@Ramhound when you present information at the most appropriate time the chance of it being read is greatest. How to ask a question has the best chance of being read at the time you write it and have it be in the center not on the side. Your eyes are focused on title and body at that time so you are likely to read how to ask. Be hopeful and let's try it with a/b testing you see if I am right. Why the pessimism?

I don't disagree with your assessment. There seems to be less caring on superuser than some of the other boards. I feel many elders lack compassion and a willingness to play the teacher role. Maybe its just personality, been-there-done-that, or some of the deficiency we have as humans working IT and computers all the time. An improvement could moving How To Ask on the right side to just under Title (especially for new users) may improve question quality. We could do some A/B testing so we can collect data over time. It is too easy to ignore on the right which encourages poor questions.

Proof shows you verified your work and there is trust in your answer. I've tried people's solution where it didn't work. No proof invites wrong answers. Hey no one is stopping you from asking how you wish. I personally won't bother solving questions if loading data to prove a solution takes too much time. For example, your question I wouldn't bother with because the data is not import friendly. Who knows maybe there are others that can provide a brilliant answer but by not making it easy to answer, people are discouraged to answer. I just see a blocker here and wish there was a better way.

I'm not talking about the person asking the question. I'm referring to proper that answer questions have to recreate the data to provide the answer with proof. The way you posted your question means I have to recreate your data then going about solving it. The format you present IDs good for visual presentation but not for importing into excel. Certainly better than a screenshot but still not easy to import into excel

Yeah perfect example of sample data that you have to re type. And some sample data unfortunately is more than three rows to explain properly

If Apple is for apple hardware/software and superuser is for computer hardware/software, there seems to be a lot of overlap in terms of where questions about apple hardware/software can belong in. Long term, I feel SU becomes a dumping ground for questions that are better organized in Apple, Linux, etc. It seems SU receives enough questions that are better grafted into other exchanges that now exist to serve that community.

it's not very likely that the website will become unavailable any time soon. -- thanks for updating the answer to be more self-contained. It did feel like special exemption for old dates, but within the context of 2009, it makes sense. I'm sure as much traffic you send HTG, there are likely referrals from HTG as well. I'm sure it is not a one-way relationship.

Is there a chat between the OP and another person? I tried to move my comments to chat, but it would not move either. I am guessing if a chat already exists for the user, another one can not be created. One chat per question? I would think new chat should get migrated over to existing chat. Seems like an unforeseen situation and an enhancement may need to be made for this use case.