Can we flesh out guidelines to improve "Best Practice" and other vague questions?

Question

One of the things that draws me to Stack Exchange sites is a focus on what Eric Raymond calls smart questions. Quoting the NE about page:

Ask about:

• Specific issues with network engineering

• Real problems or questions that you’ve encountered

Don't ask about...

• Anything not directly related to network engineering

• Questions that are primarily opinion-based

• Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer

My complaint is that too often people like poll or discussion questions (which are primarily opinion-based), so they slip under the NESE moderation radar...

Below, I am listing some questions that I categorize as discussion questions, or polls... most of them are not closed (today). Interestingly, most of them are also tagged best-practice. I personally think that best-practice gets abused to sugar-coat discussion / poll questions onto the site...

• IPv4 Address Space Planning Best Practices
• What factors drive L2 vs L3 in the access layer?
• https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1607/best-practice-snmp
• /31 Point-to-point bitmasks
• OSPF LSA Performance Tuning
• Versioning switch/router/firewall configs
• Which Python modules are you using for network management and automation?

My question:

Could we build some guidelines for what good questions look like?

Answer 1

For experts in NE, the best practices questions would seem open-ended and difficult to answer. For those people just cutting their teeth in network engineering, wouldn't we like this site to provide relevant information for them as many junior- and mid-level questions can just be seeking general direction as a starting point? To be able to ask a question in such as way as to provide all the relevant details assumes someone knows which details are important to satisfy the experts and that's not always possible.

So a junior engineering starts by understanding big-picture elements in network design such as where firewalls go in relation to switches and routers and how to work with more VLANs and basic routing. Over time, questions start coming in with trunking, STP (various incarnations), OSPF/EIGRP/BGP, or L2 vs L3 in the access layer. Eventually, they get to discussing timer adjustments in OSPF or migrating STP from short mode to long mode.

Some of the best practices questions I asked were either to seed the site or to confirm/augment what I already knew/suspected. In any case, they were questions I deemed would be a value to others starting out.

I agree the questions do need a certain level of quality to be asked, but do you want network engineers going to other sites for best practice questions or here where they can progress towards enlightenment and help to build the site in the process? Using Cisco certifications to help illustrate an extreme point, do we want a site where only CCIE questions are welcomed or are CCNA noob questions desired as well?

I would support making best practice questions into community questions out of the gate which would probably alleviate some of the concerns and encourages ongoing development and refinement of both the question and the answer(s) for posterity. However, I think this feature might have been deprecated by SE.

Answer 2

Overall, Stack Exchange has banned best-practice questions. I agree with the accepted answer, which says that many questions about best practices tend to come down to:

I have no clue, plz give me a tutorial or code

The logical fallacy behind many "Best Practice" questions

Many people hope or assume that there must be some globally accepted way of building networks that would suddenly remove all doubts and fears they have about building something they're unfamiliar with.

Speaking very bluntly, this notion is mistaken; designs are based on budget, personnel, schedule, and technical requirements. It's rare for people to truly have the same combination of those things.

There are some axiomatic rules we all follow in IT (see The Practice of System and Network Administration for good examples). But even within those rules, there is still a lot of room for judgement calls. As RFC 1925 points out, "(10) One size never fits all"; in other words, what works for one group of people might not work for you.

So what do you do if you need to design something and you aren't sure how? Don't be afraid to ask questions about how to implement a design, assuming you document what you're doing. There are a lot of people on Network Engineering who can help. However, the take-away is that broad network design best-practices are just wishful thinking.

Most Good questions (not just "Best Practices") are situational:

At this point, I don't think we should get hung up on the term "best practices" itself as an automatic close trigger. It's possible to ask a good best practice question, if you include enough information about your situation. Personally, if people use the word best-practice in their question, I think they must include:

• A statement summarizing the business need: Networks cost money, and money comes from supporting a business. If we understand something about the business traffic that the network carries, we get much closer to understanding the tradeoffs the OP might be facing
• A description of what alternatives the OP has considered and why the OP is stuck: If the OP hasn't done enough research to tell us at least one possible solution to some problem, I argue that the OP is not ready to crowd-source the question on Stack Exchange. Stack Overflow members frequently summarize this by asking "What have you already tried?". I think this is relevant to best practice questions because it gives us some idea of what the OP wants and doesn't want.

Best practice questions should include (where relevant & possible):

• Specific information about HW Models, Firmware levels
• Topology Diagram
• Device configuration excerpts

Bad "Best Practice" questions don't describe a specific situation:

Alternatively, if someone comes to the main NE site looking for overall "best practices for [insert-something-here]" and provides few other details / context around what they have already tried, then we definitely should put those questions on hold as "primarily opinion based" or "too broad".

Even though the question isn't suitable for the main NE site, best practice questions and recommendations are welcome in Network Engineering Chat.