[mmahemoff]

Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail.

Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. By definition, this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible, that's pure speculation and there are infinite other scenarios we could imagine, but we don't need to ask them as StackOverflow questions.

On a practical note, it's worth banning just to prevent a thousand viral marketers and recruiters falling over themselves to compose the most attention-grabbing fake questions in the next month.

[captainmuon]

They say questions should be "about real problems people face" but that's not quite true.

- You can post questions out of simple curiosity. - You can post rhetoric questions where you already now the answer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer ).

It shouldn't matter whether the question was based on a real situation, or if the story was just made up for "motivating" the question [1]. I often (> 50% of the time) make up or change the backstory for my SO posts, to prevent people from asking "But what is your real problem", "What have you tried", and so on, and because I want just a simple answer to my question goddamnit.

([1] Even if it is a hoax, or a joke, the question has merit. Just close as duplicate without getting all worked up about it.)

[RubyPinch]

its not so much "Not a real programming question", its more "Not able to be answered objectively". Stack Overflow is meant to be a wiki of questions and answers, and like a wiki, it wants to only present facts and not opinions.

if one wants subjective questions and answers, there are other sites in stackexchange for that

[JdeBP]

As noted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590 , the author of the question has since stated that he was attempting to see whether there were any "serious administrators" at ServerFault who would know that what he had claimed he had done could not have happened as stated.

I wonder what he's making of all of the people now conflating Stack Overflow with Server Fault. Server Fault says its blurb, is a question and answer site for system and network administrators.

[oliyoung]

"this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible"

Having done rm -fr / on a box before, I think it should stay. The incident was fake, the problem is real, it elicited real responses and has value.

[JdeBP]

You should read the Italian news coverage. Marco Marsala points out that the problem is fake, that (as several people also noted on Hacker News) the command mentioned has been benign since 2006, and that Ansible doesn't permit this anyway. He observes that "serious administrators" would know this, but apparently there were no such people at ServerFault answering his question because otherwise they'd have spotted such a blatant error ("altrimenti saprebbero che quanto ho descritto non può accadere").

* http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500711

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514666

[shaftway]

Banning the account will have no effect. In the future people will just use throwaway or sockpuppet accounts, so who cares?

Also, I don't see who benefits from this hoax. Who is going to use him as a hosting provider whether the problem was real or fake. Both indicate that he's not a reliable provider.