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Referring to this question: How to enable root login? (and this edit of that question).

There is an added remark in this question which doesn't seem to belong in the the body of a question:

Mod Warning: Running as root is a bad idea - You never need to do it but if you do you can very easily and irreparably destroy your system and your data.

Apart from if you think this remark is needed, the placement and method are off as far as I'm concerned. It's meta-information, and should be at most a comment. It doesn't belong in the question body.

Also, it was removed by the origional poster, and then rolled back: looks like the beginning of a small edit party?

Overall I think that, just like "this is urgent" remarks, that remarks like "this is dangerous" do not belong edited in the question.


I wasn't sure if I needed to make this a meta-thing, but my flag was declined with this note:

your flag comments are probably more appropriate on meta - suggest raise a question there with a link back to this Q.

So here we are:

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This was a rushed decision I was never happy with, but was out shouted about it a while ago. I think it serves to be revisited again.

In my original answer when the question was raised, was to simply put a warning at the top of the answer to warn users of potential risks, not just for root but for any other potentially harmful things. Then I realized we do potentially harmful things whenever a user runs sudo and elevates their privileges. For me, I think it's a lot better if there is just a comment and at best a note in the answer about why you shouldn't run as root (with a link to the question why). No different then what we've been doing with users who say they are chmod 0777 their web accessible directories.

I'd be interested to see what others think more than a year later.

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  • I agree that in an answer a note might be/is valuable: you are giving extra information about the secrets you are trying to reveal :)
    – Nanne
    Dec 14, 2012 at 15:11

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