*Summarizing and paraphrasing your questions:* > Should this stack be welcoming to strangers? We should be respectful to everyone, and to the degree that we're not enabling [help vampires](http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/), we should be welcoming. I have always maintained that we should be polite, but firm with help vampires. > Should we expand the site scope to include consumer networking devices, dns, etc...? No. (but I mean that in the most welcoming and nicest possible way) Perhaps you'd like to understand why I don't want to expand the site's scope to what you suggested. YLearn's answer covered some of my reasoning, but I'll point more reasons for advocacy of a limited NESE site scope (at least to start). First let's look at some numbers... - Number of users on the internet in 2015: [*3 Billion users*](http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Internet-Hit-3-Billion-Users-2015/1011602) - Number of network engineers in the world: *maybe 3,000,000* <sup>Note 1</sup> - Number of NESE close-voters (assume beta requirements of 500 NESE points): about *100 users* (as of May 2015) Boiling it down... - Ratio of total internet users to potential-NESE-close-voters: **30,000,000:1** - Ratio of total network engineers to potential-NESE-close-voters: **30,000:1** ## Some math behind community-building Before NESE was proposed, I had been an active Stack Exchange user for a couple of years. While I participated, I noticed that moderation can make or break a site. During beta, our most basic mission is building a network engineering community, which is often considered a group of people *with a common interest*. But in our case, building a community is more than just people with a common interest, it's also about building a core group of users who we *trust to moderate the site*. Like it or not, every time you upvote, you're incrementally empowering that person to govern the community, set the rules, etc... So, back to the math... - How many people could have DNS problems / questions? Billions - How many people could have consumer-grade networking questions? Billions - How many people are seriously interested in Cisco / Juniper / etc...? maybe 3,000,000 ## Rep Hounds Once we start allowing "simple" questions on the site, we also have the reality that some percentage of those users will be rep hounds, who answer anything and everything so they can get more fake internet points. The more "simple" questions we allow on the site, the more of those people who typically resist keeping the site as purely professional network engineering. ## Close voting on life support Our NESE close-voting is already on life-support; while I think that's a common problem with other stack exchange sites, the point is that we should be smart about what problems we tackle while we have a relatively limited number of close voters. Remember it only takes one person to ask an off-topic or confusing question, and *five* people who care enough to both read and vote to close it. The numbers work strongly against the close-voters early in a site's life; especially if we open the topics up to (potentially) billions of people. Taking the example of DNS... one might argue that we don't have to make this an all DNS or no DNS site... sadly, I think it's really that black and white when we have so few close voters. It's a lot of work to [suck enough details out of people](http://meta.networkengineering.stackexchange.com/q/292/775) for us to even know whether we can help them. DNS is one of those things that's going to be very labor intensive to get documented well... especially from network newbs. A similar argument applies to consumer devices; this site's name is irresistable to anyone with a home network problem. NESE might as well have a neon sign blinking "Dump your home networking question here!" Who is better to solve my home networking problem than a network engineer? When we point out those home networking questions are off-topic, it's not uncommon for the question to chamelon into a "I just want to lean about this subject". Finally, I'd point out that the number of our active close voters is way lower than 100... right now, it's more like 20. <hr> * <sup>Note 1</sup>: I have no idea what the real number of network engineers is, but this seems like a reasonable estimate and it makes the math work well.