Disclaimer and reminder: This is not a law office, and I am neither judge nor a lawyer; but I did stay at a certain unnamed motel and this is what I experienced in a remotely similar fashion. Moreover, I do not often delve deep into meta, but when I do...
It is often to advocate for the stance less popular, not because I believe it best, but because I feel the roots of conventional wisdom has grown too strong in this regard.
And so on and so forth.
Most questions will never point explicitly to a primary premise of being a localized, legal concern with real ramifications, but all questions have immediate legal ramifications whether we [often] think about it not. Usually it is not the case that we consciously weigh legal ramifications while we ponder more banal matters of our day, but who is to say some SO or Programmers or Security post does not make the difference at some point for the ephemeral 'bad guy'. There is no way to prevent it. It is not even remotely possible. It is completely counter to the ideals of our society. We cannot be productive if we worry about that sort of thing all the time, so why worry about it at all, especially in a venue like this (so long as it does not create an explicit, controllable conflict of interest for our generous host and our sponsors).
Some posters are better at keeping the personally damning aspects out of their initial post. They keep the question in a sanitized, representative form concerned with general application or purpose of an issue. That is a safe thing to do. Occasionally they may unintentionally note or raise the concern of legal ramifications. At times, the conflict of interest or personal stake leaks through.
Which is worse in that case, possibly bad advice given, or no advice? Leave them blowing in the wind, or give them some bare minimum to grab on to? At least with the bad advice, they have a next step to take, even if they might have to take two steps back. That is how progress works: sometimes a little forward, sometimes a little back.
In any case, whether the concern involves a potentially obvious legal issue or not, the advice seeker must assume some responsibility for seeking the advice of anonymous lay people to their problems, even if we strive and generally provide a good community and good advice with the information we have to work with. Only if we purposefully or maliciously misrepresent ourselves would our bad advice be particularly unfortunate.
TLDR I think we should reconsider how tightly we hold the reigns in regards to questions that smell of legal or legally related concerns.
