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In other sites of Stack Exchange the Meta has no bounty system.

I'm taking part of the new created Stack Overflow PT were the engaged community posts all the suggestion, bugs and questions that are natural of a new site.

This creates a rush of new questions and there is no bounty, thus no way to give special attention to some questions that might be priority issues. In the SO_pt case we have only 1 moderator so far and some questions are community discussions, not necessarily moderator related.

What solutions have been used in other Metas for this? any ideas (with their good and bad sides) are welcome.

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  • We only use bounties here when we think an old feature request has been neglected. Poking SE in the ribs with an umbrella, so to speak. In practice, SE already has a large stack of stuff, and all of the open feature requests are already in that stack, unless they've been [status-declined]. They prioritize that stuff internally, irrespective of any bounties we might place on a meta question.
    – user102937
    Jan 13, 2014 at 22:13
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    @RobertHarvey, in the SO_pt case we have only 1 mod and there are translation issues that are being fixed. Some questions/posts are for the mod, others are for the community to evaluate. My question is, is there a alternative to make some posts have "focus" ?
    – Sergio
    Jan 13, 2014 at 22:15
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    Mods can put the [featured] tag on such questions.
    – user102937
    Jan 13, 2014 at 22:15
  • Upvote the important ones more? Jan 13, 2014 at 22:21
  • @benisuǝqbackwards, sure. That works, but people are extra engaged in the first times of the private beta so they upvote and ask a lot. I would like to hear if any solution has been found in other communities. I'm not sure its common to just have one mod, in our case the mod has to speak portuguese, so maybe that is the reason to just have one.
    – Sergio
    Jan 13, 2014 at 22:25
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    Use tags to separate out things into groups, ie, [tag:translation issue] for translation issues. You could as a group even decide to use [tag:high priority] or something, equivalent of a red exclamation point on an email; but tags, similar to the email note, can be added by anyone, so you'd have to expect some junk in it
    – Joe
    Jan 13, 2014 at 22:26

3 Answers 3

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Bounties aren't even a particularly great way to get attention on MSO (the only meta where they're available). They're nice for the occasional contest, but there are better ways of getting attention:

  • Writing a clear, attention-grabbing title can encourage folks to click through
  • Making sure posts are properly tagged can help the right people find them (don't tag discussions , don't tag support requests , try to include at least one tag that specifies which area of the site, software or process is being talked about).
  • Posting answers that contribute useful information to the discussion can encourage people to write their own
  • Up-voting s can put them into the community bulletin board rotation
  • Spending time on concrete steps to reproduce (for bugs) or fleshing out pros and cons (for feature-requests) can make it much easier and faster for developers to process these.
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  • 2
    But even the greatest bug report can get buried beneath hundreds of newer reports, never to see the sun shines again... bounty is a simple way to possibly resurrect such a report after it's already buried. Jan 13, 2014 at 22:39
  • If a particular bug only affects one person, bountying it isn't necessarily gonna help, @Sha - particularly if it can't be reproduced even under contrived scenarios. It helps a lot more when folks can help work out test-cases or even just testify that it affects them too (and vote!) This is assuming it's not extremely serious - a bug that destroys your account, leaks private information or infects your machine with malware may well be worth looking into even if there's only one reported case.
    – Shog9
    Jan 13, 2014 at 22:43
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    Here is a simple yet good example. Small but irritating bug, got buried and the devs probably didn't notice it, until I set a bounty few months after first reported. Jan 13, 2014 at 22:47
  • Nothing against WinterBash, but... That's exactly the sort of bug that probably shouldn't be given much priority on a normal basis. Nothing wrong with bumping it & getting it fixed, but... If everyone was bountying bugs like that, it would quickly become ineffective.
    – Shog9
    Jan 13, 2014 at 23:01
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    It's not about winter bash it's about having a broken image. Jan 13, 2014 at 23:03
  • Which is now broken again, probably because there's been a new WinterBash...
    – Shog9
    Jan 13, 2014 at 23:04
  • Not broken for me... image is now safely hosted on imgur: i.stack.imgur.com/sRnbB.png (that's probably how Nick "fixed" it) Jan 13, 2014 at 23:09
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    The community bulletin seems like a good solution in our case (the SOpt beta community); I thought it was curated by mods. I'm not so worried about bugs at the moment, I'd use bounties to call attention for important discussions. One caveat though: the 3 posts on our bulletin right now are the very first posts on the meta; being on the bulletin attracts views, which attracts votes, which keeps those posts there. It's hard to beat them with such a small meta community.
    – bfavaretto
    Jan 13, 2014 at 23:29
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    That's not the problem, @bfavaretto - the board will normally rotate hot posts from the past couple of weeks through so they all get some exposure. The problem is that 3 of the 4 slots are chewed up by [featured] posts, and... There seems to be a bug with the logic that pulls [discussion] posts. I'll look into this.
    – Shog9
    Jan 13, 2014 at 23:42
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    Thanks @Shog9. I translated your answer to Portuguese and posted it in our meta. And perhaps Gabe could unfeature one of those kick-off posts too, I'll talk to him about it.
    – bfavaretto
    Jan 14, 2014 at 1:15
  • This was indeed interesting feedback. Btw, i it possible to have a tag that gets automatically pulled into the community bulletin? A kind of featured for the community? I am aware this might also be miss-used, just trying to collect ideas so we can discuss in our meta.
    – Sergio
    Jan 14, 2014 at 19:51
  • That's how discussion (debate on PT) is supposed to work, @Sergio. See: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/130621/… for details. It isn't quite working right now, and I'm not sure why; hopefully it's a simple localization issue.
    – Shog9
    Jan 14, 2014 at 20:14
  • Thanks again, we will ping Gabe about this and @bfavaretto has already translated your answer there. Cheers.
    – Sergio
    Jan 14, 2014 at 20:16
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Just keep bumping it to the front page by editing, adding more information or updating the report/request/discussion with new information.

If you think something is really important and is buried too deep, you can bring it up in chat, for example community managers roam the Tavern almost 24/7 and even email the team to make sure SE employee see the question.

Either way, we can't and shouldn't expect immediate response... the team got lots of work and their own schedule, we can only bring things to their attention and be patient.

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  • That's your sage advice? Just keep bumping the post?
    – user102937
    Jan 13, 2014 at 23:18
  • @RobertHarvey if I think a bug is important enough or want to otherwise draw attention to some discussion or feature request then yes, that's my advice. Jan 13, 2014 at 23:23
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    @RobertHarvey why abuse? That's the purpose of bumping. I don't encourage useless edits, I explicitly wrote "adding more information or updating the report/request/discussion with new information" Jan 13, 2014 at 23:26
  • since per-site metas don't have rep, bump hardly qualifies as abuse
    – gnat
    Jan 14, 2014 at 11:37
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Tags are the main way of separating out questions in meta. for example is how tag synonyms are proposed/discussed, and people who are in charge of fixing tag synonyms and/or are interested in discussing tag synonyms follow that tag. In the long run, fixable issues should be kept on top of, so this works well.

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