Is a problem that a single user is having "too localised"?

Question

Sometimes a user has a problem that is almost certainly unique to him- or herself. The question is "My system is broken. Why? Here are my configuration files." and the answer is "There's a typo on line 3." I then have the feeling that the question should have been asked in Ubuntu Forums and not in AskUbuntu. Can such a question be "too localised"? How do I decide?

Answer 1

No, I think we keep these questions.

Your example goes in with hindsight. If you know the answer is "there's a silly mistake in your configuration" that's fair enough but in the real world, you don't know that. You either have:

• A question that's really hard to answer
• A question that looks really hard to answer with an answer explaining that it's a silly mistake.

I'm a web developer by trade and I make silly mistakes all the time. Stack Overflow helps me bounce my issues around and although many of them are cases where I haven't properly RTFMd, people are there to help and my issue gets solved and I get paid. I'd be a massive hypocrite if I didn't allow other people to do the same.

And take this example of Oli not reading the manual, making a stupid mistake. In this case I managed to figure it out myself but the number of upvotes should indicate how easy it is for many people to make the same silly mistake.

We're not equipped to tell how helpful a question/answer will be until it's out there.

_{Note: Of course there are other types of too-localised questions. This answer is really only intended for things you might retroactively consider to be too user specific. An unanswered question about the release date of 11.04 would still be too-localised.}

Answer 2

Arguably yes but this does not help the poor user who has a real problem.

Perhaps we should be directing users to other sites such as Launchpad -- Questions for Ubuntu in cases such as this. Launchpad does not try to produce a text book answer unlike this site. There are lots of similar questions: each one for a single user.

This is just my opinion however and I would be interested to know what others think.