It looks like banners for questions that are on-hold/closed/locked/deleted/etc are now located above the comments, rather than below.
I'm curious why this change was made. Increased visibility for the banners? Cheese-moving quota not met?
1 Answer
Comments can be... noisy. While they do sometimes contain information useful in understanding why a given post was locked / migrated / closed / etc., even this is of secondary importance to knowing the status of a post - and until we can agree on a suitable system for getting rid of irrelevant comments, there's a pretty decent chance that the commentary won't help much in any case.
In addition, the former placement of status banners was tragically similar to that for advertisements (as Mauro pointed out a while back) - not really ideal for critical information.
So we've moved all the status banners directly under the posts on which they're applied. This applies to all status banners except for Protected when the viewer is a new user (which will continue to appear at the bottom of the page in lieu of the UI for posting an answer).
Of particular note is the effect this has on moderator-applied post annotations, which are intended to provide warnings or other crucial information about a given post:
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8Finally! Thank you. This has been particularly problematic on the sites I frequent with answers, where there'd be a big pile of comments (that mods don't want to delete because, I dunno, the author might respond someday?), and then way down at the bottom you'd see the citation-needed or insufficient-explanation notice, if you read that far and still remembered the post at that point. Commented Jun 1, 2014 at 19:24
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4I bet people still don't read them though.– user147520Commented Jun 1, 2014 at 20:27
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3This change is massively annoying, not all sites do consider the information in comments that useless ... But I have now finally understood and accepted, that the official goal of SE is by no means to support and maintain living international (on scientific sites academic) online communities, but to simply attract volunteers that write a rather steril and "clean" Q&A library useful for the hordes of Google viewers outside the network. And to these outside. And to these outside Google viewers any signs of a living community, such as for example comments, are just noise.– DilatonCommented Jun 16, 2014 at 21:09
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1The only thing I regrett is that SE does not clearly enough communicate this, such that for example on science sites many people sign up under the wrong assumption of being part of an international academic online community which is intended to serve the purpose of doing science together and further international contributions to research.– DilatonCommented Jun 16, 2014 at 21:12
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4I wrote "comments are temporary Post-It notes" in the official documentation years ago and you're just now figuring out that I don't care much for them @Dilaton? I've called comments "second-class citizens", compared TPhy to a mailing list, talked at length about the difficulties inherent in trying to use a system built from the ground up to support the construction of a vast public library for this purpose... And after three years of exposure to this, you're just now realizing that we've no interest in building a private social club? No wonder you've been so unhappy...– Shog9Commented Jun 16, 2014 at 21:15
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2@Shog9 the first two years I was there, Physics SE HAS been such a nice rather academic in spirit place for the international physics community (as MathOverflow still is for mathematicians), before you know what happend. Comparing international academic scientific communities to any privat social clubs is a very invalid analogy, and I read from it that you do not think much about science. And yes it took me way to long (and demanded tribute from my health) to realise that the mission of SE is more profane and less nobel than I first thought, but I am finally down to earth.– DilatonCommented Jun 16, 2014 at 21:31
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3I... would explain where you've gone wrong with that line of thinking, @Dilaton... But of course, I've done that before and it's just gone in one ear and out the other. If you're very lucky, you will soon learn how sausage is made and why a well-run site always looks better from the outside than from within; perhaps you will even begin to understand why MO has been so successful. I hope you do... Best of luck!– Shog9Commented Jun 16, 2014 at 21:40
Increased visibility for the banners?Bingo. These were getting lost under the comments, and new users simply never noticed them.