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Would it be possible to close questions because of insufficient research effort?
On serverfault it is possible to close questions due to insufficient research:

Requests for product, service, or learning material recommendations
  are off-topic because they attract low quality, opinionated and spam
  answers, and the answers become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe
  the business problem you are working on, the research you have done,
  and the steps taken so far to solve it.

According to me the following questions should be closed as there was insufficient research before asking the question:

Kibana splitting up hostname as multiple fields in graphs
How to create hybrid docker swarm mode cluster with multi-os application deployment?
How can I successfully debug a watcher? My watchers don't seem to do anything
Minikube - Is there a way to run Windows Containers?
Logging ansible crons in kibana
Kibana is unable to sort on some numbers
What can explain ElasticSearch 2.4 not accepting to create watchers via curl?
Making gitlab-ci not run the default scripts
Jenkins Kubernetes Plugin is slow to make slave nodes. How can I speed it up?
Converting an fai-chboot to a dirinstall
CloudFormation deregister older batch job definition revision
Where can I find older versions of GitLab Runner?
Microservices terminology i.e. distinguishing between "core " and "other service instances"

Is the question about adding a third (and last) canned close reason or about topicness of this kind of questions?

yes about a third closed reason indeed

That's just 2 question, closing with a comment should works... I'm unsure of which way to go

I thought it would be could to align with Serverfault instead of just typing it over an over again, e.g. "I think this question should be closed because the question shows insufficient research attempts". Why not adding extra options? Ok, I will extend the list of questions that are possible candidates to be closed to this Q
&A.

We can have only 3 custom off topic reasons, so before adding the last one I wait for some more reasoning about what problem it aim to solve. Even more as some of your exemples don't have even 1 close vote and are up voted, that doesn't sound like those questions are not welcome from the community

Just forgot a point before, the tooltip on the downvote button says: "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful", which boilds down to the point bad questions should be downvoted and not closed, the roomba will delete them: "The system will automatically delete unlocked, unanswered questions that have negative score that are at least 30 days old. (RemoveDeadQuestions)" (Taken from this meta post

Related if not duplicate:
What is the best way to close a question that is fully answerable with a single google search?

I feel like closing a question because not enough research was done prior to asking is a bit against what SE is about.  Creating a reason for closing because not enough research was done, I feel, may allow for an elitist atmosphere to form.  When the community on SE is so young (as is devops) I feel as these questions are going to be common as people search for their issues and questions.  I feel that if these questions do arise and it is obvious that no research was done, I think it would be better for the community to answer the specific question being asked by linking and quoting the documentation where they could have found their answer.  This way future visitors who may experience the same thing can be helped, as is the purpose of this community.
I don't think we should be doing peoples work, but I do know that often, stack exchange sites are among the first results when searching for information or tutorials, examples etc.  I have seen questions from other SE that the community at the time was heckling the poster for his question, but has since become the top google result.
tl;dr;
IMO closing b/c user didn't research enough goes against the idea of this community. lets keep the questions open (including this one), answer them with quotes and links to the tutorial so that we can be that resource future visitors years to come.  "Give me teh codez" questions should be flagged and closed.  We are too small to close topics because not enough research was done.  IMO we are the research people look for, especially in a field as young as devops.

Ok. I am open for discussion, but what I learned from other StackExchange sites is that a minimal research should be done. What is your opinion about this, this and this question? In my opinion we should prevent "throw it over the wall" questions.

@030 my opinion is follow the usual guide, downvote if there's not enough research

@030 It would seem as though this individual is having trouble grasping the concept of secret management with AWS.  If you have the guides handy, I would link the guides and parapharse the guide.  You could also ask the user for more information such as, what have you tried, have you looked at resource X.  Have them ask a more specific question. This may be this first persons time with cloud environments and is just asking for guidance as best as they can.  If you don't like the question you can down vote it.  I wouldn't close it unless it would provide no benefit in the future.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Tag synonym request: container vs containers
I do not have enough rep in either containers or container to create a tag alias, but IMHO it would be needed, hence this request. If this gets agreement it would be worthy to get it done earlier rather than later, to prevent proliferation.
IMHO containers (37 questions now) should be the tag and container (7 questions now and no tag description) should be the synonym.
I also wonder if there is something that can be done about containers being (mis)used for specific container technologies  despite the tag description clearly guiding against it (emphasis mine):

Use for generic questions on containers that do not fall under a
  specific container technology, like Docker, LXC, FreeBSD Jails,
  OpenBSD sysjails, Solaris Containers, WPARs, etc. Also use where the
  specific technology is not relevant to the question.

Sample questions where I'd consider the tag misused:

Networking between Docker containers
Windows Service installation on Docker Container
Developing inside a Docker image?

I also just noticed misused re-tagging efforts, for example:

https://devops.stackexchange.com/revisions/3349/3
https://devops.stackexchange.com/revisions/2411/4

For information, we can merge the tags when making them synonyms, so the number of questions is not really a problem, I let the community voice toward wich form is better

I recommend just merging container into containers without a synonym. The system should have blocked the tag being produced when its pluralised form already existed... but evidently, it didn't.
The moderator merge tool can be used here to silently retag every question with container into containers, and then there's no need for a synonym as the tag guidance should hopefully prevent any future taggers from creating the duplicate tag.

Done as suggested.

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


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Request for application tags (Flask/Redis)
I have a question about my DevOps stack exchange post: Should worker processes of web applications be placed in separate containers?
Flask and Redis constitute important aspects of the question which is why I would like to requests that they be added.
Related: Request and question about application tags (gunicorn/flask) in web applications

I don't feel it would help define the question, which is more about multiple process in a docker container.
The question itself could be applied to other tools/frameworks than flask and with other back-ends than redis and the answer would be the same.
There's no need for too narrow tagging of a question IMHO.

Valid point. To close the question should I accept your answer or delete the question?

I'm not a source of truth by myself, wait a little to see if community agree or voice another opinion on this before taking any action :)

@Moritz I agree with Tensibai. But, if you think that adding more tags would help the post or the site (for easy search), then, by all means, we can add them. No problem :)

I am open to the tag policy. I did not find any reference, so I am only relying on my previous meta post. If both of you think they are superfluous, it makes sense due to your greater amount of experience


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Should this question not be protected?
In my opinion this question should be protected as this is a high valued one and the other answers hardly add any value.

Protecting it would have prevented 2 answers out of 7, it has hit the Hot Network Question list and bring more views but not that much 'off scope' answers.
Maybe we'll add a post notice if it gather other answers repeating what's already said, but I don't really see a reason to protect it right now.


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What to do with Questions that remain unanswered while they have already been answered?
Although the user indicated that this question has been answered and was asked to post an answer this question keeps on returning into the unanswered tab. How to prevent that this list is growing and growing while some of these questions have already been answered?
My suggestion is to close these questions after three months as inactive. What do other people think about this?

We don't close question as inactive, what prevents this question of being deleted is the two upvotes it has. I'm tempted to close as unclear what you're asking and 'et the roomba delete it, or to just delete it as no one but the author can answer it.
I think the author has left it as is because I did close it too quickly while closing old still unclear question, this one was recent but I didn't give a try to comment and wait before closing.
Last resort for those question could be to flag for moderator attention and explain there's things missing and no reaction from the author.


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Limits of Stack Exchange - what to do with useful knowledge lists
For sure is SE for high quality questions.
But where to capture important historic evolvement?
Like, adding CI Theatre to list of DevOps memes.
What are known useful and misleading memes in the DevOps culture?
Do you think Wikipedia community would accepts such an article with an overview of the DevOps memes history?

The answer below the question is community wiki, which means everyone can edit it to update it.
So, I think you already found the the place where to do those additions.

but, according to the docs there is a "community wiki post status" available via a checkbox; if I do not see it, is it due to low achievement points or to beta status of our DevOps community?

The answer to the question is already community wiki, you can't remove it and can set it again. (the edition is allowed from 100 reputation)


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What could be cross-functional DevOps questions?
I think most powerful "human" thing about DevOps is breaking down the silos and creating new ways of communication.
Previously we have had the culture tag trending quite well, but of course the number of quesions is totally biased to tech which is quite ok to start with.
But look, it seems like most of those culture questions have been asked by tech-related individuals, most far distance I have perceived are perspectives from high-level IT project managers.
Fair enough.
Then, there is a question asked here by a recruiter - 42p score an 8K views. Is quite kind of a big bang for this community - right?
Ok then, I did an experiment and asked a question on LinkedIn to non-tech roles what would they ask and invited them to join here. Let's see what happens.
Enough explanation, hope you are still with me. Thank you :-)
Now my question:

What could be DevOps questions we would like to ask ask other roles and perspectives down the whole value chain? (I mean, if we do not, what about our own perception of importance of empathy and culture we claim with DevOps?)

Hope this does make sense to you.

I'm not really sure I understand your question but here's my thoughts, feel free to comment if I got it wrong.
First, concerning the question with 8k views, it probably did end up in Hot Network Question because it got votes and answers quickly (description of the algorithm here, which usually bring more people to it.
It did gather 42 votes from 8k views, which is not such a good ratio nor an indication of a big bang for this community, it's more an outlier. You can compare this to What's the difference between DevOps and Automation? which has 32 votes for only 639 views.
Now to answer the question:
Any question related to DevOps (culture/methodology) and the tooling for software lifecycle (infrastructure automation/build/CI/CD) from anyone of any role is welcome.
General rule apply that the question should be scoped enough to not need writing a book to answer it. If the question is too broad, wording it on a real life exemple could help narrowing the scope.
I won't try writing a list of questions "we" would like to see, I really prefer letting all question in and if a bad pattern arise we'll handle it when it comes.

sure - I was just wondering what could be examples if cross-functional question reflecting a de-silosing process.

No problem, Don't feel any obligation to accept an answer if you think it doesn't really address you question, we're on meta, I just dropped my thoughts about what I understood from you concern. I think exemples should come on main but I'm not in any way the ultimate reference of what devops.se should allow :)

By 'we're on meta' I mean it's absolutely OK to leave a question open for some days to gather more opinions, that's why meta exist after all, gathering diverse opinions


text:
How to close questions that were already answered on another stackexchange site?
It looks like that this Q&A was answered back in the day on StackOverflow. How to close such questions?

Already answered elsewhere is not a close reason and has no reason to become one in my opinion.
We do have a close reason stating:

Questions about general programming problems are not on-topic unless
  they relate to DevOps in some way. You may be able to get help on
  Stack Overflow instead.

which was discussed here Add an off-topic close reason for generic programming questions and may fit the question you linked.
The main reasoning should be 'is this question on topic for our site ?' the fact it is on-topic elsewhere is not specially relevant to close a question here, we can have some overlap with others site on the network.
I think this answer of Shog9 and the comments under it are still applicable to our site at this time.
And a relevant meta.se question on the same subject for the same conclusion: Is “closer match to another SE” a reason to close an on-topic question as off-topic?


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Are sort of DevOps code golfing questions appropriate here?
An example which comes to my mind for some sort of DevOps golfing is to create mostly lightweight Docker image for given functionality, or a compact Swarm setup for a component with minumum but all required functions.
This in my opinion involves sometimes enough puzzling as well as we know it from code golf; maybe other examples are possible.
My question is - are such DevOps golfing questions appropriate here?

As there's at least How to create the smallest working docker image every time? which did get a good reception, I think it's fair to assume they are on-topic for our site.
I won't go to add a golfing to those question, I think they are on-topic as a practical goal in a devops environment, there's no 'game' behind it.


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What's wrong with the Pro Tempore Moderators?
As detailed in "Moderator Pro Tempore Announcement", on Apr 3, 2017, there were 3 members assigned to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. At this very moment, Oct 25, 2017, this is what is shown on the profile page for one of these 3 members (who was last seen on SO just "yesterday"):

Last seen Sep 28 at 19:08

I'm aware of the "... be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. ..." mentioned in the linked question, but am I really the only one who thinks this seems like something is wrong in the decision described in that Announcement? I.e that a Moderator who has been away from the site for so long, seems to not be interested in even checking if there is anything on the site that needs some kind of moderator interventions.
I don't question the decision made back in the days of the announcement, but based on the current facts: What's the remedy?
Note: my question has nothing to do with the 2 other members mentioned in that announcement, nor do I question anything about whatever moderator interventions by those 2 other members.

What's the remedie to which problem ? I fail to understand what the problem is for the site from the question.

It looks like the answer to my question (which was about "What's the remedy"), can be found in the link added by Shog9 ♦ in a previous answer. You (should) know the drill: "links may stop working, better to include a relevant quote from it ...". So here is the relevant quote from that link:

Absentee Moderator Policy
We are in the process of implementing a policy for “absentee moderators” —
Any moderator who is not active on the site for a period of six months is subject to removal of their moderator abilities.
Moderatorship is an elected position, so if an absentee moderator returns to the site, they may be eligible for reinstatement. We understand that sometimes life happens: projects come up at work, other obligations take priority. If you need to take an extended leave of absence, just let us know and we will make the necessary accommodations. This policy is simply a way to help us better determine where additional help may be needed.

Note however that the (quote in the) above quote does not say what "active" means in this context. Some possibilities to pick from:

no post nor comment.
last seen.
some type of moderator action.

Well, links to SE blog post are unlikely to disappear totally.  Links within SE network are usually considered stable an 'community' user update them when they change usually

Better safe than sorry. That blog has had a rough time of it; I was happy to see the post was still there!

@Shog9 I understand each word of your comment here, but I have no clue what you are trying to say, can you retry?

@Pierre.Vriens he's telling me that you're right quoting it here as the guarantee it was still there wasn't such a guarantee finally.

@Tensibai, aha, now I get it, merci!

In this case however moderatorship is not an elected position, it is appointed. It may be a simple matter of asking for Stack Exchange to appoint a new mod - not to step on toes or create hard feelings, but instead to allow the space for Moderators to attend to life needs. I'm sure there are volunteers who are ready, willing and able to step in and serve. I'm not sure that less than 30 days of inactivity rises to that level however. Some people go on vacation sometimes.

@JamesShewey When I posted my question, I actually wanted to make sure to "not to step on toes or create hard feelings" (by asking this question). Which is also why (a) I did not do any 'name calling' in my question and (b) I added the "Note" to it. Moreover "I" wont ask SE as you suggested, instead I'm OK with the procedure as detailed in the quote of my answer here. Though I do wonder what the trigger for that "subject to removal" would be: is it some automated procedure that triggers it? Or some user "asking SE" as you suggested?

In the case of a pro tem moderator, I don't know. I just know the position is appointed. On the other beta site I participate on, Mods have been pretty self aware and have requested to be relinquished when they were unable to serve in the role due to life events - that site has been beta for about 5 years.

There doesn't appear to be anything wrong.
Moderators are volunteers and aren't required to be on the site all day everyday.
While being missing for a month could be seen as a problem, if the other moderators can handle the site then it isn't currently a problem.
If the absence extends to 6 months or the workload becomes too great for the remaining moderators to handle then the moderators can discuss the situation with the community managers to see what steps need to be taken. That may be appointing a new moderator or even, in extremis, removing the diamond from the "missing" moderator.
So, unless you think that the moderation of the site is suffering because of their absence there's nothing that needs to be done.

I can tell for sure we're not overwhelmed by flags to handle at least ;)

I.e that a Moderator who has been away from the site for so long,
  seems to not be interested in even checking if there is anything on
  the site that needs some kind of moderator interventions.

Well, Dave's hasn't been active (in the sense no post nor comment) on Stack Exchange network for a month. He may have personal reasons for it, maybe a new work with less free time or whatever.
I don't feel this actually harms devops.se in any way so I don't see something to "remedy" to (and the word sounds a little extreme).

This answer is partially wrong, at least for this part of the SE network.

@Pierre.Vriens I said inactive in the sense of no participation (no question, no answer, not even a comment since September)

I don't want to give the impression that I'm disinterested in participating.  I am somewhere within the SE network almost every day, so I do see notifications when there are moderator activities here.  I have been busy with work lately, so I haven't had as much time to check on the site or answer questions.

@Dave I've absolutely no problem with that and I absolutely understand :)

This kind of inactivity/disinterest can harm the site though - pro-tem moderators are appointed to moderate. @Tensibai shouldn't have the sole duty of involved moderatorship - this duty is intended to be shared by a team and the expectation was that all members of that would be active and involved. If moderators aren't going to do that, it is wholly understandable as life happens, but it should be equally understandable that this duty would be reallocated to a volunteer who is capable of performing the duty at the moment. (Though I don't think this rises to that level)

It can or may happen yes @james, but it doesn't for now,  we still have the teacher lounge to ask for others eyeballs when we have a doubt and the ability to summon others mods for some case like I did this week. Trying to fix something not broken in case it may happen is rarely constructive.


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According to the review bar there should be a number of posts that require review, but that does not seem to be the case
According to the review bar there should be a number of posts that require review, but that does not seem to be the case.
When I click on 7 then an overview of posts is shown, but none of them require a review as everything is 0

The top bar is dead! Long live the new top bar!
The new top bar only lights up—it no longer has a counter.

The number indicates the total number of review tasks waiting in the system, regardless of whether you've reviewed them personally or are eligible to review them.
At least some of the review tasks are actually your own suggested edits, which you're not eligible to review for obvious reasons. There are probably other reasons why you can't see the other tasks — perhaps you've already reviewed them, and they're still waiting for other users to review too.
Fortunately, the issue of incorrect counts will be gone (or at least different) when the new top bar rolls out shortly. At that point, the review icon will simply light up if there are a sufficient number of review tasks (although the underlying logic still won't check if they're tasks that you are able to review personally, so it's not really fixed... more hidden).
See also: What does the number next to the review link in the top bar actually mean?


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Could someone remove the meme tag?
When to use the tag "meme"?
The meme tage has been removed from the questions. Could someone remove this tag?

Tag are removed after one week without question IIRC

Tags without any questions are automatically deleted at 3:00 GMT every night by automated scripts, with no human action required, so there's nothing more you need to do once the tag is not used by any questions.

The tag has now been deleted.


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When to use the tag "meme"?
Some questions contain the meme tag. What does this tag mean?

It should be removed.
Lifewire describes a meme as:

A 'meme' is a virally-transmitted cultural symbol or social idea.

They're typically encountered in the form of captioned viral images, as you can see here.
I don't think it's really a great fit to any of the questions it's used for here. I honestly feel that it would be more accurate to say "concept" rather than "meme" here, because there are a lot of connotations of memes being jocular rather than useful, so it seems out of place on a professional DevOps site. Even so, the culture tag would seem to be sufficient, so I feel meme provides little value and should just be removed from the questions it applies to.

meme tag has been removed from three questions


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Do we have access to SE user database to track our community growth?
My impression is that delta increase of registered users is growing every day e.g we might have entered some accelerated growth phase.
Is there any data available to make a graph, or even an existing dashboard with such a graph?

You can play with

SEDE to make queries on the site posts.
have a look at quancast
checks Area51
And lastly hit the 5 000 reputation points to gain access to the statistics page which present this information.

Btw I can confirm your impression that on the last week the rate of new users is on a raising curve.

thank you so much for these insights! by the way another one valid option is to wait a couple of weeks or so to learn these 5K points insights from @Tensibai :-)

@J.Doe I already have access to the same kind of pages as a moderator, but I should not disclose the numbers there :)

Here is a graph of new DevOps users per day. It's very stable, with a natural  weekly cycle. The first peak is the first day of private beta. I don't know the cause of the second peak in early April; could be a Reddit post about something on the site, etc.

Source: SEDE query

@Tensibai - so there is no rising curve and our subjective impression was wrong? :/

^^ however in this form of graph we see a linear growth with slightly more subsequent "growth" speedup "upstairs segments" than before. Looking forward to further development. :-)

@J.Doe depends on what you call new users, newly registered users to the site (this query results) or new users of the site as new connexion. You may observe also the results graph stops on Sunday (the data stops on Monday 17) and are per day. I was more talking about a 7 day average of new visits to the site than newly registered users. The graph for new posts show the same curve and is a better representation of the site activity as is the number of visits per day.

Was coming back to recheck and reread the answer: the second peak match with the public beta opening I think.

I've been regularly checking the Users page (new users, creation date tabs) - shows all users that signed up in the past 46 days. There are peaks now and then - mostly at the beginning of the work week, but the average remained fairly constant in the past few months.


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Close reason as belongs to ServerFault and SuperUser
I'm here on the DevOps SE for not so long, but already noticed that some of the questions are generally a better fit for Server Fault or Super User and are subjects to a migration.
Would it make sense to add Server Fault and Super User to the list of sites to migrate to when closing as off-topic for this site? Currently, we have just "DevOps meta" there (at least that's what I see):

We can't setup migration path during beta phase but diamond moderators can migrate a question to any site.
I assume the proper path would be to VTC with a custom reason and flag for moderator attention when there's more than 3 votes agreeing this is a proper destination (if we don't catch it by ourselves).
We (moderators) would check with proposed target site moderators to ensure it would be acceptable on their sites before.


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Should "Is Docker right for my use case?" stay open?
The question I'm wondering about is this one.
At first my feeling was that it was a real life practical case where there should be mostly 2 options, Yes or No, and actionnable points to back up the positio. As such the question is on-topic I think.
It appears it attract mostly opinions without anything to back them up; no experienced cases with one or the other technology, most answers omit the question is about an app AND a bunch of services around on a PHYSICAL machine (may or may not be mandatory, but that's a clarification to ask, not an assumption to make, or both possibilities could be addressed, but dismissing the physical box existence to prove your point is not a valid option IMHO).
At time of writing, none of the 5 answers did address the second point (maybe Michael's one does to a certain extent, but that's highly unclear) and none did address the physical part of the problem.
The question author never reacted to any answer and didn't visit the site since the day after asking (May 17th).
I'm tempted to close this question as primarily opinion based as, despite being highly up-voted, it tends to attract nothing more than 'I think this is the way to go but can't give any reason or exemple applying to your case'.
What is the community feeling about this question ?

It should be closed as time has proven nothing really helpful came from it.
I (Tensibai) am plain wrong and a such should refrain to comment/janitor this specific question.

Both option are very valid and I'm fully open to ear I'm wrong.

Something to think about: is the question problematic, or are the answers just missing the mark? If the answers are the problem, then I guess the question shouldn't suffer for it.

@Aurora0001 Nice point. Didn't though about it before.

So after a while leaving this question open and no more feedback than the other answer here at time of writing, I'm tempted to get on the line of Aurora where this question has merit and never found someone to answer it properly.
Overall the community of this site doesn't share my feeling the actual answers miss the mark as they are not down voted so I'll end up leaving similar questions open.
If someone feel this isn't the proper approach, please open another discution post referring to this one if needed, I really think we need to refine our on-topic page, but the lack of feedback doesn't sounds like it's something to open for now.

I am the one that raised flag on that question and I believe that this should be closed.
Currently I have feeling that SE DevOps is flooded with questions about recommendations and too vague to answer otherwise than opinion based. I know it is young community and we do not have many users with closing permissions, but if that doesn't change then I believe SE will close this community as non constructive.

With around 3 questions per day, talking about a flood is exaggerated. Concerning the site closure see Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites, as long as there's no spam posts filling the site, there's no worry to have about a closure. I'd also like more focused questions, but as long as the actual questions doesn't bring a problem of flood, I'd stay on a case by case basis, hence this Meta question about this specific one.

I am probably one who has asked several questions leading to possibly opinionated answers. Frankly, I would prefer the site to allow that, with the risk of no good answers staying with the poster, obviously. Heck, in the DevOps world, the "evangelist" is a proper job description. While there are certainly many technical questions, the more strategic setup of a devops solution has a a lot of impact as well. And picking the correct tool (out of a bunch of similar tools, all building on the same set of base tools/concepts..) isn't really clear of a beginner, no matter how much research is done.


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About badges for recurring visits and mobile application
About the enthusiast and fanatic badges that you obtain visiting this site daily, doas anyone know if the visits made using the mobile application counts like a visit?

They do according to this meta post, but not all actions with the app count, mainly just viewing the feed/question list in the app won't be counted as a visit.

Neither does just viewing the question list on the desktop - I got my counter reset at 94 because of doing that just before a long day of driving which ended past the UTC deadline :)


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Add an off-topic close reason for generic programming questions
Currently, when flagging or voting to close a question as off-topic, you see two options:

This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a manner unlikely to help future readers.
Other (if you have vote to close privileges) or Blatantly off-topic (if you have flagging privileges)

Since  the only 'canned' reason is for typographical errors, it becomes very tedious to vote to close off-topic questions that are simply not about DevOps.
I propose a new custom off-topic reason:

Questions about general programming problems are not on-topic unless they relate to DevOps in some way. You may be able to get help on Stack Overflow instead.

Ideally, I'd prefer linking to the help center or some on-site documentation instead of Wikipedia, but we haven't really got a comprehensive page that documents this site's scope yet.
Although there is some benefit in forcing all closures to use 'Other' (i.e. each asker gets some advice tailored to them about how to improve their question), it does take a lot more time to write a comment, and having a detailed 'canned' reason would be useful.
Any thoughts? My proposal for the wording is just a draft, and I'd happily settle for anything to that effect—I'd mainly like feedback on whether anyone else would find a new close reason helpful.

Sounds reasonable for me.

How do we differentiate between a DevOps programming question and a general programming problem?

@JamesShewey That's a question I deliberately didn't try to define the answer to (we've tried here, and it doesn't really get constructive answers or consensus). Instead, the best answer I can say to that is "use your judgement"—everyone with close vote privileges here has to have demonstrated at least a minimal understanding of what DevOps is, and I feel it's probably better to leave it to community consensus rather than try to define it exactly. Not a satisfying answer, I know, but it's the best I can do.

The close reason is now available in the off-topic choices.


text:
Are questions about apache and mod_wsgi configuration on topic on DevOps?
I was thinking to ask a series of questions about apache and mod_wsgi configuration, their performance and memory - would this kind of questions be on topic here or ServerFault is a better place?

If it's only about apache and mod_wsgi performance with no relation with any devops culture or tooling, that's clearly better suited on ServerFault in my opinion.


text:
Can the Power-Shell tag be renamed to PowerShell?
Currently the most popular tag for PowerShell questions is [Power-Shell]. There's no reason for this to be hyphenated, the correct usage is PowerShell (camel cased). This would also align with how the tag is used on StackOverflow. Can it be renamed?

Makes sense. Will wait for a day for what the community thinks, and will take action accordingly :)

@Dawny33 I can't imagine the community making sense of that hyphen, it was likely introduced as a typo. Anyway, it's 3 days later and the tag hasn't been changed yet ;-)

Thank you for bringing to notice.
The merge has been done


text:
Is my question about continuous delivery for tvOS applications off-topic?
I'm starting development on a tvOS application and want to learn more about what continuous delivery options exist for tvOS.  Unlike iOS, tvOS does not support enterprise distribution, so I cannot use my existing workflow.
My question would ask:

What continuous delivery options exist for tvOS applications?  What infrastructure is required to support ad-hoc or enterprise delivery?
Apple provides TestFlight distribution for testing tvOS applications, which is the workflow for submitting to the App Store (the test build becomes the App Store build).  Is this my only build delivery option?

I want to contribute quality questions to this site, but fear that I'm asking for something too specific that might attract SaaS recommendations.

What continuous delivery options exist for tvOS applications?

Not sure about tvOS applications. But, you can structure your question with all the options you have explored and ask about any more which you might have missed. This would help the answerers to answer better, rather than simply listing out a list of services available.
You can then follow-up with subsequent questions on the answers received.

Apple provides TestFlight distribution for testing tvOS applications, which is the workflow for submitting to the App Store (the test build becomes the App Store build). Is this my only build delivery option?

Yeah. This is well on-topic here.

I want to contribute quality questions to this site, but fear that I'm asking for something too specific that might attract SaaS recommendations.

Welcome to the site, and we really appreciate you wanting to contribute high quality posts to the site. And I can assure you that this site's community is one of the friendliest ones, and will help you improve the quality of your posts, and make sure you get high quality answers too :)


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How does people directly get above 100 rep immediately?
I have seen some users here that are new and haven't posted anything that is, no user activity. How come these people have reputation of above 100 without doing anything. I found this while I was checking the users tab.
I could share the user's profile if requested but of course I am not blaming anyone. It might be a bug or something.

This is because those users have gotten the reps from an associated bonus.
If a user have 200 or more reputation on at least one Stack Exchange site that user will automatically get 100 reputation when joining other sites on the Stack Exchange network.
See: What is the association bonus?

I didn't know this. Maybe it was to counter the initial requirements for reputation on commenting. Thanks :)


text:
Why is the group's logo displaying "Ops"?
Why is our logo displaying "Ops"? Even if there is no place for "DevOps" could be there a better alternative? like "i/o" or some other?

Beta sites get a 'sketchy' look and feel as described here and have the opportunity to voice ideas on the theme on graduation of the site.
According to Are the beta Stack Exchange site logos generated automatically? it's a matter of who designed the logo for the beta opening.
It has already happened two sites got the same "look like" logo.
So for now I'd say it's not really an issue, we will work around this subject with the site design when we will be around 10 question per day, which still needs some effort of publicity for the site at time of writing (roughly 3,5 Q/day and less than 500 visits per day).


text:
Strategy during beta phase
Since this beta is out, the community has some development but the Area51 says it has to improve further.
Are there for a member like me any operationalizable actions to improve on that besides answering new questions?

Publicizing the site is the hardest part, usually it's done by sharing good questions to draw audiance

^ +1  I do it by sharing the good question in respective reddit sites :)

What about cooperating with a popular tech culture site and giving them content as DevOps SE team?

Go with the Field of Dreams concept: "Built it and they will come."
Publicizing the site is important, for visits/day, new users, and new questions, as well as, hopefully, good answers to questions. Publicizing on its own will only help so much, however. As the new prospects make their first visit they need to see quality, and engaging, content. Lacking that, they'll visit once, and disappear. Finding the right content they're likely to explore further and hopefully find a question they either feel qualified to answer, or that expresses a problem they've had and find a useful answer included. Finding a site of value to them increases the likelihood that they will, in turn, share the site with others they know. Every marketing professional knows that the best publicity is also free: word of mouth.
Focus on keeping the quality of the content high, and the site healthy, and the odds of the site surviving are great. It may not graduate from beta, but it can still become a permanent site in the Stack Exchange Network.
See the Meta Stack Exchange post Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites for some reassurances.


text:
Are questions on Developer Experience off-topic on DevOps?
Is Developer Experience (as related to the culture DevOps facet I suppose?) off-topic here?
Examples:

Would the strategy/methodology to qualify the level of Developer Experience significantly differ from strategies/methodologies known in the User Experience domain, applied to a given DevOps tool's UI?
How to formalize Developer Experience qualification strategy/methodology in DevOps toolsets where core asset is interaction with a tool's  API?

To the second point, I may pay attention to situations where developer community discussing more or less their UX-related feeling, hope these examples are common: "this call is ugly".. "I am not comfortable with this interface".. "I don't like tool X"..
Specific problem: DX is a new field; working assumption is that good DX could make engineers happy as we know it from good UX. But it is not clear how to proceed (or if it comes out that such questions on DevOps are off topic the assumption is wrong and DX is rather a 'bad meme'.

Possible to cite an example please? :)

@Dawny33 - here you go, thank you for motivating me to work on crystallzing the questions.

It happens that I was part of a team called Software Experience, targeted at human experience for the personnel involved in many aspects of the SDLC process (devs, ops, QA/testers, etc). Tools' UX was included, of course, but also other stuff much more DevOps-y, for example:

developer's workflow
process automation
service waiting times
tools and infrastructure status, availability, MTRR, event notifications

So yeah, I'd say such questions would be very on-topic. Though, to be fair, similarly Ops (and QA/Tester) experience questions should be on-topic just as well.


text:
How can we (or should we) distinguish ourselves?
In considering the elevator pitch it seems to me that any good elevator pitch for a product or service which is entering an existing market includes a simple means or device to distinguish this product from existing products and demonstrate what you can get here that you cannot get from the existing market.
This leads to the problem that DevOps is not a role and includes multiple disciplines. This means that this DevOps SE overlaps subject matter with several other SEs. Now, some of Stack Exchange's best sites overlap - Ask Ubuntu, Unix, Superuser, and Serverfault all overlap significantly - so clearly overlap is not necessarily considered "bad". At the same time, if we want to continue to exist, we have certain metrics and measures of success we have to meet and this overlap causes competition - and we are competing for eyeballs!
While overlap may be acceptable, there is still some unease about it. This leads to my first question:

Do we need to distinguish ourselves from these other sites to be successful?

If the answer is yes, the next question or problem, is

How do we do that?

For example, one thing we could do is provide a list of acceptable topics and allow questions specific to automation software. But this still means that we will get python questions for Salt Stack and Ruby questions Puppet - questions that are nearly purely programming-related and bound to be better supported by other Stack Exchange sites.
Finally, we also need to know not just how we distinguish what is on or off-topic (which is really squishy, nebulous and arbitrary at this time), but how we can boil that down succinctly into an elevator pitch. It seems to me until we answer the two questions above, it is unclear how users of this site get any value from it that they could not otherwise already get on one of the many overlapping sister sites and we will be unable to put together a successful or good elevator pitch.

Related questions from Area51 definition phase for background: 1 2 3

I kind of agree, but devops being what it is, trying to get the elevator pitch by on-topicness would be banging our heads on wall. Hence the up to bottom work starting by the elevator pitch instead of bottom up starting by actual subjects :) It's easier to derive on-topicness from the elevator pitch exactly because the elevator pitch enforce a very short description, after that for all subjects the question will be 'Does it fit into the elevator pitch in some way ?'

After some reflection, the thought occurs to me that most of the existing Stack Exchange questions are oriented around minutiae - how do I do specific thing X. There is not, however a good place zooming out and looking at the system holistically. Perhaps this would be a good way to give some focus to the DevOps stack exchange:
Questions should be architectural or systematic in nature and take a sufficiently high-level view - in contrast to why does  this option on this specific software suite not work? This seems to me to be entirely compatible with DevOps which was a fresh look at the system of software delivery and not specific components of the business of software delivery.


text:
Devops.se elevator pitch
One of the question for a new site is the elevator pitch, how would you describe this site in a few sentence if you had to introduce the site to a stranger during a 2 or 3 stages elevator trip.
For background I rephrased here text from this meta.se post 4th point.
For memory, our actual description is:

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

I'm voluntarily omitting any question as reference or chat talks to allow fresh positions, so quote you proposition and add a paragraph or two to give some details on why this should be the site description.
However to get some actual background from the site you may follow this search and get a look at comments under this question for more details about the culture side of devops.
So how would you describe devops.se in less than 30 words ?

Hell, I still don't know what DevOps is supposed to be, so what would a site that's about it contain (other than questions defining the term)? :P

Should I link the existing questions revolving around the word Devops to help with background ?

It would probably be useful as a way to frame answers.  My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, though - it's not that I'm not familiar with the field, but rather that I've seen so many definitions that it's impossible to even include them all in an elevator pitch, much less use them to describe what this site is supposed to be about.

Well, it's indeed a very hard task to summarize the subjects of Devops ;)  I'll try to complete the question latet

I'd like some skill-set description for DevOps as well. Being a tester with pretty wide automated testing experience I expected to be able to contribute. Guess what? No go. There will be more people like me. How to  activate? Better for the site...

@Bookeater I'm unsure of what you're after with this comment. Maybe you could write a Meta question about your concerns ? You'll have more room to describe them and it may be the starting point for the lengthly site description also.

@Tensibai thanks I'm hovering between just that & chat.

An additional guideline I've heard is "less than 150 characters if possible". Might be worth checking answers against that too.

One option is to re-use the summary from the Area 51 proposal:

Beta Q&A site for software Engineers working on automated testing, continuous delivery, service integration and monitoring, and building SDLC infrastructure.

It's indeed the actual text (I may have shorten it up in the quote in the question) and a very valid proposition :)

Oh derp, I forgot to reread the question when I came back to this today. >_<

No worries, I had wrote it if no one did :) I'm just trying to keep a step back to let the community voice positions :)

I'd like to see something more along an actual DevOps definition using all parts of (CAMS - Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing).

DevOps StackExchange is a Q&A for professionals working on issues related to organizational transformation toward better work Culture, wider adoption of Automation and Measurement and Sharing of experiences for better understanding of each other both in the companies among individuals and teams and outside in the industry in conferences and forums like this one.

I'd strip it after 'Sharing of experiences' (I'm afraid this would be too long for the short description space). There'll be more space in the on-topic page (next step on the todolist for the site)

Sounds good like that.

Does it mean that DevOps applies only to companies transforming, or does it also happen in Greenfield new companies? I am also a bit reluctant to tie this site to a specific meme since these come and go much faster than the buzzword (devops) itself.

Good point there. I just tried to take it a step away from Tools Tools Tools.

And yet you didn't mention tools even once, even though it is common knowledge that DevOps has a hefty amount of tools involved ;) (like you just said)

my 2cc

DevOps StackExchange Q&A site for questions about practices, processes, and tools used during software development and delivery to reach improved business value.

or the other way around

DevOps StackExchange Q&A site for questions about practices, processes, and tools used to reach improved business value by way of software development and delivery.

DevOps Stack Exchange is a Q&A site for software engineers working to increase business value by building SDLC infrastructure, and the practices, processes, and tools used during software development and delivery.

It seems to me, the best way to distinguish ourselves is to focus on architechure instead of specific technical problems. As such, a good elevator pitch might be:

DevOps Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for business leaders in the technical field seeking to architect or rearchitect rapid, efficient and high-velocity software delivery systems using techniques such as automated testing, continuous integration & delivery, monitoring and related procedures, policies, processes, and software.

That's seems very very long and hard to digest at first glance...

@Tensibai - Feel free to edit for clarity and brevity if you like the concept

It's kind of late here, I'll see tomorrow with a fresh mind if I can word a more constructive comment :)


text:
Discovered answer to my own question but haven't tested it - should I answer?
I asked a question about AWS ECS images. No one's answered so I reached out to AWS' support and got the barebones steps to solve my problem.
I haven't tested it yet but it seems sound in theory. Should I;

Post the answer I got from amazon as a "I haven't tried it but this is what they told me" as it's a general answer that could help others.
Wait until I test it and post my exact steps on the grounds that it'll be more precise? (which could be a couple weeks)

Why not do both?
I get that the solutions from AWS Support are pretty good, but you also need to do a bit of work to actually test them out.
So,

Post the answer I got from amazon as "I haven't tried it but this is what they told me" as it's a general answer that could help others.

Do this making the disclaimer clear, and then, once you have actually tested it, then add a note confirming it.

In my humble opinion,  answers are more useful once battlefield confirmed. There's no urge to self answer yourself.
Anyway that's a nice move from you to think about following your question and giving the solution you have found for future readers stuck on the same problem.  Personally I'd test and confirm and then answer giving the credits for the first step to AWS support and add whatever tweak you had to do or a sentence saying it was the straight  to the point solution once tested.
Whatever you choose,  self answer are very welcome.

You can post the answer, then after testing you can update and accept your answer as correct.


text:
Which questions could do with a second, third or even fourth answer?
I've spent some time over the last few weeks adding additional answers to some questions; for the most part it is a thankless task, certainly isn't as much fun as being an early answer that immediately solves problem, but it is worthwhile.
Can we bring together a list of questions that would benefit from having an additional point of view? based upon our collective knowledge of the site we can probably come up with a list of half a dozen questions that could be improved by more than one answer.

I'd say both of my self answered questions at least. And nearly all I answered may profit for better worded answers

Would it be possible to create an additional tab, like the unanswered one so that users could easily see questions that would benefit from having an additional point of view?


text:
Book Recommendation Question
We have a question requesting suggested reading, the question itself is quite broad and the answers have the potential to be opinion rather than fact:

It has three upvotes and three downvotes,
It has three close votes.

My recommendation was to post a new Community Wiki question with suggested reading.  However, Aurora pointed out this is now discouraged.  I think there are a couple of approaches we could take, I will try and list these as answers, jump in with other suggestions too.

the question itself is quite broad

Exactly. I have been repeatedly telling in chat and the site that Devops is a huge domain. So, there are hundreds of books which can be potential answers for this question. So many that even a CW wouldn't suffice.
Instead, if I have a well-narrowed down question like:

Can you suggest me books (and/or) resources for learning about X?

where X can be pin-pointed domains/concepts like Devops Culture, Devops Hiring, Cloud Security, Serverless Infrastructure/Applications, Chatops, SRE.
Instead, if someone askes for a book recommendation about Devops, I see it as very broad.  It's like asking for book recommendations for Computer Science. SCIP can be a potential answer, as well as CLRS by Cormen.  So, the number of answers will go on and on, and which might in fact, confuse the OP rather than helping them.

Reading between the lines, I think what the author is actually asking is for introductory books, I am inclined to answer with The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Continuous Delivery - however in it's current state I don't think it's a viable question thus I am resisting answering.

I'm with you on this, let's try the ChatOps question for size

It's a good answer. I would like to add that on the Q&A format, the documentation of wiki of various tags is sometimes a good place to suggest books.

I don't think book recommendation are something to have, answers will become outdated and so we will keep outdated content.
There's a large Q/A about this on meta.se, the problem has already be tried on many se sites and nothing valuable on long term has never came out.
Best bet is too keep those kind of talks in chat, short lived (in accuracy) answers are not something we should go for.

I've struggled with this question and questions like it here on DevOps StackExchange.  On one hand, this is exactly the kind of question that people new to DevOps will come here seeking to answer.  On the other hand, it's a very broad question.  I think we need to find a happy medium or we run the risk of devaluing the site for those who need it most- DevOps newbies.
I've never been a fan of the tendency for all "what to read" questions to be closed on StackExchange network sites.  While I understand the need to keep questions timeless and specific, there must be some way to address these types of questions other than closing them.
I agree with Dawny33 that more specific questions about DevOps resources (books, classes, videos) should be allowed to stand.  The best resources tend to be valuable for some time, and I think we should tolerate a little timeliness in the interest of allowing these kinds of questions to be answered.


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What is our definition of Deployment?
Tensbai and I discussed this on chat already posting this here mainly to record the decision.
The deployment tag uses the following definition of 'deployment':

Use this tag for questions about deployment, which is about all the activities to make (part of) a system available for use in some target environment.

I feel that this is the non-DevOps definition of deployment, to this end I have added the following to the tag wiki:

It is worth noting the DevOps Practice of Continuous Deployment seeks to separate release from deployment:

For most organisations releasing and deploying are the same thing while in fact, these are 2 separate things:

Deployment: A technical handling where a new version of the software is deployed to a specific environment
Release: A business handling where the customers are informed that a new version of the software is available and can be used

Shout out if you feel we should take a different route.

My 2 cents: using deploy-ed to define deploy-ment doesn't seem right. About "Release": IMO there is so much more to releasing, apart from explaing/teaching the customer about it  (that sounds like release notes), while "can be used" is not always the case (i.e. when it "must be used", since prior ones are out of support, no longer accessable, etc).

@Pierre when it concern internal releases, it is ok. I do think usage of a term in a multiple parties context should be worded as such because it's not the major usage . In brief, if the meaning is slightly different because it is not internal it should be said to avoid misunderstanding, not the other way around. (my 2cts)

Shouldn't this be a non-meta question?
I did write an answer that provides the distinction between deployment and release as it related to the DevOps nomenclature.
https://devops.stackexchange.com/a/1417/6

What about infrastructure?
Most of these answers focus on code but one key value-add of DevOps is the idea of IasC (Infrastructure As Code) and CasC (Configuration as Code) where servers are cattle. If I "deploy" a new virtual machine instance and configure it - perhaps even as a blank instance, is this not also a deployment? What about the spooling up of compute resources? How do they fit into this tag?

Quoting from your question to be the devil's advocate to some extend:

deployment, which is about all the activities to make (part of) a
  system available for use in some target environment.

and

Deployment: A technical handling where a new version of the software
  is deployed to a specific environment

From your question:

I feel that this is the non-DevOps definition of deployment

I fail to see how they differ, it sounds literally the same thing for me.
While I agree adding a word about separating deployment and release, I don't think the definition of deployment really differ.

The difference is "available for use" the second quote from your answer doesn't make any reference to use.  I agree it's subtle but important.

@RichardSlater at this point I'd argue for pedantry :) remove for use and you get the exact same meaning, it's more a way of wording it than an important point of the definition. And I'd argue that a deployed software not available for use is not really deployed, maybe delivered ?

I think you just reinforced my point, you can do a deployment with the new functionality disabled, via a feature flag, then later release the functionality for use by toggling the feature flag.

@RichardSlater I'd call that a delivery into the target environment and not a deployment, well probably it's probably my English level which is in cause :)

Delivery is subtlety different again, in the Agile vernacular delivery is simply the end result of a work effort.  To be clear these are not my words they are the words used in blog posts, conferences and by clients; when we talk about separating Deployment from Release we are talking about the technical act of pushing code vein separated from the business decision to make features available for release.

What about these definitions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_deployment
Sometimes I hear colleagues talking about "deploying artefacts to Nexus" which is kind of "deploying to specific environment" but in fact Nexus is something else then "environment" - need to talk what the definition of "environment" is..?

This doesn't seem to answer the question...

Hi, Tensibai, maybe the proper question would be "what ARE definitions of deployment" because I consider even in the DevOps domain there are different contexts where this word is applied.
WordNet Dictionary
Noun 1. deployment - the distribution of forces in preparation for battle or work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_deployment

You're side scope with the question itself and the answer doesn't address the points at all... The question is specially in a devops environment , etymology while interesting has no place at all. Answers are not there to ask another question as in a traditional discussion forum (as you can't "reply" to a specific answer), they should try to bring a position with arguments where people can agree or disagree with by voting (agreement on meta, on main its usefulness of the answer)

Generally I think of deployment as being the process of making build artifacts "useful" - that is, getting them running in some sort of shared system that people use.  I'm not sure how to boil that down into a terse but understandable definition, though.

Releasing software, I think, is to make a deployment available to specific consumers and is business decision made at a particular stage in the developed software (included features, amount of testing).  What a release entails is defined by the business releasing the software.  Does it contain tech docs, user guides.  A release may also be either a single exe, or an entire system.
On the other hand, I feel a deployment may, or may not, be part of the release process.  A deployment, I find, is just the placement of a single piece of software in an environment.  It is a process, not particularly a product or goal.
To summarize, I define as the following:
A release is defined by the business.  It can be comprised of items other than software (documents) and, a single or multiple deployments that occur once the software package(s) has reached a certain stage in development (defined by the business).
A deployment consists of a single software package to a particular operating environment, defined by the development team, for purposes agreed upon by both the business and the development team.


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What tag style should we follow for AWS products/services?
As of now, both the aws-* and amazon-* version of the tags are synonyms for each other.
So, which one of them should we have as the master?
Do we want the aws-* style tag or the amazon-* style tag?

The master tag should be the official service name
For example, aws-lambda is the correct tag, because the product name is AWS Lambda (and, not to mention, everyone calls it AWS Lambda).

amazon-ec2 should be the master because that's the official name.
amazon-cloudwatch should be the master because that's the product name.
amazon-s3 should be the master (see Amazon S3).
amazon-ami should be amazon-machine-images (see Amazon Machine Images—Amazon AMI is a litlte redundant!)
aws-cli should be the master (see AWS Command Line Interface)
aws-codedeploy should be the master (see AWS CodeDeploy)
amazon-api-gateway should be master (see Amazon API Gateway).
aws-kms should be master (see AWS Key Management Service)

As a general rule, most of the products are [amazon-*], except CLI, CodeDeploy, KMS and Lambda. Let me know if I've missed any, though.

Completely agree, it's hard to remember which ones are 'Amazon' and which are 'AWS' but we should be consistent.

I think [tag:amazon-cloudwatch] is resolving in the wrong direction, it appears to be resolving to [tag:aws-cloudwatch].

Would there be anything wrong with creating aliases for all of them so it gets automatically canonicalized by the site?

@chicks Yes, I think the idea here is for both tags to be synonymised—I intended to discuss which tag should be the 'master' (the tag that should the 'canonical' one). Is that what you're wondering about, or something else?

It wasn't clear to me that we were keeping the aliases, but rereading the question the context is more obvious.


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Specific Contributors driving away Community Expansion
I've noticed that the majority of questions right now are being answered by the same couple people (I won't name names).
I think this type of thing is counter-productive for developing a fledgling community.
As someone who would like to contribute, it's frustrating when every question has already gotten a detailed answer by users who have already farmed a bunch of points in this community (whether from being in the beta, or moderating, etc.)
I suggest that those individuals actually refrain from participating until others have already contributed to a question. Otherwise there's little point for someone like myself contributing to a community when 1-2 people are already answering all the questions and their answers automatically have high visibility.
I suppose if the goal of the community is NOT to attract additional contributors, and you're fine just creating a google searchable archive of 1-2 people's opinions, then you're on the right track. However, I think numerous opinions from a diverse array of contributors is preferable.

What does prevent you to frame anothe answer if you think there is another approach to answer the question ?

Just because someone already answered (regardless of the answer's value or if it's accepted or not) it doesn't mean someone else shouldn't. It's actually desired to have several answers so that the best/most popular one (based on the number of votes) bubbles to the top. See the answer ratio in http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97295/devops.

My comment above is a genuine concern, I see not much to answer to your post if you don't explain a little more what prevent you from answering, maybe linking to one or two questions and explaining what stops you may help better understanding your concern

OK, maybe I should clarify - just don't repeat what already existing answers say :)

@Dan sometimes, answering the same thing with a your own wording and experience (not plagiarism of course) is good also, it should add something on top of existing answers, but every answer should answer the question alone so overlaps is expected. (That said I'm guilty of no doing this every time)

@Tensibai Right. We're in agreement.

Interestingly, this post has now received two upvotes - I would be interested to hear the opinions of those who agree with @EthanEdwards

What is your actual question? Something that ends with a "?"-mark ... And what's your proposal about how long "I" should not be allowed to "Contribute"? Do you mind if while waiting I continue to suggest tag wikis / excerpts?

As one of the early users of the site, and the person who has seen the largest increase in reputation in the last week I am making the assumption that you consider me to be one of these problem users.
Three things come to mind:

Regarding the percentage of answers, it doesn't look like any one person has the majority:

Richard Slater: 24/435 = 5.5%
Tensibai: 49/435 = 11.2%
Jiri Klouda: 26/435 = 5.9%
Xiong Chiamiov: 5/435 = 1.1%
Evgeny: 27/435 = 6.2%
Pierre.Vriens: 20/435 = 4.5%
Dan Cornilescu: 31/435 = 7.1%

Having multiple answers to questions is highly valuable; in fact, it is one of the measured metrics for SE Beta sites.
Reputation is not the goal here; I, personally, answer questions because I want to share knowledge - the majority of new users are going to come to the site with questions that they want an answer and an answer within a reasonable time.

There are currently 9 Unanswered Questions and 15 without an accepted answer questions are being posted at about three a day if you have specific skills you can subscribe to the Tag RSS feeds for those tags, that's how I find new questions on StackOverflow.

fully agree with Richard ... on top of that: about 50% of my questions have no ACCEPTED answer yet, while the ones with an accepted answer are all candidate for being challenged with an even better answer (if a better answer comes in, I will for sure change my mind and change to such answer as accepted) ... PS: note that I intentionally react slow to marking an answer as accepted, though I am pretty flexible to upvote most answers to my questions ...

I think the fact that the only contributors to this question \ discussion consist of the people I was talking about, only reinforces my point.

@EthanEdwards and then what do you propose ? That top contributors stop answering to leave room for you ?

As someone who would like to contribute, it's frustrating when every
  question has already gotten a detailed answer

There's actually 6 unanswered questions. I've answered this one yesterday which has been asked on April 7th and did stay 4 days days without answer.
And for this one I did just dig into the documentation, that's far from a good answer in my opinion and someone comfortable with Circle-CI should add an answer with more details and best practices extending over to multiple keys management.

I suggest that those individuals actually refrain from participating
  until others have already contributed to a question.

How long until someone having an answer can post it if no one post ? 4 days ? a week ? a month ? When do you think it would be acceptable someone you have grief over post an answer if no one has done one ?
Corollary: do you really think that's fair for the question author to leave them without answer for an extended period of time for imaginary reputation points ?

Otherwise there's little point for someone like myself contributing to
  a community when 1-2 people are already answering all the questions
  and their answers automatically have high visibility.

There's no more visibility for an answer or another, each answer added bump a question on the top of the homepage, so any answer even on a very old post will get visibility. There's a badge for answers getting more votes than the accepted answer also: populist along with badges for well received answers.
I would recommend going through How do I write a good answer? for advice to write good answer even if existing one are there.
You didn't give any example of question you had like to answer and was discouraged from, so we can't have any idea of what you're interested in nor a starting point to get background from your post.

I suppose if the goal of the community is NOT to attract additional
  contributors, and you're fine just creating a google searchable
  archive of 1-2 people's opinions, then you're on the right track.
  However, I think numerous opinions from a diverse array of
  contributors is preferable.

Here I've a problem with your approach, we're not here to build a collection of opinions but a collection of answers to problems. Stack  Exchange sites are not discussion forums, the format doesn't work well for opinions debate.

I've definitely felt this problem on various sites, including some of those in the Stack Exchange community; the worst part is the initial bootstrapping, when you can't do things like comment on posts until you've got 50 rep.
In general, however, Stack Exchange favors good answers over quick ones, and that's good for someone in your situation.  It means that if you have a better (or just different!) explanation of something than others had, you can post it - that will cause the question to get bumped to the homepage, which means your answer gets views, and generally people are pretty free with upvotes to reward good content like that.  This is much better than, say, reddit, where there's a strong bias towards the first few responses.
With that being said, being quick to answer questions is also a good way to get your foot in the door.  Last year I decided I was going to become active on security.SE, and frequently checked the new question list; this got me from 300 to 7500 rep in 6 months.  The Stack Exchange mobile app is particularly good for this.
Finally, questions get you reputation, too!
Overall, we're here to help each other out, and it seems silly to intentionally not help someone when you can.

I think the fundamental problem here is trying to gain reputation on a site that just doesn't have much activity.  The OP might find a much happier home on ServerFault where there are 20 unanswered questions for every hour of the day.  Or if they work better with fire hoses head over to StackOverflow itself.  Then once you've reached the 200 rep to get the 100 association bonus on each new site life becomes much easier.  This doesn't mean that you will suddenly be gaining lots of rep on sites like DevOps (or even my favorite Bricks) which are simply low-volume at this point in their lives.  I have sites that I've been on for over a year where I've only gained 4 or 6 rep in my entire time there.  I don't see anything wrong with that if I'm learning and I'm contributing as best I can in most cases.
A significant secondary factor is that some of this also comes down to luck and timing.  I've written hundreds of answers in my time on these sites, but after two years I was in the right place at the right time with the right answer and folks loved it.  I had no idea that answer would be so much more well received than all of the previous effort I put in.  I had prior answers that had their own github repos, but that "huge" effort wasn't as well received as something I dashed off quickly to help somebody out with their LEGO projects.  That's just luck and timing.
A third component of this that I haven't seen previously mentioned: maybe the OP just doesn't like us.  Ops folks have a well-deserved reputation for being jerks or curmudgeons so this isn't a surprising result to old timers.  (And I don't think the Dev folks with their wild optimism are any easier to deal with.)  Regardless of our presumed faults, sometimes folks just don't get along.  Part of the beauty of the StackExchange model is that there are lots of other communities where you might find a vibe more to your liking.
So I wish the OP better luck in finding a happy home on StackExchange.  Ultimately I think being able to give back to a community which has done so much to make my job and life easier and more fun is a worthwhile endeavor.


text:
Should this site have Community Promotion Ads?
I'm a fan of what's called "Community promotion ads" on SE sites. Such as the currently active version of it on Drupal.SE. Checkout this link if you're not familiar with such ads, to understand the rules of the game, and also see some real world samples.
If you do checkout the above link, and want to help "me" to promote DevOps.SE, then make sure to look at this specific ad over there (disclosure: it's mine ...). Or if you rather want to try it out via this question (to see what will happen if it ever gets enough votes over there), just click on this image below:

The kind of actual ads which, IMO, could make sense for DevOps are (among probably many other variations):

DevOps related events, as a variation of "What are the Devops-related conferences happening around the world?".
DevOps related training, as a variation of "Which university has a good postgraduate DevOps program?".
DevOps related open source software recommendations.
... what else?

My questions:

How about also having such ads on DevOps.SE, does that make sense (already)?
If so, who or what is required to get it going on DevOps.SE? Is that something that one of the (new) mods can do, or is there some other magic behind the SE-scenes needed for that?

PS: the (red) community-ads tag is available already, but I don't have the required privilege for any red tags ...

Side note: red tags are reserved to mods and SE staff :)

Unfortunately, Community Ads on this site aren't available until graduation.

In keeping with your feedback, we’re considering laying out the mechanics of graduation a little differently in the coming days. It would look like this:
The Community Team announces that a site is cleared for graduation. Without delay...

the beta label is removed
elections are held
migration paths are set up
community ads are run
a link to the site is added to the footer

(emphasis mine)
The site will graduate on receiving approximately 10 questions per day consistently. Until that point, there won't be any ads here, but you can always share relevant links in chat.
I haven't ever seen a beta site with Community Ads, and I don't believe it's usual practice to enable them—instead, let's focus on growing and graduating the site before worrying about the ads.

Promoting this site with Community Ads on other SE sites can work well though, just like what you've done with Drupal.SE. We did this on IoT Stack Exchange, and it does seem to attract a fair bit of traffic.

This answer is correct.  Community Ads are not enabled until the site graduates when it reaches about 10 questions/day.

Interesting answer (didn't know that restriction). Though marking it as "accepted", as I do now, is a bit strange in this case (don't be surprised if I ever un-accept ... after graduation!)


text:
Custom close reasons:
After posting my thoughs on Should debugging CI/CD problems caused by coding errors in the software product itself be on-topic? it comes to my mind we need some usual 'off-topic' close reasons on top of the 2 actually present:

So add an answer with the close reason text as quote and the reasoning behind your proposition with how and when it should be used.
We, moderators, do keep the right to not include a reason whatever the votes are if we think it would be toxic for the site, in this case a meta post would be raised to explain the reasons.

You might also want to define the help center page linked in the first close reason (time for a different meta post, maybe?)

@Aurora0001 I've think of it, I do hope this post will lead to starting material for this page indeed :)

Quoted from Stack Overflow reasons, trimmed for devops:

This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced
  or a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be
  on-topic here, this one was resolved in a manner unlikely to help
  future readers.

This reason is quite self explanatory but I think it should be used when the solution was found in comments and doesn't deserve an answer which would solve someone else time later. For example: a simple typo error in a command or a quote missing, when resolved by 1 or 2 comments would fit.


text:
Should debugging CI/CD problems caused by coding errors in the software product itself be on-topic?
Debugging CI/CD problems would normally be on-topic on DevOps, according to Can I ask a question about debugging problems in common DevOps tools?.
Would the same be true if the problem are actually caused by coding errors in the software product itself, not in the area of the DevOps tools used in the development process for that software product.
For example build failures in CI executions, caused by coding errors, not by build environment problems, of course.
Related post, for context: What is/should be our take about code-debugging questions?

Main problems with debugging questions are:

They usually need a talk to narrow down the problem
They're likely to become Chameleon Questions where solving first problem surface another and doesn't solve the problem in OP's point of view, who edit it and change it enough to invalidate existing answer, turning into a forum like talk.
There's chances the problem is not where the OP think it is, it's often a XY problem

While as in the case above there can be a 'kind of useful' answer, the answer itself has no real link with the question tittle and finding the root cause of the problem is not always easy.
Main problem could be that the OP will spot something wrong absolutely sideway of the question and as such no satisfying answer could be made, I'd argue my answer to the question above is not really satisfying or good, it just summarize what the OP found during the chat session.
We're not overwhelmed by the number of question for now, so my take would be to try to get them in an useful form if an answer can be made, if not, we should close it with (Started another meta for custom close reasons):

"This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be
  reproduced or a simple typographical error. While similar questions
  may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a manner unlikely to
  help future readers."

This assume there's people here willing to do 'interactive support', if there's no one for that, the question will stay as is if it's clear enough. If the OP is not responsive then it should be closed as Unclear".

for bullet #1 - IMHO perfectly valid, comments are OK for that, chat as well if too noisy - just as your example (and plenty of similar ones on SO) prove. Even if on chat/comments even the procedure for narrowing down can itself be a valuable resource for those willing. And can be referenced in other question/answers/debugging sessions, even if unrelated to the original question.

for bullet #2 rollback and comment inviting to ask a new question can be a way of approaching this. But I agree - it is quite annoying, I saw many users who keep doing that on subsequent questions.

I feel this answer fits better the sister question: Can I ask a question about debugging problems in common DevOps tools?. I asked this one specifically for errors in the sw itself, not for the devops tools used in the development process for that sw.

@Dan I think the problems encountered stay the same. But that's mainly points of attention

I agree. But it may be relevant if in the end the consensus is to accept  as on-topic one kind of questions but consider the other off-topic. Which is the end goal of both these questions, if I'm not mistaken (I mean establishing their on/off-topic scope)

@Dan indeed, but what I did mean with this answer is that sometimes it takes a while to narrow to a code problem on something which looks like CI system problem, Hence the idea of welcoming the questions and close as not useful if a code problem is spotted

And well, if the code problem itself is not worthy of being kept


text:
What is/should be our take about code-debugging questions?
As we are in an early stage beta and are still molding our scope and the culture, let's have a string of discussions regarding the same.  And, here's one:
Should code debugging questions be welcome here?
Or should we send them to SO? We, the mods have some opinions too. So, putting the question out there so that we can all discuss collectively.

I'd explicitly list in the question (or ask as separate, related questions?) particular cases, especially the borderline ones, like questions about: CI/CD pipeline failures caused by errors in the very sw product itself (build failures, for examples), custom scripts for devops use, etc. - this should help clarify whatever is the outcome decision and help with future reviews of such questions.

@DanCornilescu Very well!  Pl go ahead and raise a question :)

In my opinion, it depends, on the code.  If the code in question is about building an extension for one of the many DevOps tools that are on-topic and the problem at hand appears to be as a result of that tools API then it should be allowed.
If the code has a gramatical error or is simply "why doesn't my code work" then it is off topic on SO and here.
If the code is part of a consumer application that serves requests from actual users then it is on topic for SO but off topic here.

I'd recommend asking separate specific meta questions (ideally referencing this Q&A for context and inter-linking) about each particular case, especially for the borderline ones, for example questions about:

CI/CD pipeline failures caused by errors in the very sw product itself (build failures, for examples)
custom scripts for devops use

Collectively these Q&As should help:

clarify whatever is the outcome decision and help with future reviews of such questions
fill in the DevOps specific on-topic guidelines
clarify some of the future DevOps customisation of the menu seen when flagging questions for closing
clarify some of the future decision of which SE sites would be included in the DevOps list for off-topic question migration (well, SO in this particular case).


text:
Moderator Pro Tempore Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: Moderators Pro Tempore.
I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that this community’s issues are properly addressed:

We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.
Did I overlook anyone?
Almost certainly. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My failure to account for everyone this early on is in no way a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why you'll have your elections several weeks after graduation.
Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It’s a learning experience for everyone.

Thanks for the confidence on our judgement.


text:
How best to promote the DevOps site?
I've started promoting this site via LinkedIn by writing a pulse post, please do feel free to re-use the words, images and text anywhere you feel it would benefit from it.
How else should we promote the site? I am cognizant that we need to strike a balance between visible and annoying so I am resisting cross posting too much at this stage.

On September 15th, 2008 StackOverflow hit the Internet; created by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to be the Software Developer's answer to the inherently closed incumbent Q&A sites. Eight and a half years later and the site is ranked in the top 50 most visited sites in the world and is the defacto standard for getting answers to questions, spawning many more sites in the StackExchange network.

The StackExchange network is an extension of the StackOverflow concept, allowing for new sites modelled after StackOverflow to be proposed, taken into private and public beta with the goal of eventually becoming a fully fledged part of the network.
A little over a month ago now a new site entered private beta, it's based on a topic close to my heart, specifically DevOps. You could be forgiven for thinking that DevOps questions should appear on StackOverflow or the sister site ServerFault, however many questions about Culture, Tools, Transformation and Techniques have been closed because they are off-topic - the new DevOps StackExchange Beta is the place that these questions can be asked and answered freely, by example we have had these questions posted in the last 30 days:

What is a "Walking Skeleton"?
How to explain DevOps to a non-techy manager?
Who is this Chaos Monkey and why did he crash my server?
What is SecOps?
Which university has a good postgraduate DevOps programme?

Who is involved?
There is a small core of five to six users who are using the site on a regular basis and another thirty or so whom we see on a semi-regular basis. This is where we need your help - we need more question, more answers, more comments and more votes. We have an opportunity here to build a community that espouses the principles of the DevOps community whilst gathering answers to the questions we have about DevOps.
How do I get involved?
Signing up to any StackExchange site is easy, just head over to the site and click the Sign In button at the top. Do you already have a question in mind, great, ask away! Do you have experience in DevOps, I am sure you do, take a look at the unanswered questions and jump right in.
I personally am excited by this proposal, looking forward to seeing you on the site and answering your questions very soon.

Does it answer your question or is it a complement to it ? I've the feeling it should be within the question itself.

It's an answer IMHO, I've put it out there to 1) licence it as CC and 2) allow you all to edit it.  Let me know when you do edit it and I will update the original article.

In mine (humble opinion), it's a shareable post example, the one linked in your question. But not an answer to "How best to promote the DevOps site?" nor "How else should we promote the site?". Hence why I think it should be in the question, with the link from the question above it to show it in situation. But that's just my 2cts


text:
We are in public beta!
we have graduated to public beta (So, yayy!)
Congrats to the "beta" badge winners, and also to the ones who "fulfilled" their commitment from Area51.
Also, please share the posts which you think deserve to be shared with the community, and encourage more people to view and participate.  [Also, you'd be getting the shiny "Announcer", "Booster" and "Publicist" badges for helping!]
Congrats to all of us. And, let's work together in making this site a great resource for fellow Devops folks. :)

Dawny33, how to share? Can you please provide some manual?

@RomeoNinov See the share link under the tags?  Click on it. It'll give you a unique link.  And now, share that unique link :)

tweet out: https://twitter.com/DanCornilescu/status/844579437064663041

@DanCornilescu Awesome!  Retweeted :)


text:
Could existing SE sites help inspire what we might ask here?
I keep struggling (and trying) to better understand what kind of questions would be a good fit (on topic, scope, etc) for DevOps.SE (and I seem to notice from existing questions and comments from others that I'm not the only one). In my case, I learn most from ... mistakes, and examples. So I've been doing (some) research in another SE site that I'm pretty familiar with (= Drupal.SE), and where so now and then DevOps related topics show up also, and which also has DevOps related tags.
On Drupal.SE for example, there are plenty of questions that smell like DevOps related; quiet a few of them have 0 answers, while there are also questions that are simply closed. These might help inspire what types of questions folks are interested in for this site!
Below is a partial list of questions (which I created from just searching tag-names on Drupal.SE):

deployment (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
version-control (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
configuration-management (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
jenkins (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
testing (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
phing (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
staging (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
amazon-s3 (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
amazon-ec2 (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.
aws (with 0 answers and/or closed questions), such as this question.

To better understand what kind of Drupal-related questions could be  on-topic for DevOps.SE, I wonder if we can create a 10-bullet list related to these same tag-names I used here (+ same order!), and thereby indicating for each item:

Do you think the sample question I mentioned (via the "this question"-link each time) would be on-topic or off-topic?
Can you name (via a similar linked question on Drupal.SE) another question that you'd consider as on-topic for DevOps.SE (where appropriate with some comment why you say so)?

Should you stumble upon other DevOps related tags on Drupal.SE, please include them in your answer also.
Update:
My question is not about "migrating those questions" from Drupal.SE to DevOps.SE (also because of the valid reasons mentioned in Robert's answer). I mostly included the various tags/links as examples to get a better understand/feeling to better understand if such questions would be yes/no a good fit for DevOps.SE also.
PS: If you don't like Drupal, don't understand those questions at all, or would rather use another SE site (SF, SO, ...) to come up with a variation of the list in my question, please go ahead!

As an administrative note, unless those questions are deemed off topic on those other sites, we have no cause to remove content from another site and the reputation/ownership that goes with it.
I just don't want to see users soliciting content from other sites because those questions can be asked here. That is not appropriate.
Besides, migrating content from elsewhere is not really a great way to build a new site. Migrated questions tend to be orphaned if the author does not have an account here, the tags don't typically match, the post doesn't often follow any posting guidelines you've established here, and anonymous content always has that odd, back-dated feel of long-forgotten questions that no one really cares about any longer.
Essentially, you would be loading this site up with a lot of questions asked and answered a long time ago… without imparting any of the benefits of reputation, ownership, or experience into the community that is supposed to take care of it.
That's why we don't do it.

@Pierre.Vriens Does my title/copy changes better describe your intent? 100% feel free to roll back those changes if I got it wrong.

@RobertCartaino Would it be acceptable/recommended, at least for those really interesting ones, to comment inviting the OPs to re-ask them on DevOps?

@DanCornilescu No, that would not be appropriate. With so many questions/subjects vying for attention, that would become (and has become) unworkable pretty quickly. We cannot allow folks to  solicit users and questions from other sites unless they are simply asking in the wrong place (i.e. off-topic)

@RobertCartaino I see. OK. Just curious. Thx.

@RobertCartaino: just to clarify: my question was specifically in the context of those posts being closed as off-topic on those sites, not the ones being accepted. I just now noticed your unless those questions are deemed off topic on those other sites note in your answer...


text:
Radical cultural change with strict adherence to tradition?
It completely surprises me, how a group of very strict StackExchange traditionalists, who want to adhere to every single rules to the letter, are trying to start a discussion about a radical cultural change in the processes and methods of doing things in a new way.
How detail oriented optimization of every single aspect of the site individually and apart, trying to find the best moderation box in every single case on its own and in every question as it stands alone, does not seem to be in the minds of the group at odds with the topic at hand, which is promoting systems thinking and view of the entire system as a whole with all the interdependency and complexity.
How a culture that is supposed to promote blamelessness, openness and bridging the gaps and divisions between disciplines and departments is discussed by people who are extremely quick to judge and close minded to anything that does not fit their strict view of the world from their singular view point and viewed through lenses of their particular experience.
Do we even stand a chance? Are we even capable to apply any of the lessons we preach?

Interesting that you're in favor of a blameless culture while looping over blaming peoples only.

Any change needs to start somewhere. Cultural changes in particular are in a really bad spot initially because they have to at least partially invalidate an established scale of values or practices. Which many won't accept easily (or even at all), at least at the beginning.
I'm just a bit surprised that you are surprised to encounter resistance ;) My suggestion is to not take it at heart. Many of those trying to embrace DevOps don't quite know how - they're still used with the old ways. But they try. And some succeed. DevOps is about making that happen. But patience, inclusion and communication are keys.
A similar thing happens here: yes, there are rules for SE sites. And no one has been successful in doing an SE site like the one you're expecting. So no one knows exactly if creating such site is possible and, if it is, how it's done.
So just give it a bit more time - we've only been in (private) beta for less then 3 weeks and we have less than 100 members actually active, other site have been in beta for years and have 100s/1000s of members.
Test the flexibility of the boundaries - ask the questions you'd like to ask. Don't get upset if they're not well received presently. Most likely those that can change didn't have enough time to do so. And if the current majority won't get swayed don't despair - that majority is too small to be representative for the future community. But once the audience grows significantly maybe others would like them too.
Same DevOps keys apply: patience, inclusion and communication.
My 2c.