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As previously referenced in the recent post about closed questions, many questions pertaining to mining are being closed as off topic.

I think that much of the confusion comes from ambiguity in the on-topic list. In particular, are questions pertaining to mining in general, but not to Ethereum in particular on topic? For example, this was given as an example in the aforementioned post, but I would argue that nothing in the question mentions or is specific to Ethereum.

Many similar questions are posted, asking for hardware recommendations and expected hashrates and help with mining software like Claymore, and I think it would be good to clarify whether these sorts of questions are on-topic, perhaps by expanding the category

Open-source Ethereum clients, wallets, browsers, or other related tools and libraries

to include mining hardware? What do you think the litmus test for these types of posts should be?

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I'm never really sure what to do with these, so it would be good to get some level of agreement.

I think the way I've been treating them is to flag them as off-topic unless there's at least some relation to something Ethereum-y.

For example, the one you link to, "About GPU lifetime", is IMO blockchain agnostic, and would be better suited to a board dealing with hardware. Unfortunately, the best StackExchange has to offer is SuperUser, or the Hardware Recommendations beta, but neither of those sound quite right. The general Cryptocurrencies board might also have been suitable, but that never made it out of Area51.

On the other hand, something along the following lines I wouldn't flag:

"EthMiner is causing such-and-such a problem on my hardware that I don't have when running bitcoin mining software, etc., etc..."

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  • I agree that ethminer specific problems should be on topic. What are your thoughts on issues with issues pertaining to other mining software like claymore? I notice that these questions are almost always left unanswered. Maybe we need to either make them off-topic or try to recruit some users who can answer those types of question
    – Tjaden Hess
    Commented Jul 2, 2017 at 16:43
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    Perhaps that's part of the problem: mining questions require specialist knowledge, and each different type of mining software requires an even more specialised set of knowledge. So we're down to a subset of a subset of the community. And if most of those people are happily mining away, never experiencing problems, then they're less likely to spend time here. Perhaps there just isn't the user-base at the minute that would mean they get answered? Perhaps one answer would be to blanket ban anything relating to mining, to prevent us having to apply the criteria we're trying to come up with now.
    – Richard Horrocks
    Commented Jul 2, 2017 at 22:06
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    reddit.com/r/EtherMining/ seems to get a lot of traffic, so one option would be to punt questions there?
    – Richard Horrocks
    Commented Jul 2, 2017 at 22:07
  • I'd say the two options are either punt questions to them, or recruit them to answer questions here
    – Tjaden Hess
    Commented Jul 3, 2017 at 16:43
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    My opinion, I upvoted Richard's comment about directing such questions to reddit.com/r/EtherMining It's also relevant how the specialist knowledge is with a few people, and with an eventual move to proof of stake, the mining subset and specialists could decrease further.
    – eth Mod
    Commented Jul 10, 2017 at 7:42

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