Where's the border between good and evil on Superuser?

Question

We just had a question on Superuser regarding WGA and the risks of ignoring those messages.

Now I agree with TheTXI comment:

The OP says that he could locate the windows key and try to validate it. That is enough to make the assumption that it is valid. And even if his installation was not legit, the questions is not asking how to get by WGA or advocating for piracy. All it is asking for is consequences of ignoring the WGA message, which is an entirely legitimate question even for regular legal users who get hit with the WGA warnings for no reason.

But where do we draw a border for questions we want to see answered on Superuser? Since if certain people start to see topics like this pop-up they might start to ask questions that go over the border and into warez-like areas. Especially now that Superuser is going public, the risk of question on illegitimate topics are bound to become frequent and I would personally like to prevent that from happening.

Any thoughts? Perhaps I'm just overreacting...

Answer 1

There is no way to define that boundary here. Every case has to be taken as it comes and judged appropriately.

Answer 2

I know I addressed this somewhere on Meta before but I don't know where.

Basically what I said then was that if someone is talking about doing something which violates warranty (say, jailbreaking an iPhone) that is generally acceptable and I will tend to leave a note on the question telling the community that SuperUser does not advocate nor take responsibility for any behavior which could void a warranty or break your product.

For items which are blatantly inquiring on how to do illegal activities, it is much easier to draw a line. The only real problem is what if it is legal in one area and illegal in another? You could get into a debate over that in itself. It is illegal to try and bypass the national firewall in China, but nobody would think twice about an American asking a firewall/proxy question to get by a corporate filter. Questions asking how to acquire illegal copies of software are 99.999% likely to be closed immediately.