After Six months, my question is offtopic?

Question

I asked a question about how IFTOP accounts for protocol bits. There was one answer, which provided no insight greater than that which I had figured out on my own before asking the question. A few months ago, someone commented to "mark the question as answered, or answer the question myself." But the question has gone unanswered, so I did neither.

The question is about how a network monitoring tool works and how to interpret the results it shows. Is this not is scope?

I have a feeling that the only reason this is now "offtopic" is because nobody answered it, and for whatever reason the moderators don't like to have unanswered questions that fester about.

Answer 1

The question is about how a network monitoring tool works and how to interpret the results it shows. Is this not is scope?

If you were correct, then it would be in scope. However iftop provides host level information about a network interface. This makes it a host monitoring tool much more so than a network monitoring tool. Stated another way, iftop doesn't tell a user about the network, but rather about the status of the host.

Just because something "touches" networking in some way doesn't actually make it a network question, although many people associate things this way. This is not an uncommon occurrence; I can provide plenty of examples along the same lines on sites such as Super User or Server Fault that have the "network" tag applied that are not actually network questions.

A few months ago, someone commented to "mark the question as answered, or answer the question myself." But the question has gone unanswered, so I did neither.

Perfectly acceptable response from you. You even provided a comment responding along the same lines. When this question was again resurfaced because it had no answer, it looks like this prompted the moderator who provided the comment to delete both (i.e. your response meant his comment was no longer helpful and your response would be obsoleted by the deletion of the original comment).

I have a feeling that the only reason this is now "offtopic" is because nobody answered it, and for whatever reason the moderators don't like to have unanswered questions that fester about.

We have plenty of unanswered questions on the site. We don't mark a question as off topic simply because it has been around for awhile and doesn't have an answer.

Questions without answers are "refreshed" by an automated process periodically to try to find a better answer. This often prompts people to look at the question again and sometimes respond in any number of ways (new answer, comments/questions for the OP, edits to question/answers, etc).

In this case, it is far more likely that someone looked at the question with fresh eyes and realized it was actually off topic and should be handled as such. Perhaps they were unfamiliar with iftop specifically and thought it might be on topic based on the reasoning you provided yourself, but then actually had time and/or the inclination this time around to learn more about it and realized it was off topic. Or originally it simply "slipped through the cracks" of the process in place and is now being handled as it should.

Answer 2

I don't remember ever seeing the question when it first came up (I try to read them all, but I do miss some).

I periodically go through each question with answers where none were accepted to place the comment about accepting an answer, simply as a reminder. We get people who don't understand that helpful answers should be accepted, and there are those who simply forget. This has been pretty successful in getting answers accepted, but there are simply so many such questions, that I don't really have time to read each one when I am placing the comment.

When the question popped up again, I read the question, and I realized that it was off-topic, so I marked it as such. That had nothing to do with the fact that it wasn't answered. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was never answered because it is off-topic.