220 matching keyword Kubernetes. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=kuberbetes+closed%3A1 (both sets might overlap of course)
According to linguistics studies of meaning, it could indeed be that some questions on SO could appear on-topic but not well focused for people having no deeper knowledge in say Kubernetes. At DevOps there might be a higher chance that somebody enthusiastic with Kubernetes sees the question, and "decodes" the problem deeper.


text:
Risk assessment of getting closed during Beta?
I've come across a closed SE site for startups with the claim it was not active enough during Beta.

Comparing it to our site stats (as of Jan 05 2020) gives an unpleasant feeling.

Could we be moving towards the risk being not active enough by StackExhange standards with a subsequent closure during this year?

Thanks for this question Peter. I have the same concern as well. There are a lot of questions on SO and SF that should be migrated to DevOps, but the responses to the meta questions on SO and SF were not hopeful in my opinion. I think that we should contact some owners of SO and SF so that we could introduce some advertisements on their websites, but I do not no whether that is possible.

I think we can indeed ask SF/SO what so they think about migrating DevOps questions. I don't see exact duplicate because there is a big difference between "would ever become official" and "get closed because 5 questions per day is a too low activity". This is not even normalized to the size of the current user base neither the potential target group.

Currently, Stack Overflow has 1873 unanswered questions mentioning "DevOps".

That is interesting. Could you post a meta question on SO to request them to move them or to add an advertisement?

SO: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/392666/unanswered-devops-questions

superuser: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/13933/unanswered-devops-questions

@030 please contribute to the SO thread. I was also going to ask a question at the general Meta whether the Beta metrics could be adjusted based on how much big is the community for a very special topic. See also this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/ekkhsd/understanding_member_base_of_devops_se/

Thanks. I have added a comment and added two upvotes. Please let me know what you think.

@030 great, thank you! my first impressions and observations based on the feedback based on the other side are: 1) moderators of other sites expect direct communication with DevOps SE moderator like authorized persons eligible to take part in decision that a question is moved 2) if agreed, people can be scared to migrate questions manually, therefore we as DevOps people might need to provide some automation solutions.

there could be an attitude like "these are our questions even if they are unanswered", here I think we can only capitalize on the topical focus benefits offered by specialized SE sites. 4) there is also a hard fact that a moderator can't move a question after 60 days; for unanswered question I still see a reason to do so, even more maybe, but this is a question to raise at the general Meta.

maybe 60 days in some case is justificated but our site does not deal only with questions "how do I make code snippet A to produce output B" which require sometimes days to think over and collect information so maybe a question can get too old but not already after 60 days. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136537/is-too-old-to-migrate-a-good-reason-not-to-migrate

Hi, I saw your post on SO meta. I think one of the reasons for the "low activity" may be because this SE isn't talked about a lot. I think it needs more visibility. I personally have never heard of it, and I do quite a bit of devops on my off time.

@kemicofasupportsMonica thank you and welcome! I've been thinking about possibilites to make it more visible, but not found a good idea yet. https://devops.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/321/understanding-growth-of-our-community-vs-user-base-estimation-from-other-resour

Closed Startups beta

@Peter On the other hand, this SE is already in beta for longer than 1800 days.

A good counter-example! But why did the closed Start-ups, even twice?

@030 FYI - https://psychology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2102/rebooting-cognitive-sciences-a-suggested-approach

Don't take a 5 years old thing as indication for the present :)
Startups had a drop in activity at this time an noone to take care of it, hence its closure (as was its previous iteration, as explained here).
Quoting Robert Harvey (now no longer part of SE along with Shog9) from meta:

As discussed in: Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites, just about the only criteria remaining to keep a site open is having enough users (three minimum) willing to step up to Moderate♦ it.

In my opinion, Stack Overflow the company won't close something as long as it drives traffic to show ads as that's mostly the only thing they have interest in now, building communities and good quality knowledge bases is no longer their goal.
Late addition: I just seen This MSO question which seems to mean the company would like to combine this site along with others under StackOverflow "brand". My sad interpretation of their behavior in paragraph above would be confirmed if they close devops.se in favor of a devops-* tags in StackOverflow.


text:
2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

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

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on DevOps over the past 12 months:
                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  0          8
Users contacted                                   2          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue            63        356
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue               16         17
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue         24         97
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue               28        141
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue               172      1,124
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue               98        206
Tags merged                                       2          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             1          1
Tag synonyms created                              1          0
Questions unprotected                             0          2
Questions reopened                               36          0
Questions protected                               5          8
Questions migrated                                3          0
Questions flagged⁵                                0        381
Questions closed                                470          8
Question flags handled⁵                         162        219
Posts undeleted                                   8         16
Posts locked                                      0         41
Posts deleted⁶                                  175        930
Posts bumped                                      0        583
Comments flagged                                 14        105
Comments deleted⁷                               210        167
Comment flags handled                            82         37
Bounties canceled                                 1          0
Answers flagged                                   7        219
Answer flags handled                            197         30

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? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: 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

Wishing you all a happy new year...

Out of curiosity, as the mod team changed in october, who is taken as moderator for those stats ? I.e: does my actions count as moderator or community ?

Actions you took while a moderator count in the moderator column; actions you took after stepping down count in the community column, @tensibai


text:
What to do with questions that do not get any answers?
At the moment there are 391 questions without answers, see https://devops.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=mostvotes&filters=noanswers
According to https://stackoverflow.com/help/no-one-answers one could create a bounty to get more awareness.
However, what is the opinion regarding closing questions if they are inactive for longer than three months?
December 20, 2019
https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97295/devops

December 22, 2019

December 23, 2019

December 25, 2019

@030 thank you that you take care of that to develop our site towards successful end of the Beta status.
It seems to me that asking authors of the questions whether they've found an answer in the meantime is a good approach! In terms of Beta state, I think getting more answers to get the 2.5 answers/question will be more tough though.


text:
Blatantly off-topic?
Uhm, I am not exactly the most active user here, since most of the stuff I do with any remote connection to devops will be catered by other SE sites (Unix, ServerFault, SuperUser and AskUbuntu come to mind).
However, when it's about ansible I tend to think of this site and head here.
So today when asking an Ansible question of my own I noticed this question, which I answered. However, the only connection with Ansible and therefore DevOps in the closer sense is that apt/apt-get/aptitude or whatever the Ansible apt module used in that case got executed via Ansible. The underlying issue has nothing to do with Ansible whatsoever.
So I decided to flag it and vote for closing it as off-topic. Alas, the dialog puzzles me a bit:

The first two choices didn't seem applicable to me. This isn't about programming and even if this isn't reproducible (due to lack of information in the question) it would still not be a valid reason if the missing information were given.
Which leaves two options:

Blatantly off-topic (this question has nothing to do with DevOps)
This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network

which in turn leads to "belongs on devops.meta.stackexchange.com" and therefore disqualifies the migration option entirely ...

So being a mod (pro tempore) on RE.SE I decided to double-check to see whether this question would be considered DevOps-related and ended up on a page with the following contents (at the time of writing):

What topics can I ask about here?
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.

Yes, that's all the content there is on that page other than navigation items.
The one piece of information which I'd expect to find on this page is missing: what topics are deemed on-topic?
So given the scarce selection of migration options when attempting to close a question, I am left wondering where to find a list of examples of items being on-topic or explicitly off-topic.
But I am also wondering why such strong wording (blatantly off-topic) is used, because as the only item that was not eliminated for other reasons, I am hard pressed to consider this blatantly off-topic, since the person asking the question is using Ansible which I would deem on-topic for a DevOps-themed QA site and even if Ansible wasn't explicitly included, one could still argue that such issue could reasonably occur in the daily routine of a devops staffer ...
Edit #1: admittedly I was shocked to find this 2.5 year old question under related links after posting my question.


text:
Understanding growth of our community vs. user base estimation from other resources
Recently, I've checked for how many DevOps interested people are out there based on other online communities on this topic.

The Reddit r/devops counts about 120K+ subscribers (though related to this high number not so much discussion happens there).
AllDevOpsDay hosts claim they would attract well 30K people (maybe though they just have about so many on their invitation mailing list).
UPD Jan 2020 - Tag #DevOps has over 500K followers at LinkedIn

While we have a good growth recently with our current 16K members, what do these numbers mean in comparison?
Does this mean that StackExchange as platform is generally less known/popular/too young in comparison, or do people maybe "fear" the strict form of our Q&A format?
Sorry for being speculative, but I just think about which hypotheseses I could formulate to look then for more facts and figures to understand these observations.
So, indeed, the Reddit site was founded about 2010 so our community is way younger, it exists since about 3 years. Is this mostly close and therefore a sufficient explanation then?

I think the comparison is a good idea, but should not be done blindly.
I feel that the amount of traffic that the DevOps subreddit and this StackExchange site gets should be compared (daily active users, or even daily unique users, _e.g.).
Secondly, although I find a LOT of good stuff posted to the socials, I hardly ever see anything from this site. I hope folks will agree that traffic from social media is almost always the largest component, but if people aren't sharing their questions and answers online, then that traffic will only ever be organic.
Is that a bad thing? Perhaps not... we might not have enough mature members yet to handle a lot more traffic, and the quality of the content (not to mention the sanity of the mods) may suffer. However, I do have the impression that practitioners of DevOps would rather expound on their blog or podcast, rather than come here and help build community by answering questions and curating content.

agree with your last point; sad enough given that DevOps capitalizes also on communication. Is there a way to attract more practicioners? Maybe post questions here going into more detail on some aspects of their content?

One of the points that limits Q&A sites like this one is the somewhat stricter format. Sure we have comments as well, but they are highly volatile and anyway not meant for discussion. It won't appeal to everyone the same. As a community we often tell newcomers that this is not a forum. So when comparing to Reddit I think you're comparing apples and oranges. I didn't know AllDevOpsDay until I read your question, but it also looks like quite a different format as well.
But I am with Bruce Becker on the other point. The numbers about posts and users don't say a lot on their own. The benefit to the internauts visiting is what makes a Q&A site successful. When I ask my colleagues at work if they've heard of StackOverflow and various other StackExchange sites they will all readily admit to reading and benefiting from answers (usually through web searches and several times a week). But only a very very small percentage takes the step to posting their questions. It could be that their question had been asked already and was also answered or that some information they gleaned from one of our communities gave them a nudge in the right direction, but in any case that first step seems to be a big one (although I wouldn't say it was). And then it seems to be yet another big step to start answering or voting or in other words committing to your community/communities; despite all of those gamification incentives (badges, reputation, privileges ...).
Not sure I'd buy into "social traffic" (and not just because of the misleading terminology). In terms of traffic and ads played out to visitors it may be true that this is the most attractive part. But that would be what the company behind StackExchange cares about, not so much the individual communities. In fact I think that because of how social media works, this isn't exactly the traffic that is helpful for those trying to foster the community. I would think that visitors from search engines are more important by far and that optimizing for clear titles of the questions and correct tags and terminology would be a better path.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the formats you compare differ too wildly and that certain of the naked numbers won't tell you about the utility the site provides for people who are not (yet) part of the community.
And last but not least there is that little issue that many of the topics a DevOps staffer cares about is also catered by at least four other SE communities. So you're in a competition and some of those other communities are giants. So despite the age of this site and a bunch of committed core community members it's still a David vs. Goliath situation from my point of view.


text:
What is our policy on profanity?
Is there a policy on the use of profanity? Since this is a multicultural site, I suspect that the default attitude is "laissez-faire". If there is no such policy do we want one, i.e. a list of banned words?
Having a list of banned words seem to a Bad Idea (see this question on SE Meta. Also banning people from using specific words seems to be a bad idea.
Personally I would be extremely hesitant of banning words. The code of conduct covers behaviour, not content and I'm ok with that. I was just wondering if there was a DevOps SE policy on this (y/n). More importantly, since I haven't seen it discussed, I wanted to know where this community stands on profane language.
The suggestion from SE seems to be that it should be up to the users to flag inappropriate language, and the moderators to respond. However this comes back to the original question: How do we decide what is appropriate, for profanities?
The SE help and FAQ is also silent on this matter, it seems.

Please add some Q&A's and comments that contain "banned words". Could you explain why this is needed? Did you check meta.stackexchange? I expect that this should be applicable to all sites on SE and not to just one of the sites. Did you check whether this is included in the general policies of SE?

There are no Q&A's which would trigger my definition of profanity, I'm asking a-priori. I don't want to make a case for why it's needed (personally, I think it's not). I'm merely asking if there is one, and if not, do we want one :) The answer may be : No. And also No -- but I would like the question to be asked.

Ok clear. Could you address this on meta.stackexchange as well?

possibly our site would appear more professional if it would not contain expressions like "dude" and "f*ck" but I think this is really up to moderation, in terms that I've also seen posts with low quality content/grammar which still passed through the SE post filter.

@Peter being a mod elsewhere I disagree. This is a task for the whole community. Editing questions and answers is like pruning the branches of a tree, it helps them blossom. So when you find those words in a question or answer simply edit them or if you find them in a comment, flag it so the respective word or words can be edited out (if the content is otherwise useful) or the comment can be deleted (e.g. if it's old or otherwise outdated).


text:
Tag suggestion: webhook
I was surprised to find there isn't a webhook tag on the DevOps site. Is this something that should be added?
A webhook tag could apply to many existing questions, including:

Jenkins GitHub Organization Metrics
Jenkins Webhook Management
How can Bitbucket webhooks be invoked after they are deleted?

what would its tag wiki and/or excerpt look like?

@Pierre.Vriens At least 150 reputation is required in beta to create a tag. Shall we create this tag?

I'd be against creating a generic tag like that.
When creating a tag here's roughly what question I ask myself:

Does it help defining the question content ? => At some level, yes, with caveats detailed below
Is it unique enough to bring value ? => I think no (idem, details below)
Would someone follow this tag ? => I doubt someone will filter specifically for webhooks questions (or against them)
What would I write as tag wiki ? => This is the most problematic part here

for the details: github, gitlab, jenkins, bitbucket (and others I don't think of right now) have each their own format and payloads so there'll be little in common between a question about Jenkins webhooks and bitbuckets webhooks.
This negatively impact the value the tag brings to the question and add complexity in writing its wiki description and usage guidelines.
While it still describe the content of the question, I don't feel it would really bring something useful to the site.


text:
Burninate [development-environment]
development-environment has no tag wiki and only 8 questions, none of which seem related to each other.  Should we get rid of it?
(I'm vaguely aware that burninations are generally requested for tags with hundreds or thousands of questions, but I'm not familiar with the various processes for modifying or deleting tags, and I'm also not really sure when it's appropriate to request tag deletion, so I figured I would at least ask here before doing anything.)

I agree to get rid of this tag. You could edit the 8 questions and remove the tag. If no questions are related to this tag, the tag will vanish.

Ok, I've removed from the remaining questions.  Looks like somebody else already edited some of the questions.


text:
2019 Community Moderator Election Results
DevOps's first moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:

They'll be joining the existing crew shortly—please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
Also, please join me in thanking Dave Swersky and Tensibai who will be stepping down as moderator.
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.

Congrats and welcome to the squad pierre.vriens and 030. Godspeed! :)

Thanks for the kudos, happy to be elected! But, why does the Moderator Agreement requires me to accept the privacy policy of SO.SE, instead of the one from DevOps.SE (that's what the hyperlink points to)? Can this link be fixed please?

Congrats you both :)
You'll have more l'attitude to continue the good work you've been doing on moderating this site.
Take some time to get accustomed to the TL, the place is a bit shaking lately but you'll always find good advices there.

I can't stress enough how important your leadership is/was to the community. Thanks for everything Tensibai. Hope you stay around and stay active on the site :)

Merci Patron (I trust that those who know some French will understand the real meaning of what that means)! It'll be tough to ever come close to what you did for DevOps.SE up till now...


text:
2019 Community Moderator Election
The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://devops.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.

the results of this election can be found here: 2019 Community Moderator Election Results


text:
Announcing a Pro Tempore Moderator election
Summary: DevOps Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on September 23 to bring in two more moderators.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:

Starting on September 23, users can nominate themselves. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)
On September 30, 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 October 8.

(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.

With Tensibai resigning should we do a more complete election?

@chicks those elections are triggered by me stepping down :)


text:
Time to step down and let this be
It took me a while to make my head around this, but I feel it's time for me to leave.
We had a bunch of talks at the beginning on what this site would be about and around moderation in general.
I've listen, relaxed what I would have closed as too borderline too see where it goes and well, it doesn't go toward something I'm interested in anymore.
A fair amount of questions show no understanding and doesn't show research of what they're doing and I didn't join for hand holding.
So I've taken the decision to step down as moderator and mostly to take a break of StackExchange as a whole.
In addition, this goes beyong Devops.se alone, I've kept this post focused on here, but StackExchange behavior is a a large part of why I'm resigning and leaving this network. This now takes effect immediately (2019-09-30), I won't handle any more flag.
Was fun, take care of you all  :)
P.S: Mod elections should come in a near future, meanwhile I'll still be around, but far less active.

Huge Thanks for all your efforts, crucial for bringing the DevOps site from its inception to where it is today!!!

I'm tempted to downvote this question ... especially because on meta sites downvotes are used to indicate disagreement with the post. Howver, since it is TB who posted this question, and out of respect for how mostly TB, and only TB, performed all those moderation tasks since devops.SE started, I cannot downvote it. Needless to say I fully agree with @DanCornilescu ... PS: how about changing your status to AWL, aka absent-without-leave, hoping to see you back when you feel time is right to return? E.g after some weeks / months (not years ...) of (unpayed) vacation? ... SVP?!?!

You may want to proofread your post as there's numerous clumsy typos, and most of us can't "Suggested edits are not allowed on non-tag-wiki posts on meta sites."

@user1271772 sorry for that, I can't really stop them, blame ESL. I'm unsure bumping this 18 month old post about me leaving for typos would be very useful.

You will be sorely missed.  I'm sorry the volume of clueless questions has worn you out.  That's totally understandable.  Hopefully we can bring out more of what you were hoping for in the community.  Closing more marginal tickets sounds like a worthy plan.
Thank you for your huge contributions to the site.  Noone has earned more rep from the Q&A.  Noone has done more moderation.  These are huge shoes to fill and we are very grateful your huge effort to get us so far.
Good luck with all of your other projects.  I'm glad you had fun with this site for a while.  Hopefully you can easily find some fun somewhere else.

Thanks for the kind words :)

Sad to see you go. Thank you for all the work you've done and for growing the DevOps SE community to what it is today. Best of luck, and hope to see you elsewhere around the internet :)


text:
How does a beta StackExchange site become non-beta?
What are the parameters which are taken into consideration when deciding that a certain site is needed?

Mostly you can find literature about that here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239949/287976

If by "non-beta" it means "graduated", SE stated that when a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation. However, no new beta sites have graduated since Oct 2017

Have a look at the proposals within the Area 51 site for the site you want to know the answer to your question.
As a sample, go check it out for DevOps.SE. The beta-tab shows the current status (progress), indicating what is still needed for the site to become mature enough to "graduate" (= change from beta status to no-longer-beta).
Even though there appear to be exceptions, as soon as all 5 indicators have changed to Excellent, additional steps are taken to actually obsolete the beta status of the site, which may still take a few months or so.
PS: with the above in mind, if you want to help DevOps.SE to graduate, just try to post some more (good!) questions, and / or try to answer existing questions.

3/5 are excellent at the moment. The daily amount of questions and number of answers per question is an issue currently.


text:
Extrem Feedback Devices
Are Extrem Feedback Devices and Software which are used to create them (Dashboards etc.) considered on-topic?
It feels like it could be because it can and will help Users in the scope of DevOps (System status, build status, code quality, etc.) but im not quite sure if it is.
PS: I ask because i would like to ask a Question regarding how a XFD Dashboard could be realized that get the information mostly from Atlassian Products (Bamboo, Jira, Sonar,...) because the Atlasboard (an old NodeJS Application) is very much out of date.

I'm not sure this is an answer or just a long comment. And I'm not here for a long time, so take my advice with a huge grain of salt.
As far s I understand it, anything related disseminating know-how and promoting good DevOps and CI practices in the professional field are on-topic here. That being said, even in the site has reached its public beta stage, it is still in its infancy. And the community has probably not yet reached the critical point for strong consensus to emerges about what is on-topic or not.
So, my suggestion would be to simply post your question. If it is well-received. Great. If it is not, don't take it personally: consider it was an experiment.
Finally, remember you can always self-answer your own questions when you'll gain more understanding of the topic or of your issue. The great thing about self-answered questions is not only you share your knowledge, but you also give the opportunity for a more experienced user to correct you, or to post new answers when the technology evolves. As a bonus side effect, that would also improve some of our stats, since, at the time of this writing, we have 75% answered questions but only 1.7 answers on average per question.


text:
How many questions is too many?
I noticed a single user posting a lot of Docker-related questions in the past few days. Is this behavior acceptable or is it considering flooding? If that's the case, I could manage to convince him to calm down.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/27322/11-famous-illeists

@chicks Or maybe he was just schizophrenic :D

I hope most people are focused on quality and not quantity.  Since the majority of your questions have at least one up-vote it seems like you're falling on the good side of things.  You might want to look back at the ones that didn't get up votes to see if they could be turned into better questions, but maybe they were just overlooked because we don't have enough docker folks lurking here.
I don't recall seeing any complaints about question volume on any of the StackExchange sites that I've been on.  I got fussed at once for submitting too many suggested edits so I try to keep those to a few per day per site.  This makes sense because there's a limited about of time people have to review these things and it is all effort being put in by volunteers in their "spare" time.


text:
Are issues related to DevOps literature and educational materials on-topic on this site?
I reviewed the answers in the Help Center and didn’t notice any restrictions on literature, technical documentation, training materials or resources for training and professional growth in this area.
Are this questions on-topic?

That's quite hard to answer, do you have an exemple of such a question ?

In example, on ru.StackOverflow site questions connected with books, and technical documentation is on-topic

Community questions like this are discouraged on the whole network now, they fade quite quickly and become stale with no one maintaining the links. So we're more on the side of wide topic, but focused question not needing a list of external link as answer. See https://devops.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49/why-are-people-restricting-broad-questions-on-culture-and-process?rq=1 for rationale behind this

But books that have ISBN don't fade.

Well, they do each time what they describe become outdated, and for well known literature google is better than a list here, my 2 cts.

I'm not sure to understand what we are talking about here. Is it about asking for a list of resources_ ("What are the best books about DevOps?"), or about asking questions related to some educational material ("I read in the XYZ book p123 that ... but I don't understand why"). The former will probably fade quickly. But the second, if properly written, is as valid as any other question. Or isn't it?


text:
Do all Docker-related questions belong to DevOps?
I'm relatively new to devops.stackexchange.com and I already asked a couple of Docker-related questions. But before asking, I always wonder if I should post here, on stackoverflow, on serverfault on linux&unix, or on some other stackexchange site.
The "What to ask?" help page is rather helpless here.
So, I wonder if all Docker-related questions should belong to this site--or if there are some rule of thumb to choose the "right" stackexchange site. Unless the mods here could migrate the question in case of need?

FWIW, here are few border-line topics I could think about:

"Is Docker the right tool for XYZ" (could be asked on https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)
"I run XYZ in  Docker container, how to change the configuration" (could be asked on https://serverfault.com/)
"I need to access XYZ running in a container from my app, but my code doesn't work" (could be asked on https://stackoverflow.com/)

EDIT: related to https://devops.meta.stackexchange.com/a/229/11179

You're mostly right on your analysis, no, all docker-related question doesn't belong here.
This site topic encompass questions about tools revolving around devops approach to problems, ad hoc task with docker are not really related to any devops approach or methodology.
So as usual, use your best judgement when asking :)
Feel free to ask here on meta to get advice on the question before posting it in main.

Thanks for the reply Tensibai. If I understand it well, in your vision, the DevOps SE site is mostly for high-level questions regarding software architecture, organizational tasks, and methodology, rather than for technical questions. So I suppose this and that would be off-topic. If that's the case, could you migrate them to a more relevant SE site?

Well, as you already self answered the second, no harm done leaving it there and accepting your own answer (which sounds very good IMHO). First the first one I'm tempted to say it would be better suited to server fault or superuser, I'll check with those sites mods tomorrow.


text:
2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

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

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
To that end, here is how the moderation done here on DevOps breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  2          8
Users destroyed                                   2          0
Users contacted                                   3          0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue            69        528
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue                5         26
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue         10         72
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue                0        138
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue                13      1,019
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue               62        323
Tags merged                                       3          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             3          0
Tag synonyms created                              3          0
Revisions redacted                                1          0
Questions reopened                                2          0
Questions protected                               0          4
Questions migrated                                1          0
Questions flagged⁴                                2        104
Questions closed                                104         25
Question flags handled⁴                          63         43
Posts unlocked                                    1          0
Posts undeleted                                   7         11
Posts locked                                      1         14
Posts deleted⁵                                   76        276
Posts bumped                                      0        784
Comments undeleted                                5          0
Comments flagged                                  2         97
Comments deleted⁶                               132        164
Comment flags handled                            68         31
Bounties canceled                                 1          0
Answers flagged                                  10        117
Answer flags handled                            113         14

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 This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Wishing you all a happy new year...


text:
Are Product Recommendation questions on topic?
Most SE sites I participate in have sections in the help documentation and close options to make "product recommendations" off topic for the site. These sorts of questions are often opinion based and attract spam (vendor X is best). However I'm not seeing this for DevOps. Does this mean they are on topic here or should we update the help pages to explicitly state they are off topic?

For reference, the original blog post explaining why it's explicitly off-topic on most sites: https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/11/23/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/

As far as I can tell we don't have a fixed policy, some questions may have definitive answers ("Which product may I use for configuration management on a sshless machines ?" for exemple have a closed list of tools allowing that and the answer would probably stay limited), "Which tools should I use for CI/CD?" however would be far too large and mostly opinion based and closed as such.
So for now, we don't close product recommendation as that because the spam problem has not been a problem here, we may change that if the case arise and gets out of control.


text:
New tag request: binary repository manager
We talk about all possible DevOps tools using their product names but at least in the case of the Ivy/Artifactory/Nexus.. product family there is a term I find descriptive and neutral enough:

A binary repository manager is a software tool designed to optimize
  the download and storage of binary files used and produced in software
  development. (From Wikipedia)

What about introducing a corresponding tag?


text:
VSTS has been renamed to Azure Devops
The meta.SO has already addressed the proposed resolutions, but I think the outcome should be reflected here to avoid confusion.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373920/vsts-has-been-renamed-to-azure-devops-lets-talk-about-some-tags?cb=1

Thanks for the head up, I'll check with Tim or other CM how to handle that here.

I don't suppose there is any controversy in changing the tags here, but if so, we can easily reverse the naming or create a new synonym.

Following the convention on Stack Overflow I renamed:
vsts-build -> azure-pipelines
vsts -> azure-devops

Those were the only two vsts* tags I see. It would be good if someone edited (or suggested an edit) to the tag wikis for azure-devops (Now done) and created one for azure-pipelines.


text:
What can we do to have more debates about devops.se policies?
Lately the engagement on meta.devops.se has been quite low, the last question where I would have hoped to see other feedback than mine is What is the cross posting policy on DevOps?.
It only gathered 22 views, which sounds very light compared to the 3 500+ users of devops.se.
On the same plan, our chat room is defunct and there's not been a word said there for months.
So what do you think we can do to have more participation on meta and raise some more talks/opinions? Or is everything fine as is and I'm just oversensitive on this subject?

I think DevOps suffers from the issue that there aren't really many power users who are sticking around and using the site and participating in chat and meta. The "middle class" of users who generally want to influence the direction of the site and are eager to participate seems smaller here to me.
Of course I'm perfectly guilty myself, being active in the beta but my recent activity here as dropped off a lot. I took a look through the recently answered questions though, and I noticed that a surprising amount of questions were being answered by new or low-rep users rather than seeing the same few users come up again and again. In some ways that's great; you're getting a good flow of users to keep the site fresh and healthy.
But... it doesn't look like you have a lot sticking around to keep building the site. I just took a look in /review and handled one—from late June!1 Obviously if people aren't interested (or able) to take part in the community moderation like /review, meta is equally going to suffer. It's all about making people want to take part in the running of this site.
If there are more users in the "middle class" participating, I think naturally there will be more meta activity.

Voting and making sure newer users want to continue participating is one option on the main site to boost activity; one would hope this boosts the number of people visiting meta (if we assume the fraction of people visiting meta is roughly constant, then more users = more meta users!)
Featuring posts to make sure meta is discoverable might be another good idea; both to encourage new users and more established users to use meta more often.

I think you are right to be concerned about having no feedback on meta; it makes community-led site moderation more difficult, but I guess you just have to assume if you're not opposed, then you're trusted to make the right decision.

1: I have no idea why that wasn't invalidated weeks ago by the system; alas it was not, so it's a good talking point anyway.

I assume I've to accept there won't be any more engagement.


text:
Beta progress indicator "2.5 answers per question"
In DevOps, for sure more than one solution approach can be possible to a given problem, however while questions are required to be very narrow and not allowing opinions, this creates in my understanding room for more focused answers which then can't be many, maybe just two.
Why is it good, and how possible to have more than two answers to so precise questions?

There can be multiple ways of getting something done. Sometimes, work-arounds. So, they'd also be considered as helpful responses


text:
What is the cross posting policy on DevOps?
Cross posting tends to be frowned upon on SE sites. I recently had a flag declined for "flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention" on this question. If flags are not desired, what is the appropriate process to handle a cross posted question on this site?
Here is the meta.SE discussion on cross-posting for reference, but that doesn't really cover what to do after a question has already been post to multiple sites.

Returning the question: what do you think a moderator should have done with the question when receiving your flag, what course of action were you expecting ? (BTW thanks for opening the talk)

@Tensibai few options I can think of. Comment from the mod pointing to the SE policy against cross posting and asking them to voluntarily delete one of them. Or deciding which site is the better fit for the question and closing it on the other site. Could also look at where the active conversation is happening and close the question on other sites.

Mostly for reference: What to do with cross-site duplicates?
Now according to your comment (split on 3 points to address all of them):

Comment from the mod pointing to the SE policy against cross posting and asking them to voluntarily delete one of them.

You already did it, mods are here to be exception handling for things the community can't solve alone or to enforce the community decisions. There's no reason to pile up another comment after yours which is absolutely clear.

Or deciding which site is the better fit for the question and closing it on the other site.

We're mod on only one site (well usually, some are mods on multiples sites), on others we're just users as you, as per the reference above there's no real reason to close a question when it is on topic on both. (cross posting is not a close reason).

Could also look at where the active conversation is happening and close the question on other sites.

Same as above, I don't see any reason to close one over the other, leaving a comment if you're so inclined to point to another site where there's an answer is also ok. (Or as you did, answer on both site)

For the specific question, if it was necessary to something I'd vote to migrate the SO version to Devops.Se to be closed as duplicate.
This is my personnal point of view on the subject and in no way a hard binding. If the community disagree I'll review my actions on this kind of flags accordingly.

The meta link is helpful, thanks! There's a Teacher Lounge to ping mods from other sites to work out cross-site issues (I'm a mod on another site and just a user here :) ). I feel dirty posting the same answer to the same question on two sites, hence my flag. Still trying to internally reconcile the two meta posts, one saying "don't cross post", and the other saying "but if you do, we'll probably leave it".

I think the main idea is that's not an offense per se, if someone insist in cross posting after a warning then sure it worth a flag, but first course is as you did, leave a comment to let the person know that's not really appropriate