tracking problems

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <blah> somebody writes:
> I would like to find out if there are any problem reporting/tracking systems
> available for Unix that is similar to the Info Family product (thats a 
> IBM VSAM mainframe product).
  [ etc., lots of stuff having nothing to do with C ]

Question: I know this article is inappropriate for comp.lang.c. But how
do I explain this to someone else? Is there some reasonably well-defined
quality of an article that always implies inappropriateness?

When someone asks what he's doing wrong with popen("who","r"), the
answer might be that he's mismanipulating some FILE pointers, or it
might be that he's misusing the output of the ``who'' command. How do
you explain that his question was appropriate for comp.lang.c in the
first case and comp.unix.questions in the second? Is the appropriate
newsgroup a function of the question or of the answer? In either case,
what's the function?

Followups by e-mail. Yes, I'm asking this seriously. I simply can't
figure out a good way to explain this ``appropriateness'' concept to
people. Please *don't* send me e-mail if you don't have constructive
suggestions.

---Dan