Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail.<p>Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. By definition, this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible, that's pure speculation and there are infinite other scenarios we could imagine, but we don't need to ask them as StackOverflow questions.<p>On a practical note, it's worth banning just to prevent a thousand viral marketers and recruiters falling over themselves to compose the most attention-grabbing fake questions in the next month.
It's not a "hoax" in any sense. Just a plain lie. A hoax has to be fairly large-scale and affect a lot of people (negatively). The original question contained no hyper-links at all. (Ironically, one was inserted by subsequent editors).<p>The question is plausible. I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script! Recovery consisted of copying libs from another installation of the same OS.<p>ServerFault appears to complaining that the question is generating traffic --- to ServerFault!?<p>If we look at the user's account, it's clean. Only through a LinkedIn reference do we see that "bleemboy" is Marco Marsala. Like, what fraction of visitors are clicking through all that?
I actually witnessed a funny incident, similar to this, when I worked at a National Laboratory some years back. A team I was working with had a big project that formed the core of a larger system, so they created a directory named "core" and spent the next N months happily churning out code. Meanwhile, the system administrator had a set of backup scripts that he'd configured to ignore core dump files (yeah, you can guess where this is going), but the scripts that he wrote didn't differentiate between files or directories that had "core" in their name, so nothing got backed up for almost a year. Over the Christmas break, the system administrator decided to install a new version of Solaris, and wiped all the drives as well. I came in to work after the break, and everyone was freaking out because all their code was gone. They managed to recover some of it, because some developers had separate copies of parts of the system, but it was still a disaster.<p>Every once in a while, at one job or another, someone will suggest we name a source code folder "core" and I get to relate that story all over again.
This shows the problem with the way Stack Exchange doles out moderation abilities (automatic once you hit a certain karma threshold). You get a lot of people who want to use these newfound powers. That's understandable, for sure. The issue is that in their eagerness to be a good mod and help clean up and get to do some cool moderatory stuff, they get overzealous and it results in hamfisted, overbroad moderation because everyone is looking for a reason to close the question. The higher principle behind the community gets lost in a sea of technicalities.<p>Stack Exchange could improve their guidance and closure templates to help curb the habit of closing useful stuff all the time, so part of it is an identity issue that SE sites have within themselves, but it's compounded and exacerbated by a lot of fresh faces looking for a reason to stop the discussion so they can click their brand-new "lock thread" button.
A question was asked, a problem was posed, and it got helpful replies and answers for someone looking for a solution.<p>It's origin should not matter.
Apart from the SO moderation question, I'm quite bugged by a bigger one: How the hell this ended up in mainstream media?<p>Can't we just ban every online buzz outlet from talking about programming, hardware or computers until they actually understand what they are talking about? I know what I'm asking is beyond impossible, but I'm really annoyed by the amount of buzz-impinged-naiveté blossoming everywhere each time someone makes headlines of something IT related.
This reminded me of an old story from The Daily WTF:<p><a href="http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Bourne-Into-Oblivion" rel="nofollow">http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Bourne-Into-Oblivion</a>
I don't think they should delete it. Just ban the user for abuse, and edit the post to explain the situation. People spent time answering that question, and it's plausible someone might find it helpful.
If you're curious what the hoax post was (the answers have since been merged onto a different question) -<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6y3HTYvxTYIJ:serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6y3HTYv...</a>
The linked article says they already determined "What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question". What the article is asking is what to do with the fake internet points.
Reminds me of this post.
Poster created a question and immediately answered it with his own link.<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9751207/how-can-i-use-goto-in-javascript" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9751207/how-can-i-use-got...</a>