I would add to the answers offered Farray and Mr. Atwood: the "not a real question" is tricky in this forum.
Since the purview of graphic design practice is intrinsically visual, there is always the risk of lexical confusion when you engage in the act of talking about it with words. As such, it can be hard for us to differentiate the "real" questions from those whose interesting and/or important nature is hidden by sub-optimal word choice.
The FAQ's enumerated criteria for determining if a question is real or not -- "ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical" -- arguably describe the essential content that animates all design critiques in academia and in business. In , descriptors are commonly evaluated contextually; words like "challenging" or "visceral" or "considerate" (or "ambiguous" or "rhetorical", for that matter) are used in praise as frequently as in condemnation; and any given statement has connotations that differ, diverge, or even diametrically oppose what a naïve reading might suggest
For example, if I'm critiquing the famous "Lemon" Volkswägen ad I would cite the opposition in its contradictory messages (as delineated by typographic hierarchy qua written copy) as a major factor of its success... But, in a critique of 80 Percent Thinking by Ian Cylkowski, I would talk about the opposition in it's contradictory messages (as delineated by typographic hierarchy qua written copy) as problematic and flawed.
That's just my opinion of course -- someone else could assert that either the former or the latter example as successfully harmonious instead, or that they're both unresolved, or whatever. Such is the nature of discussing design. Each bit of discussion is a product of the relations of its component words, rather than the identity the words themselves. I'm not trying to say that "it's all relative and therefore unknowable" (which is an irritating argument no one is interested in) but all "facts, references, [and] specific expertise" will incur the need for subjective assessment.
The practical upshot of all of this is: assessing whether a question is "real" or not means reading the whole thing, in good faith, and then thinking about what it is saying.
Stack Exchange questions are "real" when they seek to seed a discussion that will end with a definitive and constructive answer -- that's what the "real question" FAQ item is trying to describe†.
But, since this is a site where people come to learn about graphic design through discussion, questions' real-ness will be just as subjective as any design discussion; we will be able to make the real-ness call, but not without a bit of patient consideration: Farray's answer suggests some well-contextualized criteria, for example, which describe lexical patterns (rather than specific words) which were evident to him after such consideration.
† Most other Stack Exchanges' subject matter can be definitively nailed down with written language in some way. Unlike graphic design, the fundaments of e.g. Stack Overflow or german.stackoverflow.com aren't inherently subjective; questions can be judged as "real" without any handwringing about meaning or contextual evaluation, or any of that -- FAQ criteria like what we have here will work great in these sites.
