Magic wand time - what does your community need?

Question

Continuing in my series of questions to you: Last week, I heard some great origin stories. This week, I’d like to refocus a bit on what could be better (in your view). I’m very curious about whether we’ll find near universal agreement or if we’ll discover that different communities have very different needs or ideas of how things “should” work. So my question for you this week is:

• If you had a magic wand that you could wave that would let you fix ONE thing that would help your community (not the network, not the company, but the specific site community with which you most closely identify) overnight, what would you change (and why?), and what would the result look like - how would we know it was different?

This can be something technical (a site “pet peeve” - props to Mithical for suggesting as a topic), or could be something in policy, or could be the size of your mod team, or permissions of your users, or something about the environment in which you operate, or none of the above!

I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have the ability to magically “produce” technical change. While I might be able to advocate for technical solutions, I’m not committing here and now that we will build anything suggested here. I’m just looking for ideas - and I would ask that you lean toward social or community based ideas rather than technical fixes, if possible.

• For bonus magic internet points, feel free to hazard a guess about whether your beliefs would be widely shared or whether you might be a bit of an island on this one.

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Community	"ONE thing"
Code Golf and Coding Challenges Stack Exchange	Making all users use the Sandbox before posting a challenge on Code Golf and Coding Challenges
All communities	Changing age requirement needed to be a moderator
All communities	Stop people from enforcing the rules without questioning and understanding their purpose.
Stack Overflow
All communities	Making vote counts visible regardless of reputation
Code Golf and Coding Challenges Stack Exchange	Built-in leaderboards on Code Golf
All communities	Fix a 10 year old security vulnerability
All communities	Time Travel! (Or at least a cautionary tale of community dynamics)
Stack Overflow	Discourage overly situational debugging questions, encourage more generally useful questions.
All communities	Convert Answer to Comment
Puzzling	Better spoilers
	Allow more syntax highlighting
Interpersonal Skills
Software Engineering	Encourage more community members on Software Engineering in curating minor issues in questions in favor of closing them
All communities	Could we have Chat (and meta) on the sidebar?
	Tag Hierarchies/Dependencies
	Decrease the limit of simultaneous hot questions from the same site
Science Fiction & Fantasy	Custom question-flow for asking story ID requests
English Language Learners	Easy way to find credible definitions for words and idioms without leaving the site
	Bring chat into this century
All communities	A community advocate.
TeX - LaTeX	Restore previous "community promotion" conventions
	Improve or officially support sandboxing
Meta Stack Exchange	Fewer off-topic questions from new users.
All communities	More capability to customise the Help Center
Project Management	It looks like you're asking a question about Scrum. Have you considered asking it on Project Management instead?
	Provide more details about spoiler content without revealing
All communities	Site-specific new user onboarding
	Shared Drive for valuable Google spreadsheets
	Fix a major past mistake which has lasting effect to this day
	Force new users to take a quiz
Stack Overflow	Duplicate closure should be a more rewarding experience
Role-playing Games	Make it possible for RPG system tags to always appear first, and display them in a special color
	Multimedia Help Center
Ask Ubuntu	Archive feature
Graphic Design	Modify the copyright release clause a bit for this site so that a stronger community could be built, a mechanism for sharing SVG files
English Language Learners	Change the way questions are tagged
	Tag Reform!
	Better accessibility.
	Allow non-bumping minor edits, but review them on /review
	Invite low rep user to a chat
	Retain existing users
Biology	Ability to search Species ID posts using pictures
Ask Ubuntu	Better integration with other forms of Ubuntu documentation
Code Golf and Coding Challenges Stack Exchange	Automatic accepting
Ask Ubuntu	Obsolete Answer Flag

Answer 1

Making vote counts visible regardless of reputation

According to this, the main reason viewing vote count is restricted by rep is because it's costly on the server side. It'd probably take a bit of work, but I'm sure it'd be possible to optimize things a bit so that anyone who has an account can view vote counts.

This isn't quite as important on main sites, but on meta and per-site metas it's often important to be able to see the vote breakdown. On CGCC, for example, a lot of our rules are based on voting on meta questions and answers, so not being able to see vote breakdowns makes it difficult for a new user to determine if something meets the requirements to be a valid answer or not.

Even if an answer has +10 score, without being able to see the vote breakdown you have no way to know if 10 people found an answer to be incredibly useful, or 1000 found it to be helpful and 990 did not.

This is definitely more a smaller issue, but it'd be nice if newer users (or established users on other sites) wouldn't have to resort to workarounds like userscripts to be able to see vote breakdowns.

Answer 2

Hi, we're special!

This is what the front page of IPS looks like to someone that doesn't have a profile there. This is what it looks like after you've made a profile and log in. And what you end up seeing after finding us on HNQ: This or this depending on whether you're logged in. The 'Questions' page too, where people are likely to end up browsing other questions: it looks like this.

Let me add some more screenshots to compare those with: A forum, one of the Facebook groups I'm in, and a not so-random subreddit.

Spot the differences. Both that Facebook group and that subreddit have a box in their right sidebar with rules and information about the thing you're looking at. All IPS gets is a big black banner with some text. Our meta (does a newbie know what meta is?), chat, our help center... All the things that contain information about what makes our site just a little bit different from others: they're all hidden away behind this button.

As for the forum post I threw in there: "Closed" behind a question doesn't immediately make it clear that this is because the question is unsuitable for the site. On that forum I screenshotted, for example, 'Closed' means as much as 'I'm not looking for reactions right now'. If your post was problematic, it would've been deleted by moderators/admins. But for a new user to SE, there is no place that explains what 'closed' means (until they open the question), they just see a list of titles and assume they can ask about similar things.

Do you think a total newbie would want to know who the newest valued associates are, or what the site statistics are? That they're immediately looking for tags to watch, or to create a free team? Or would it perhaps be better to give each site a part of that right sidebar, where they can explain "Hey, if you're thinking of asking a question here, look at this and this. If you want to answer, here's your relevant info! Also, don't use our comments to argue or write answers in". I want that box, similar to what my Facebooks groups and some not-so-random subreddits have. I want to have the ability to shove it in people's faces: Hi, we're special, and this is what makes us different from other sites you may be used to!.

Answer 3

Fix a 10 year old security vulnerability

You can add images from any source in a post (or in chat). This allows things like:

• Determining the IP addresses of specific chat users or (with less accuracy) highly active users on main
  • This allows tracking which questions they view, which chat transcripts they open, and more
• Gaming the Announcer-class badges
• Making it appear to network administrators that people on school or work computers are navigating to porn sites
• Phishing passwords from people using old browsers
• Silently taking advantage of certain CORS vulnerabilities in other sites
• Freezing users' browsers with specially crafted SVGs
• Using advertising links to make money

Additionally, after these "images" (usually not actually images) are removed from an offending post, one can link to the revision page, which appears trustworthy but still contains the payload.

Answer 4

Duplicate closure should be a more rewarding experience

The main community I use is Stack Overflow. We have more than a decade worth of questions - chances are that most simple queries are answered. Yet we get them again and again. We are drowning in duplicates. Some show up multiple times a day.

There are multiple issues with closing duplicates that make it a chore and not even viewed in good light.

Closure seen as bad

Duplicates are closed and many users seem to think that closure is somehow bad. There are two misconceptions here, in fact:

• closure is not bad. It is supposed to be a temporary state until the question is improved. It is quite neutral, not any sort of judgment on the user as a person or driven by malice.
• Duplicates are a type of answer. This discrepancy is jarring because dupe closures are still closures. Yet, we close as dupes not as a temporary state¹ but to immediately give access to answers. In some cases, the answers have been curated and improved for years.

These misconceptions put people off.

In the ideal magical world of my fantasy, duplicate closure would not be presented as "closure" but re-framed as a way of answering.

¹ Unless the duplicate was wrong. But we do not aim to close against the wrong target.

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Question askers do not cooperate

The misconceptions do agitate a lot of them. This leads to some fighting the duplicate closures. Here are some of the common arguments:

• The title does not match. But we do not close based on title but answers.
• The top answer does not help. Again, we close because of all answers, not just the top one.
• The duplicate does not work for their code. Very often this is because their code uses different names - it is not foo it is bar. Or values - not 42 it is 215. And that is it - everything is the same.

We close as duplicates to give access to ready-made answers instead of having to wait. Having to then further spend time convincing people that yes, this is the answer but you have to maybe modify slightly or maybe even read further down is frankly exhausting.

Not all question askers disagree or fight the dupe closures. However, I seriously sometimes avoid closure and just leave it because I do not feel I have the mental fortitude to start explaining yet again why a would answer something.

In my imagination I picture question askers being happy they are linked to a high-quality existing resource. Because they recognize that it does solve their problem.

---

Question answerers do not cooperate

Another reason to close as duplicates is to consolidate all knowledge in one place. This only works if all the knowledge is in one place.

Very often, however, we get answers to duplicate questions. Sometimes many. A common and simple enough question can rack up 5+ answers by the time it is closed.

Sometimes, duplicates are not even closed. It is extremely frustrating to start searching for a duplicate and find 3-4 different questions that are all fundamentally the same but you cannot really choose any one of them because all are open and all have different answers.

Gold badge closure power helps a bit but not everybody has that.

In my dreams, people are motivated to find or vote for a duplicate instead of answering.

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Searching for the correct dupe target is not very pleasant

I cannot entirely blame people for answering duplicates. Having to look for existing answers is a literal thankless task. The vast majority of the time, at least.

Some duplicates are easier to find. Others take more time. Regardless of the type, I personally start to get exhausted after having to look for a dozen duplicates in a row. It feels like I am just a personalized search assistant. I imagine others might have even less of a tolerance to that.

A simple answer is very tempting. It might be easier to write one than find the correct duplicate target. Also, answers get upvotes, comments, and reputation in general. Finding a duplicate gives you either nothing or frustration.

With some imaginary powder, I would make it so somehow proposing duplicates has some sort of reward. Some incentive to do it rather than just because consolidated knowledge is how what we want of Stack Overflow. It will help mitigate some of the dissatisfaction related to this.

---

Amount of incoming questions is high

This might be a personal thing but what I also find exhausting is just how fast questions are coming in. At more busy hours, there might be 10 questions a minute. At less busy hours maybe 1 question a minute. Normally, it is somewhere in between.

In the time I spend evaluating few candidate questions to see which most closely matches as a duplicate target... there may be another 30-50 new questions added. A lot of them asking things that were already asked years ago.

That is only about the tags I monitor. At least in that corner of Stack Overflow, it seems impossible to keep up. We need to have more people curating given the number of questions we get.

Hopefully, all these magical transformations will make it easier for users to find an answer to their questions. Which will reduce the tide of new duplicates that come in. At least a bit.

---

With a magic wand, I would like to make the duplicate closure more pleasant for everybody involved. Close voters, answerers, as well as question authors. I just hope there is magic strong enough to do that.

Answer 5

Could we have Chat (and meta) on the sidebar?

This is kinda a request that goes across communities, but also is about communities (Very Zathras, I know).

In the old days, chat was a "first class" citizen of the network, sharing a top bar with the main site and meta. Both (per site) meta and Chat are second class citizens compared to Teams. It would be very nice to consider having per site meta and chat represented on the left bar - as our second and third spaces.

People don't really find meta (or end up here by accident) or chat as easily as they did, and that is detrimental to the vibrancy of the respective spaces for each community.

Answer 6

Improve or officially support sandboxing

Code Golf is probably the site with the biggest need for this feature, though other sites like Worldbuilding have sandboxes as well.

Currently, sandboxes are just meta questions. Answers are drafts, and comments and votes are used for feedback. CGCC's sandbox currently has over 3000 answers, and the limitations of this system have become apparent:

• It's difficult to review drafts, and often unrewarding
• It's difficult to get people to notice sandbox posts, so they need to be regularly advertised in chat
• This means that new users' posts can sometimes slip past and receive no feedback, even when they do everything right and use the sandbox as requested
• It's difficult to get new users to notice or use the sandbox, when they're the ones who it would likely be most helpful for

Despite almost every new user being requested to use the sandbox in the tour, welcome modal, ask question guidance, and most reviewers' welcome comments, we still get plenty of questions which are either off-topic or lacking the necessary clarity or objectivity that the site requires.

I don't have any specific solution in mind, because I don't know how much work these would take or how much work SE would be capable of putting in. But, ranging from the simplest to the most effective, here are some ideas:

• Add a link next to the "ask question" button, taking you to the sandbox
• Add a feature where a meta question can be marked as an official sandbox (maybe a mod-only sandbox tag), which could add various things:
  • Disabling the "there are already more than 30 answers" pop-up
  • Sorting by active by default, regardless of the user's sort order on the rest of meta
  • Linking to the sandbox (in a very obvious way) in various highly visible places, such as the sidebar and review tab of the ask question page
  • A way to show the most recent few drafts somewhere visible, like the sidebar, to encourage reviewing
  • A way to quickly migrate questions to and from the sandbox
• Add an official solution for sandboxing, like a sandbox subdomain or something like collectives

Any solution that would have a meaningful impact would probably take a lot of work for SE, but it would be immensely appreciated on sites where sandboxing is encouraged, and it would likely decrease the number of closed or negatively voted questions on sites like CGCC massively.

Answer 7

Stack Overflow: Discourage overly situational debugging questions, encourage more generally useful questions.

This likely means less focus (especially by high-rep users) on if the asker has put in enough effort to deserve a solution and more focus on whether the question is a specific, clear programming problem.

As Shog9 puts better than I ever could, the only question we should be asking about effort is "has the asker put enough thought into the problem to formulate a clear, specific question?"

This means no more comments that are basically just "What have you tried so far?" (which you can still post as long as you add "so far") or "Stack Overflow is not a free code-writing service" (it is).

Such a strong focus on problem-solving effort emphasizes debugging questions so specific to the asker's situation that they're unlikely to be of use to anyone other than the original asker (Shog9's above-linked answer, again, explains this better than I can). Frequently, such debugging questions technically comply with all the rules, get answered, the answerer gets some rep, and then the question is never seen again by anyone who finds it useful for the rest of eternity.

Answer 8

This is something that recently came up over on SFF as it is very similar to one of the questions (#9) asked in the election questionnaire. In my answer I mentioned new user onboarding. However, this is something that looks to be being worked on at the moment and some good steps have been taken there so I won't focus on that here. I'm sure @Catija will also be glad that I'm not going to ask about site theming this time around!

What I do want to focus on is something a bit more specific to SFF though not solely applicable there:

Tag Hierarchies/Dependencies

Many sites in practice employ Tag Hierarchies, meaning that every question with this tag must also have that tag.

• On SFF, for example, all [avengers-endgame] questions should be tagged with [marvel-cinematic-universe] and in turn all [marvel-cinematic-universe] questions should also have the [marvel] tag. This means if you're asking a question on a specific MCU film, you need 3 tags by default out of the 5 maximum. See here and here for example, and there's a long-standing feature request for tag hierarchies.
• On Literature, similarly, all [nineteen-eighty-four] questions should be tagged with [george-orwell], and the same for any story with a known author, while all [war-and-peace] questions should be tagged with [leo-tolstoy] and [russian-literature]. This means if you're asking a question on a Russian novel, you need 3 tags by default out of the 5 maximum. The site has a clear, consistent, and rigid tagging system, but the 5-tag limit is often a problem.
• On Puzzling, again, all [geometry] questions should be tagged with [mathematics], and all [sudoku] questions should be tagged with [grid-deduction] and [logical-deduction]. (Actual tagging isn't fully consistent with these policies, but a few users are working on it slowly.) This has come up a few times on meta, and tag hierarchies have been requested again.
• On M&TV they have something similar to us on SFF with universe/franchise tags and specific work tags. It is also likely applicable to the more technical sites where library tags and version tags probably want the main language tag all the time: the main meta feature request linked above refers mainly to SO.

In short, we need a way to make it easier to group tags together that rely on each other: something more automatic than just writing "please use this tag together with this other tag" in the wiki excerpt and then a lot of editing when new users inevitably fail to notice or read the wiki.

The change here would essentially mean that we could mark tags as dependant on one another and so if a question is tagged with Tag A it will also always be tagged with Tab B, C, etc.

This might mean a change in the number of tags allowed on a post as well, or that the higher level tags are not shown on the question but are linked to it in some other way, but the posts will still be discoverable through those higher level tags too.

Answer 9

This is a short one:

Bring chat into this century

Answer 10

Stop people from enforcing the rules without questioning and understanding their purpose.

We have a lot of rules here, and that is a good thing most of the time. But the rules tend to take on a life of their own, independent of the purpose they used to serve. Most of our rules boil down to ensuring that people are civil and that the content meets a certain quality threshold. The specific rules are simply patterns we saw that indicated problems.

This can get to a point where people simply match patterns and act on anything that matches that pattern, no matter if the content actually presents a problem or not. This is in part due to some of our rules being inherently difficult to judge, but my impression is that in the end we always end up with more of a "letter of the law" enforcement than any true understanding of the purpose of our rules.

Half of this problem are popular, but inherently problematic rules like those against homework questions. They're very easy to overapply to posts that are not a quality problem. But you can misuse most of our other rules as well.

This is not about a single site, but about two that I feel attached to. How much of an issue this is probably depends quite heavily on the dynamics of the community and the topic, some topics are inherently more difficult to deal with.

Answer 11

Better spoilers

The site I started on, Puzzling, has a lot of spoilers. Many (if not most) answers have a significant amount of content in spoilers, and many questions have a hint (or hints) in spoilers. That's the site culture. It comes with how we've tried to force the SE Q&A model to fit a puzzle-solving site.

Given that, it would be wonderful for spoilers to be improved. There are two big things:

• Make spoilers accessible to keyboard-only users
• Better support for Markdown in spoilers: tables, but also everything else (since most people aren't going to discover the hack of using HTML instead of Markdown).

All that content that Puzzling has in spoilers could benefit from better, easier formatting; people are reduced to using funky hacks or just giving up on proper formatting altogether. The times that I've had to help someone figure out how to spoiler code, or explain that tables don't work, or fix up a post with an apologetic "I'm new and can't figure out the spoiler formatting" etc. are numerous. And making spoilers more accessible seems like a no-brainer (given a magic wand - I'm sure it's more complicated behind-the-scenes).

For something that combines both of these bullet points, take my crusade for Markdown table conversion. I have an SEDE query to find posts which have MathJax tables, so that I can edit them into Markdown ones to improve accessibility. But... a lot of the tables I find are inside spoilers, and I can't fix those. Markdown tables simply don't work in spoilers, and even if they did, my target audience of vision-impaired-folks wouldn't be able to get to them anyways (assuming they're keyboard-only).

So given a magic wand, I would give my community better spoilers.

Answer 12

More capability to customise the Help Center

The elements of the Help Center that moderators can customise on behalf of their community are quite limited and limiting. The fixed elements are all about the working of the SE 'engine' and there isn't really enough 'space' to talk about the workings of the specific community, especially the community-specific expectations/aspirations for good questions and answers.

Yes, we can include useful guidance that fits naturally in the current structure, such as what is on- and off-topic, but there's other stuff we have either to shoehorn under a irrelevant topic -- making the specific information hard to find, and making that topic (What topics can I ask about here?) longer and longer and less likely to be read.

And yes, we can point to Meta questions but I don't believe Meta questions are a good means of communicating with new users -- the format is confusing to them. Why is it a question? Does that mean it isn't a policy? Why isn't this in the Help Center anyway -- does that mean it's less important?

Give us the ability to have sub-pages in the Help Center -- I won't try to design the structure here, but stuff hanging off 'how to ask a good question' and 'how to write a good answer' would be a start. And somewhere we could put our specific privacy guidance, guidance for including images of sources, guidance for asking for software recommendations, guidance on 'lookup requests', ... All the stuff that is current community policy that we expect/prefer askers and answerers to take into account. If nothing else, it should help improve the experience for newcomers and maybe that will make them stick around -- we have too many hit and run questions and we need to convert some of those into community members not drive-by posters.

Answer 13

For the SO community, more people willing to take action rather than just leaving comments.

If a question requires a dozen comments to eventually dig out all of the information required to answer it, it should have been closed in the first place until the op makes the necessary adjustments to avoid people posting guesses as answers. Ideally this would cut down on answered dupes and allow us to more effectively route users to time-tested answers.

A few potential options:

• Open up close/reopen voting sooner for high-traffic sites to reflect the fact that the majority of users are sub 3k
• Open up privileges based on actions rather than (or alternatively/in addition to) reputation
• Some just-in-time info when a comment discussion is detected to suggest improving/editing the question and/or closing
• Mind Control/Mass Hypnotism
• Artificial Intelligence

I am aware that users that are sub 3k can flag posts for closure, but the UI for this is confusing. It should instead follow an identical workflow to closing questions rather than being hidden within the flag dialog. My goal would be better informing users of the tools that help keep this place functional earlier rather than it feeling so adversarial until they've been here long enough to realize why things are the way they are by empowering them with the very tools we're using. You're far more likely to pay attention to a privilege you've earned than one you were introduced to as preventing you from getting the help you need.

Answer 14

RPG.SE: Make it possible for RPG system tags to always appear first, and display them in a special color

There are two features I think RPG.SE would really benefit from (that would likely also benefit other sites on the Stack Exchange network), and they're both summarized well in existing feature requests on our Meta:

• Make it possible for certain tags (like game tags) to always appear first
• Can we color system tags to emphasize that they're different and "more meaningful"?

Basically, on RPG.SE, most questions (though not all) are primarily asking about a particular role-playing game system, and often a specific edition of that system - whether they're asking about the rules, or a problem they've encountered, or a group-dynamic issue. This is generally reflected by our tag system, so whatever system a user is asking about, there'll usually be a tag on the question to indicate it.

The name of the first tag on a question appears before the question title in the title of your tab/browser (when viewing the question), and in Google search results. In addition, the system/edition tag is often an important signal to users to help them judge whether they have the relevant expertise to answer the question.

Since D&D is a popular game, a D&D edition tag will almost always be the first tag listed on a D&D-related question... But there are thousands of other RPGs out there, and most of them aren't so lucky.

Say there's a question about the Lancer RPG. Because there aren't very many questions about Lancer on the site, then if other tags (e.g. weapons) are added to the question, they take up the first spot in the question's tags instead - meaning we have to either intentionally avoid adding a useful/relevant tag to the question, or cause the relevant RPG system to not be listed in search results/page titles.

Making it so certain tags can be designated to always appear first would allow us to have the best of both worlds. As stated in my feature request (the first one linked above):

This would work like the four special tags on meta: all special tags are sorted by popularity first, then all normal tags are sorted by popularity.

This would allow us to always have the RPG system/edition (where specified) be clearly listed for a question, while also letting us include other relevant tags (even when they're more popular than the system/edition tag) without causing any problems.

In addition, as stated in the second question linked above:

It doesn't help that a lot of RPGs have names which might just refer to a game element or procedure of play: fate fiasco monster-of-the-week dungeon-world microscope kingdom follow

Even when a tag like this appears in the tag list, some users (especially new users) don't realize that the tag refers to a particular RPG system; some of them simply assume the question is about D&D, and answer accordingly. This just results in frustration/annoyance for both the querent (who's getting an answer that isn't relevant to them at all) and the other users that help moderate the site (because they then have to flag it as "not an answer" and/or vote to delete it). It also contributes to an overall sentiment (well-documented on our Meta) that RPG.SE often feels more like "D&D.SE", making players of other RPGs feel unwelcome - or at least feel like the site isn't going to be useful to them.

The two suggestions I've linked above - making it so RPG system/edition tags can always appear first in the tag list of a question, and displaying the tag in a special color - would help avoid/solve these recurring problems. This would be a definite quality-of-life improvement for RPG.SE.

(I think there are other sites that could also benefit from the ability to designate certain tags as "special" as well, such as tags for particular video games/franchises on the Arqade, or specific programming languages on Stack Overflow - RPG.SE is just the one I've spent the most time on.)

Answer 15

Archive feature

On Ask Ubuntu we have a lot of questions, and especially a lot of answers, which were super relevant and useful to a lot of people at the time they were posted, but which no longer have value in helping folks find out how to do x, because how to do x has changed over time. Many such posts are highly upvoted, jump up on search engines, and if they are answers show at the top of the by-default-vote-ordered pile.

We don't delete such posts, and I don't think we should delete them or even necessarily edit them to update them (often this would involve replacing all of the content, perhaps making it the same as other existing answers to the same question), because they have a social history value and perhaps can be of use to people interested in user experience and various other aspects of software development - who knows? But the mass of obsolete material is only increasing over time and gradually making it harder for visitors and reviewers to find answers that actually give accurate and current information. It's not at all the case that everything old is out-of-date, but enough of our posts are out-of-date that it's an issue.

Recently Monica from the Ubuntu community team gave me the idea of an archive feature. The way I think it could work would be different for questions and answers.

For answers, 5 users could vote to archive an answer, and it would be pushed to the bottom of the page in all views under a notice that the below answers are archived and may not work any more.

For questions, 5 users could vote to archive a question, and a notice would appear at the top of it stating that it is archived and may no longer be relevant, and optionally and preferably, linking to newer questions with current answers on the same topic.

Answer 16

Site-specific new user onboarding

Onboarding new-users has been a focus of several past and current initiatives. However, from my perspective these have always been too focused on Stack Overflow.

As moderators and curators on other sites, we don't have any ability to change how the asking process looks for our users even when our requirements and the types of "bad" questions we get are completely different from the ones on SO.

New users shouldn't be so surprised that medical advice and self-help questions are off-topic on MedicalSciences.SE, Biology.SE, and Psych&Neuro.SE after they type in their question (and no, the ugly disclaimer on MedicalSciences is not the way to go; it's also not even visible on the mobile site. This is a legal/liability feature, it doesn't do anything for site quality and anyone experienced in dodging ads and other irrelevant material on the interwebs is going to automatically filter out that yellow background text as "extra stuff not relevant for me to read"). New users to Academia.SE shouldn't be so surprised that the site isn't for asking about their organic chemistry homework.

Close votes and comments should be about responding to the questions that still sneak by the information, not the sites' first line of defense.

Do your research, then give us the tools

I don't think its feasible for the CMs or any other staff to review these sorts of things for every community. The time commitment would be huge across the whole range of sites. However, you have some dedicated experts in each community that are going to be eager to help write copy for this. Let them.

There will no doubt be more opportunity to do A/B testing on SO to determine how to best present the messaging to get (at least some) new users to actually heed the advice given. However, I think the steps taken on SO should be designed with the rest of the network in mind. Think at an early stage about what might be customizable across the network and how to facilitate that, rather than just doing what makes sense for SO and maybe later kind of squeezing in a half-solution for everyone else.

Answer 17

Allow more syntax highlighting

HighlightJS ships a lot of useful languages, of which SO & other programming sites only use a small fraction of.

Syntax highlighting is very useful for clarity and readability. If someone posts a AppleScript question, the code would be a lot easier to read, and therefore be understood/answered better, if SO had the AppleScript language mode.

I know that this is because of performance, but since most questions only use one language, would it be possible to dynamically load whatever languages the question requires?

This probably would require a quite substantial overhaul, but I believe it's possible.

Answer 18

I don't have any specific community in mind. My request is more generic and about the need of the community as whole.

My request isn't technical, and it isn't about policy, but I guess it fits under "something about the environment in which you operate", so I'll give this a try.

The environment in which I operate is Stack Exchange as whole, and something there is still off. Something still prevents many people from getting back to full activity.

So, my request is for the company to fix a major past mistake which has lasting effect to this day. Many, both inside and outside the company, keep saying it's impossible, and maybe it is; yet I think there's no harm in asking anyway. All it needs is one single apology, done properly.

Those who need to know what I talk about exactly know it already; I prefer not to go into specific details here as it would lead to undesired side effects and my request will be lost in the smoke. The essence of the request is simple: fix a past mistake. You (the company) already made major steps towards this.

Answer 19

Better accessibility.

When users with disabilities struggle to use SE, this also means that they may not have much of a voice here.

In the 2021 developer survey, 4,1% respondents claimed to have a physical difference with the majority being blind or having difficulty seeing. This is the highest result when we compare to past surveys which varied between 2,8% and 1,7% of respondents claiming to have a physical difference. We don't have such a survey for the whole of SE as far as I'm aware so this is the most representative number I can find for our user base.

According to a 2017 article from the Pew Research Center, "[...] there have also been dozens of lawsuits in recent years, claiming some websites are not accessible to those with disabilities."

This doesn't relate to a specific need of one of our communities but back in 2018, our former SO product manager Joe Friend wrote :

I want to see us make improvements for a range of users with differing abilities. My perspective is that improvements to users with specific needs can lead to improvements for everyone.

Better accessibility would not only make all of our communities more diverse and welcoming, it would also mean an improved experience for all users.

There was a lot of discussion around being inclusive on SE in 2019. Back then, a few moderators started compiling a long list of unresolved accessibility issues related to screen readers, color perception, keyboard accessibility, dyslexia, visual impairment, tremor, and more. Unless they've been resolved, some of these issues seemingly affect core community mechanisms.

A long list of unaddressed accessibility issues on MSE can be found by searching with the following queries:

Questions on MSE including the accessibility and feature-request tags that are not status-completed

or

Questions on MSE including the accessibility, bug, and feature-request tags that are not status-completed

Answer 20

SF & F

I would like to see a custom question-flow for asking story ID requests. They're about half of our questions, most of them are by new / drive-by users, and most need to be coached in the comments to tell us when they read or watched it, where, what language, and so on.

A custom question-flow that would ask a (new) user to address those points would be really helpful.

Answer 21

TeX.StackExchange: restore previous "community promotion" conventions

Within the TeX/LaTeX community, local user groups have used the community promotion ads to good effect to announce their annual meetings or similar events. Such events are both time-specific and time-critical, and after an event has occurred, an ad dedicated to that event should be replaced by something more general.

This year, however, proposing this year's ads wasn't even launched until late spring, and the ads won't be activated until August 1. By then, at least one group's meeting had already taken place, and the annual meeting of the international TeX Users Group (TUG) starts on August 5; not much time for a useful announcement.

Even worse, it will no longer be possible to replace an outdated ad. This simply leads to embarrassment and the perception, especially by newcomers, that the site is not current, or even that it is not to be trusted.

This is a request to restore the previous practice -- Start proposals for a new year's ads at the beginning of the year, or even a month or two earlier, and activate them as soon as possible after January 1. And allow replacement of "expired" announcements as appropriate.

It's also the case that "commercial" ads for SE/SO are exhibited much more frequently than the community ads, and I've rarely seen only a community ad without it being preceded by one of the organization's ads. While we recognize that SE/SO needs to support itself, it's sad that this appears to be given much higher priority than the needs of its users.

Answer 22

As I mentioned in chat when suggesting the topic, I'm afraid my "pet peeve" or thing that I would change would be the relatively new policy of having to be 18 or older to become a diamond moderator.

As I wrote in my answer(s) to the original announcement, there have been numerous moderators around the network who became moderators under the age of 18, including some of the most well-known or influential moderators on the network.
I also became a moderator at the age of 14. I stepped down before turning 18, which meant this policy change didn't affect my personally - I reclaimed my diamond a few days ago, and I just turned 19 - but it still felt like a slap in the face when it was announced. Given the history of young moderators on the network, and the literal years of time and effort poured into improving the sites and moderating, it gives the impression that all that effort was never really valued.

The possibility of underage moderators was discussed all the way back in 2012 (long before I joined the network). There was a pretty heavy consensus that age should be irrelevant for becoming a moderator, since moderators are selected for ability and temperament in any case (leaving aside the practical issue that it's impossible to actual verify age on the internet).

All this, combined with the votes and responses to the announcement, mean that the community has made its opinion fairly clear: The age of a moderator should be irrelevant. Changing this policy back in order to allow any user who meets the age requirements laid out in the ToS (13 most places, 16 in the EU) to become a moderator, even if it means getting parental permission, would show that the community's values are reflected by the company.

Answer 23

Built-in leaderboards on Code Golf

I'm somewhat active on Codidact Code Golf. I also use the Graduation Userscript on CGCC (created back before we graduated and had a design). One feature that both of these have that I'd love to be a part of CGCC by default is leaderboards:

And a little tooltip that tells you the winner:

As this is doable with a userscript, it mainly involves a bit of custom HTML + JS being added to our site, so it's not even too crazy of a change. Currently, this is only for challenges with the code-golf tag, so that might be a bit of a challenge to do.

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I find this a super useful feature to have (and is really the only reason I still use an outdated and failing userscript). It allows me to not only see if someone has posted an answer in the language I use quickly (something that can be hard when you have 3 or more pages of answers), but it also gives me a target to beat when golfing.

This is also something that uniquely fits with CGCC. Such a feature makes no sense on any other Q&A site, and would show that SE is willing to put in more effort into site-specific requests.

Answer 24

Encourage more community members on Software Engineering in curating minor issues in questions in favor of closing them

As an example, I regularly see good or at least acceptable questions asked, but then the asker adds something like

• "do you know any further references for solving the problem"?

at the end. Guess what happens - the question collects close-votes, because questions for third-party resource requests are not allowed (interestingly, answers giving references to third-party resources is not only fine, but encouraged).

It gives me the impression certain members don't read the question, but are only interested in scanning them for buzzwords, casting a vote and not even try to give the asker a helpful comment. This is especially frustrating when the close-voters do have enough rep and could easily edit those buzzwords out of the question (or at least leave a comment to give the OP a chance to remove the critical part before the question gets closed).

Other cases include questions which are closed because the title does not really match the question (but could be easily fixed when someone takes the time to read and understand what the OP is really asking).

Of course, when I see such cases, I try to fix the issues by myself, but when I count the number of people willing to do so, including the diamond moderators, it seems we are pretty understaffed.

Answer 25

A while ago I suggested a Dictionary look up in the side-bar for English Language Learners. If I had a magic wand, we would have an easy way to find credible definitions for words and idioms without leaving the site so we could start off on the same page. There are many dictionaries online, and they vary widely in quality; we discussed that a bit here: What sorts of dictionaries should we use on ELL?

We often ask questions similar to “Did you look up word in the dictionary and why didn’t that help?” This isn’t an attempt to try to short circuit questions before they’re asked, but to help us get past the language barrier and try to understand why they’re confused.

Answer 26

Force new users to take a quiz

Yes, this is fairly radical. But many sites get so many off-topic questions that it's taking the most time of all the moderation tasks. Much of that can be prevented, since many people simply didn't know their question would be ill-received.

All users that are new to the site (1 rep, ignore association bonus) or recently had a question closed get a small quiz. An open-book quiz that's so ludicrously easy that the only way to fail it is if you haven't read the rules. Failing the quiz locks you out for a minute, after that you can try again. 3 questions at most. Heck, we can start with 1, that should already do a bit.

We can't force-feed the rules into new users, but even with the new fancy modals not everyone reads what we shove in their faces. When the questions get closed, some users get really aggressive about it.

Code Review has a couple of rules. 6 of them are very easy and explained in the help center:

• Is code included directly in my question?
• Am I an author or maintainer of the code?
• Is it actual code from a project rather than pseudo-code or hypothetical code?
• To the best of my knowledge, does the code work as intended?
• Do I want the code to be good code?
• Do I want feedback about any or all facets of the code?

If everyone that posted would honestly answer all those with 'yes', we'd lose about 90% of all off-topic questions. This would save a lot of fresh users the frustration of getting their questions closed and make the review queues a lot less populated, which greatly helps with the improved-reviewing-experience SE's got going on for a while now.

I'd like a checklist to have people check all 6 of those, but I know that's asking too much. So I'll settle for quizzing a few of those points at random.

Answer 27

What does your community need?

MSE: Fewer off-topic questions from new users.

If I had the magic wand, I would wave it in order to instill a deep, irresistible desire for people new to a community to go and read the essentials, first thing.

I've said it before: I've seen a hell of a lot of off-topic questions on MSE and SO - across the network, actually - from new users that have disregarded the on-topic page or the help center entirely (detailed answers to any questions you might have!). After being downvoted and deleted, the authors go and post complaints or questions such as Is it necessary to read all the rules on Stack Overflow? (rene's answer is on the money there).

One of the things I would do to help with this: put a popup on the ask page (just for the newbies) that quotes a few lines from the "Don't ask" page, particularly the bit mentioning:

To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking ...

Which I personally would change to:

To prevent your question from being flagged, downvoted and possibly closed or removed entirely...

As that's mostly what I see them complaining about: being downvoted. If we warn them a bit more strongly, they might listen.

These are just a few ideas. I might need to formulate a whole new question, but there you are.

Answer 28

There is a highly upvoted feature request about this: Allow non-bumping minor edits, but review them on /review.

In some instances (major retaggings, updating dead links, and correcting typos) it might be preferable that the edited posts do not clutter the front page. (To mention an example I saw recently, a community on some site might decide to split some tag into two separate tags - and the only way to deal with the existing questions is to retag them manually.¹) Of course, it is important that somebody looks at the edits - but that could be resolved by a review queue for minor edits.

This was brought up on several metas. Among them, MathOverflow users seem to be one community that is rather opposed to bumping - in fact, such feature request was brought up by one of the moderators on that site. (Of course, that is just my personal impression - it is possible that there are some other communities which were quite vocal about this feature and I simply did not notice them.)

Here are some examples of posts from per-site-metas related to this issue:

• MathOverflow Meta: Minor edits, subject to review (One of the moderators mentioned in the comments that he communicated about this also with the Stack Exchange team, but there were no updates since then.)
• Mathematics Meta: Is there a way to edit without bumping the question? (And other similar feature requests: “Minor edit” feature for trusted users and Would you like to have the option to edit a question without it being bumped to the main page?)
• Physics Meta: Minor edits should not make questions 'active'
• Tex-LaTeX Meta: Minor edit checkbox? and Can I edit a post without bumping it to the front page?

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¹ A recent example of such action can be seen on Politics: Better defining the [polling] and [public-opinion] tags. On a site where I am the most active, I remember splitting (algebra) into (algebra-precalculus) and (abstract-algebra). The tag (algebra) was removed from 1500 questions.

Answer 29

Okay, here's a little pet peeve of mine for the wand sprites to look at:

Tag Reform!

I'm a Music: Practice and Theory native, and recently I've been trying to go through the site's numerous neglected tags and fix them up. I do notice symptoms of a lot of the functionality of tags going completely over the head of most users. In particular:

• Tag synonyms are over-restricted. Currently, the requirement to be able to vote on proposed tag synonyms is a net score in that tag of 5, and to suggest tag synonyms one must additionally have the 2500 reputation required to unlock that privilege. Maybe on bigger sites this isn't as much of an issue, but on my home site, I've got the necessary 2.5k rep to suggest synonyms. The trouble is, the smaller less-used tags are the ones that often need synonyms, and it's not easy to get 5 total score in rare tags like schenkerian-analysis or balalaika, which only have 4 and 3 questions respectively on all of M:P&T! I think by the time a user amasses 2.5k on a site, they should know enough to be able to at least SUGGEST synonyms, especially when they're voted upon anyway. In the meanwhile, our site has had just two synonyms created this year, and I'm pretty sure that's not a sign of our collective tagging genius.
• Tag synonyms go relatively unused (partially because they're so restricted). At this point, they're almost a hidden feature, only accessed by those in-the-know. When was the last time YOU checked your site's Pending Approval section for tag synonyms? The description for the tag synonym privilege does provide the necessary information to use the system, but I think we'd see more users start to use this feature if the pending suggestions could have their own review queue!
• Tag wikis are decrepit. Some of the largest, most common tags have wikis so incomplete that they wouldn't even be valid as answers! They also rarely contain any links to posts or other sources of information. I think it's great that it takes a trusted user (20k) to directly edit without suggesting, but I believe that with a more visible way to access the tag wiki (perhaps with a link in the pop-up when hovering over the tag itself, or allowing them to turn up in search results!), SE's tags would be more complete and useful for new users. On the plus side, tag wiki excerpts are working just fine across all SE, and I like how they are so accessible (cough cough).
• Tag wiki excerpts could use a rename. It can be confusing for new users to learn that tag wikis and tag wiki excerpts are entirely different things - I remember that when I was new, I thought the wiki excerpts WERE the wiki entries (and since it's so hard to find the wiki, how could I have known the difference?). Why not call them "tag excerpts" instead?

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I realize that while this is all my own experience on my specific SE site, I suspect these problems exist on other sites as well, particularly for the smaller ones. I don't know how many of these could be realistically implemented, but I at least feel good about getting these off of my chest.

Here are some more questions to look at about how the tag synonym isn't quite working well enough:

• Does the tag synonym suggestion system work?

• Can we allow 7.5K users to suggest tag synonyms without a score of 5 in the tag?

Even Meta's What is a Tag Wiki? How do I write one? answer says about the nonutility of tag wikis, "Start with the excerpt. That's the part of the tag wiki that users will see first, and the only part that most users will see at all".

Oh, and this question was where I got the searchable-tag-wiki idea from: Improving the tag wiki

Answer 30

A community advocate.

All communities, large and small, booming and busting, or otherwise moving around in circles all have their own pulse and their own quirks to how they work and how they run.

They also have their own challenges, trials, tribulations and triumphs.

What the communities I'm a part of seem to acutely lack is someone advocating for them on a daily basis.

And I don't mean the typical, "I'll run this back and let you know" kind of person. You could get any ol' intern to do that much. For the record, I've never found any value in those kinds of roles, either, since it usually means that the community gets to roll on its back and expose its soft, soft belly, and lay prone to the mercy of the company when the person finally gets back to them. Also by the point we hear back from them, it's a "well we talked about it and this is The Direction™ we're going to be moving in"-kind of deal.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

No thanks to that.

What I really want is someone who's dedicated themselves to that specific community for years; someone who knows the community, its ins and outs, its quirks and peculiarities, and knows how to read the room. Someone who the community can rely on and trust to get their voice heard and stand up for them when the company wants to push changes that may impact or disrupt their flow. Someone who can actually speak to why things are the way they are and break it down so that even D-level or C-level members can understand why.

Someone who isn't going to have panic attacks about talking with us. Someone who is willing to listen with an open mind and is committed to being transparent. Someone who actively cares about the problems we have and wants to see to it that our problems are solved. Someone we can put our trust into because they would have already built that rapport with us.