I found wikipedia's interface to be pretty unfriendly for me as a new user. Stackoverflow was a lot easier for me to get started with. Maybe that lower barrier to entry leads to more random posts from people that are "low quality?"

Side note: I find a similarity between SO and HN. Both can feel pretty hostile and over-the-top with penalizing you for not saying things "the right way." But as much as it does annoy me sometimes, these are two of the most useful websites for my purposes.

Stack Overflow is worse because the questioners are approaching it in the vulnerable state of "not knowing". This makes the smack-downs worse, because the user already had a problem, and now they have haters as well.

Maybe worse for you. My experience certainly contradicts your claim. And I suspect that your claim is anecdotal as is mine. The difference is I am only speaking about my experience where you are attempting to make a sweeping judgement based on your experience.

Stack Overflow is great for me; I was empathizing with someone in the position of receiving criticism instead of answers.

This hasn't been my experience. I've asked questions that in retrospect were fairly stupid and I've only been treated with respect.

Yeah, browsing a few if my own old questions always makes me think, "seriously? Was I that bad at Google-fu?" Though generally it boiled down to having a problem, and not knowing enough to even ask Google the right questions.

My experience is more like this:

https://serverfault.com/questions/966765/private-network-dns...

Closed due to "off-topic". With a comment that basically says "I don't like your problem, try to be more normal."

You basically had a problem related to a DNS server, so you thought that Server Fault was the place to ask for help. In reality it's more related to workstations, i.e. try asking on Super User or Unix & Linux Stack Exchange.

I suggest having a look at dnsmasq [1]:

> -S, --local, --server=[/[<domain>]/[domain/]][<ipaddr>[#<port>][@<source-ip>|<interface>[#<port>]]

> Specify IP address of upstream servers directly. Setting this flag does not suppress reading of /etc/resolv.conf, use --no-resolv to do that. If one or more optional domains are given, that server is used only for those domains and they are queried only using the specified server. This is intended for private nameservers: if you have a nameserver on your network which deals with names of the form xxx.internal.thekelleys.org.uk at 192.168.1.1 then giving the flag --server=/internal.thekelleys.org.uk/192.168.1.1 will send all queries for internal machines to that nameserver, everything else will go to the servers in /etc/resolv.conf.

[1]: http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html

Note that the closing message didn't suggest better places to ask though. And your advice is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.