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Feel free to edit the title, if there's a more suitable one.

There's this question

How to move a file of 250 GB to another server?

The tittle looks decent, but when i told him to use zip the file and use rsync, he replied

what tarball ? how to use rsync?

So i had to answer these questions, rather than helping user with problems transferring files.

Do you remember that guy who complained about his question being closed for low quality?

Isn't "what is tarball? And how to use it, low quality?"

Isn't "How to use Rsync?" low quality? isn't it a dupe? Superuser is full of questions about Rsync.

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  • I'd say everything matters. Even the asker's other questions, profile message that may or may not describe his level of expertise in some areas, and all you can have access to. Sep 11, 2013 at 8:35

2 Answers 2

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To start with your initial question:

Do you judge a question on the title or on the user's attempts to solve it?

You should judge a question on its overall appearance (proper title, formatting, spelling, etc.) and its contents, i.e. showing research effort, being on-topic, reasonably scoped, etc.

A good title on its own doesn't make a good question. Quite the contrary, we have a number of bad questions that happen to attract many views just because their title is so broad. "How to move a file to another server" is a good example here.

Now, to the specific question: I think your comment and your answer are good. You point them in the right direction. The OP hasn't described their problem clearly enough though, and there isn't much to work with in this question (which in my opinion should not have been allowed by the quality filter). You might have to rewrite your answer at a later stage, or remove it entirely.

Tom Wijsman edited the post, but I'm hesitant to interpret so much into the original question. In general you should always try to salvage posts whenever possible, but if the OP can't describe what they actually did and where they got stuck, we cannot help them.

For the time being, I put the question on hold until the OP can clarify what the issue is.

Isn't "what is tarball? And how to use it, low quality?"

Isn't "How to use Rsync?" low quality? isn't it a dupe? Superuser is full of questions about Rsync.

Yes, absolutely. Of course, if the OP just asked that in a comment, that's not an issue per se, so you can just point them to general resources on how to use tar and rsync, but leave a gentle reminder that these things can be looked up as well.

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Probably both! But never judge a book by it's cover(too much)

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