I think DLux got it pretty much right. The exchange administrators are relatively easy crowd to please, you'll know SF is good when the network engineers accept it. As they are relatively comfortable with Nanog, vendor-nsp mailing lists, irc and other relics, I guess it'll take at least few years. Even if SF starts going to the right direction today.

However, as the good and interesting questions are scarce and the crowd really doesn't appreciate them or the good answers, it's pretty hard to imagine how SF wouldn't self-select itself into uselessness.

Some people have suggested advertising, and I would have to say it wouldn't help. To make it work and gain visitors who would actually return, SF would have to be a valuable resource that just needs to be found. The value is not there at the moment. When someone has a SF-related problem, Google usually finds some obscure blog or years-old mailing list post, but seldom anything from SF.

Big part of this can be attributed to the fact that old stuff runs the world. It's not uncommon to have to work with decade old hardware and even older software. With programming, the pressure is towards using the most productive tools. With systems and network engineering, the pressure is towards causing as little capex as possible. SO crowd has questions about new stuff, the intended SF crowd has questions about antique. Because of this, it will take way longer for SF to find its way to the first results of sysadmins' google searches.

When it comes to finding the "Joel Spolsky of sysadmin bloggers", the fact is that there is none. Actually, Joel isn't really a "programming blogger", I'd say he's read more because of his business orientation than technical content. Sticking to technical stuff limits the readership. To have in-depth knowledge of some platform or technology usually means you don't have broad knowledge about related stuff and optionally you work for the vendor. And the field is even more fragmented than programming. On the other hand, if it was possible to attract the active niche gurus to SF, they could provide really great answers to hard questions.

As a quick fix and easy improvement, there really should be links to SF and SU on the "ask a question" page. It should probably be in the sidebar, with brief, clear description.