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

Graphic Design

Site Graphic Design is a bit special in that, at least in theory, everybody on the site should be able to generate their own images. And nearly every question and answer should have an image. The community would want for more people who work as graphic designers to participate and share.

But graphic designers on the whole live by the copyright of their images. So in many instances one can not post the image one needs since that would mean release the copyright for CC-BY-SA. It would be nice if there would be a possibility to modify the copyright release clause a bit for this site so that a stronger community could be built.

But this might be totally out of the question. So at least remind new users of the copyright release when posting images. Similar problems may be on more media focused sites.

Secondly: Graphic Design would need a mechanism for sharing SVG files.

PS: I would like to note that you can not uphold same rules as you use in programming related forums. Since graphic design is about whole visual field at once, highly context sensitive, subjective and has no one right answer. This makes it impractical at times to break into a question without showing what you are doing. Primary teaching mechanism in graphic design is critique which is entirely reliant on showing your work. In the end we can not quantify or feelings into rules, at least not today.

Answer 2

Provide more details about spoiler content without revealing

Similar to how code fences can provide a language, I would like spoilers to be specifiable by certain words or correspond to tags on a question.

I mainly want this on Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) to encourage people to use them more, knowing they can have TV shows, movies and books they've read 'white listed' so the spoiler is show by default. This could be applicable on Movies & TV, Literature and even maybe Puzzling (perhaps more sites?)

But whilst discussing this, it seemed like it would also be worth using this to let people hide distressing images/text content necessary for the question or answer and perhaps having content warning/trigger warning (CW/TW) lists in network profiles that blocked you from seeing it unless you 'consent'. That could be applicable on so many more sites, like Interpersonal Skills (IPS), Parenting, Politics, and the list goes on.

I imagine it could look like this:

>!{star wars, shooting} Han shot first

and render like this:

Answer 3

Eleven years later: "Invite low rep user to a chat"

I would like to switch comments to chat, even if the OP has not enough rep to join a chat room (meaning less than 20).

That was studied in 2011, for instance to allow temporary guest accounts in chat.

This should not be abused, as it could transform a Q&A site into a giant chat space.
I propose to limit that privilege to user with a certain reputation level.
Say... 1 Million rep.
(Or, as proposed in 2015, 30K: on level up the current highest privilege with 25K)

Answer 4

Retain existing users

This is important for small sites on which each user who decides to leave, is a noticeable loss for the whole community.

In the past years, SO put a lot of effort into attracting new users. That's nice! However on specialized sites, where there might not be a never ending supply of new users, it might be worthwhile to also search for ways to retain the existing users.

Just one example of something your team could look into: on tex.se I've witnessed several users leave due to conflicts with other users. Maybe SO could try to provide tooling to avoid or stop conflicts before they escalate? At the moment it seems the only option is waiting until a conflicts is heated so much that mods step in with suspensions, but maybe things like Add the ability to ignore users could avoid some of these conflicts in the first place?

(This is just one example I could think of, don't focus too much on this particular example. I'm sure you have people with much better qualified to identify possibilities to improve user retention)

Answer 5

Time Travel! (Or at least a cautionary tale of community dynamics)

There's a handful of early communities that kinda fell apart, and quite a lot of missteps with good intentions and poor execution that hurt communities as a whole.

But we can't roll back the past so I think I'd bring up my former second community, before this one, as a cautionary tale. I think its vitally important not to assign blame, I'm in a fairly unique situation where I've kinda heard at least two sides of the story (and have something approaching the truth). I'm sure there's other versions of this story, and I do hope folks correct me where there's a mistake.

I used to be very active on Server Fault back in the day. My job -3 let me work on servers (and $deity, I miss that), and they had an active, if a little rowdy community.

There's not 'one' factor that led the core of the community to leave - but one of them was a disagreement over scope (If memory serves - over hosting panels), and one of the mods automating closing them (He was a bit overenthusiastic). I'm of the opinion Shog did what was best in the situation (Relevant meta post here - and the broader thread might be useful reading of history for y'all, and Hopeless did what he felt was best, but the end result was massive drama. There's a few additional parts of the story - that aren't public (I am under the impression talking to other folks that the mod in question was kinda tied up in work - which lead to an extra break down in communication). In short, it was a bit of 'cascading things going wrong all at once'.

This probably was compounded by ongoing issues (cause $deity - I seem to recall a fairly painful cultural shift at the time, not all bad) and a bit of a tug of war over scope.

So much of the drama and tension between the community and company are a result not of malice but of communication break downs. I suspect its vitally important, especially as the community team ramps up to not just consider the problem at hand but the people involved, the knock on effects that a particular action has, and the awareness that sometimes solving a problem causes other problems. There's other examples of this of course, but this feels like a good place to consider.

This isn't impossible, just... probably incredibly hard. It needs both mods to know who to talk to (and who they are talking to), and a fairly deep knowledge of the community that needs help and guidance.

Answer 6

Automatic accepting

Code Golf has made noise before about removing/modifying the way accepting works on the site, as it counteracts our idea that code golf challenges are competitions within languages (so Python competes with other Python answers, not with Perl), and leaves the awarding of the winning answer (for non-code golf challenges) up to the challenge asker. Due to site culture, this mostly results in the winner being awarded the checkmark, but this sometimes fails, often due to newer users. Additionally, we also have a principle that, at the bare minimum, every challenge must have an objective scoring criteria.

This means that automatic accepting of the winning answer would, in theory, be entirely possible. Practically speaking, this isn't doable unless you had a magic wand, as the complexities of a system actually determining the winner from some of the weirder criteria we've had, such as the sum of the scores (as defined by a formula) of all your answers. However, by making accepting an answer a fully automated process, CGCC would be able to more effectively use accepting as a way of marking and rewarding the winning answer.

Answer 7

"It looks like you're asking a question about Scrum. Have you considered asking it on Project Management instead?"

(Maybe a bit less Clippy-esque though. Maybe.)

I remember back when we were in beta, the only thing stopping us from graduating was #questions/day.

We continue to suffer from relatively few new questions.

Further, I remember coming upon several questions (one of them even a HNQ) on Software Engineering and thinking 'This is a textbook pmse question'.

So, the same way that the site looks at your tags/content and shows possible duplicates, could we set it up to show 'Hey it looks like this question is better-suited to this smaller, more niche site over here'?

The idea could presumably be extended to other smaller sites, as well. Even Software Engineering itself could benefit from having certain questions/questioners nudged to it from Stack Overflow.

Answer 8

If my magic wand had enough power left after my first suggestion, I would change the way questions are tagged on ELL. I'd rather just wave a wand and make more people care about tagging questions well, but mind manipulation is an evil sort of magic we should probably avoid.

First, I would create a system that analyzes the text of the question, looks at similar questions with high scores or that have been edited to update their tags then suggests tags that might be appropriate. Under no circumstances would it suggest a tag because it was "popular". (I have no idea how to actually implement this, I'm relying on magic here.)

I would give a community a way to exclude tags from being suggested. English Language Learners has this terrible "grammar" tag that gets applied to questions regardless of whether or not they are actually about grammar (as opposed to "grammaticality"). A while back, we had reduced the number of questions tagged only with "grammar" to about 300 or so today, there are over 3400 open questions with just the grammar tag.

If someone asking a question really can't pick appropriate tags, there should be a "can't-decide" or "don't-know" tag that puts it into a review queue to be tagged properly and we should give people badges and such for participating in the queue. If someone doesn't know the answer to their question, often they don't know the best way to categorize it so that it is grouped with similar questions (at least on sites like ELL where something can look like a question about one thing but actually be about something Linguists are still arguing about ). Maybe there are other things that would trigger a review, like someone creating a new tag, the question being closed as a duplicate that has different tags, or the question getting put on the HNQ.

Answer 9

Ability to search Species ID posts using pictures

(copied from Redesigning Biology Stack Exchange (extended) on Biology Meta)

Problem:

Most people coming to Biology SE to have their unknown specimen identified have two options: either browse through dozens (or hundreds) of old posts to see if they can find a match for their specimen, or (much more commonly) just ask a new question.

• This first option requires opening each post individually, and therefore is incredibly time consuming. As a result, most users opt for option 2.

• This is ok if it's in fact a new species (i.e., one not previously ID'd on Bio.SE before) or if one of our users can recognize it as a duplicate of a previous post.

  • However, with 600+ species ID posts, there is a good chance that there are un-marked duplicate posts.

Proposal:

Wouldn't it be so much better if you could sort through old species-identificaion posts by picture?

I have no idea how this could be done (and I'm fairly sure it actually cannot be done), but it would make our species ID posts MUCH more accessible to visiting users.

• This would likely result in heavier traffic through the site.

Here's an example of how I think this could be done:

How this could work:

• I envision one of 2 ways:

  1. Auto selects 1st image in a post

  2. Provide some ability for a user to select which image to include in search.

Answer 10

Ask Ubuntu

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Posted by C.S.Cameron here.

Obsolete Answer Flag

In many cases the answer with the most upvotes is simply the one that has been here longest. Often these high vote answers are totally obsolete and no longer work.

It was much easier to get votes in the old days, when Ask Ubuntu was new and unique. Answers did not need to be very good to get lots of upvotes.

There should be an obsolete flag so that users can flag these old and obsolete answers to drop them from the top of the list. A flagged answer does not need to be totally removed, just dropped to the bottom of the page where it won't hurt anyone. It should probably take a vote of five flags to demote an answer.

Closing a duplicate question and then linking an old question with 20 obsolete answers wastes the users time and does not give users much confidence in Ask Ubuntu.

Some people talk about historical value of these answers but people come here to get help making their Ubuntu work, not history lessons.

Lets keep Ask Ubuntu relevant and up to date.

Answer 11

Making all users use the Sandbox before posting a challenge on Code Golf and Coding Challenges

We often get questions from new users that are duplicates, are not specified clearly enough, have problems that take the fun out of them, or are simply off-topic, and posting drafts in the Sandbox for Proposed Challenges first helps reduce that a bit. Users are asked to use the Sandbox, but it's not enforced at all.

For this reason, it'd be amazing if, before posting a question not tagged with tips, a user would be required to submit a link to an answer in the Sandbox that's at least a day old as proof that they've sandboxed their question and gotten reviews on it before posting it. Of course, it's possible to get around this by adding the link to someone else's answer if you want to abuse the system, but if the user in question is acting in good faith, this feature ensures that their question gets at least a little bit of reviewing. That way, we can reduce the number of questions that get closed.

It'd be even better to have a tool to migrate questions from the Sandbox to the main site directly, but of course, that's probably asking for too much.

Answer 12

I would want the magic wand to decrease the limit of simultaneous hot questions from the same site from 5 to 3 or 4, in order to give more sites the chance to be advertised to a network-wide audience. The last time I asked for statistics about this, it looked somewhat depressing, even with outliers ignored:

86 least represented sites of 156 total contributed less than 10% hot questions, 106 contributed less than 20% questions and 135 - less than 50% questions. 21 top sites of 156 contributed over 50% hot questions...

The result I would expect to obtain is a more diverse representation of various sites in the hot list. As for knowing the difference, in this case it seems to be fairly easy, because there is a way to estimate the presence of the site and compare results to prior statistics referred to above.

The longer term impact I would be hoping to achieve is a noticeable growth of the active user base at smaller sites, indicated by the amount of users with a reasonably solid on-site reputation (not counting the association bonus).

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Preferably the above would be augmented by disabling a tweak that pushes Stack Overflow questions from the hot list a bit too strong. This would serve the same purpose as above: a more prominent presence of SO questions in hot list would help the major audience of this list realise that smaller sites aren't something alien and that they are welcome to participate in these sites just like they do at Stack Overflow.

The results I would want to get by this change are the same as above: a noticeable growth of the active user base at smaller sites.

As for knowing the difference, it would be a bit complicated. There is a natural and straightforward measure by simply counting the active users who joined some site when they already had an SO account. However, it would cover only part of the picture because some anonymous SO visitors may join sites they have seen in the hot list without creating an SO account - and I haven't yet figured how this can be estimated.

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I won't hazard a guess whether my beliefs would be widely shared or not, because the hot questions are a blessing and a curse.

Answer 13

Multimedia Help Center

If I had to choose a different site from my previous post, let's say that this is about Meta Stack Exchange, but I think that this might apply to all the sites, including per-site metas.

Nowadays the content of the Help Center only contains text articles. Some of these articles include links to meta posts, the company blog posts and external content that might look not very attractive because of their format and length, specially for "new users". I would like the magic wand to add multimedia elements to all the articles so they become more attractive and easy to understand by a broader audience (not all users learn the same way).

These multimedia elements could be material developed by the community, short clips took from the company podcast, YouTube videos, etc.

P.S. I would love to see a Stack Exchange board game.

Answer 14

Shared Drive for valuable Google spreadsheets

The top tag in Web Applications is google-sheets, many posts having this tag have links to Google spreadsheets that are shared with anyone with the link to view or to edit. Sometimes that is the best way to show what the OP tried or to help others to reproduce the problem and propose a solution, but over the time the spreadsheets are moved to the trash or deleted. Now that Google have changed the policy for Google Drive storage the risk to loss valuable spreadsheets is bigger.

It would be nice if there is a Shared Drive "owned" by Web Applications were the users with certain privilege level could add Google spreadsheets there. Some sort of Wayback Machine - Internet Archive but for questions' and answers' valuable Google spreadsheets.

I think that it's feasible in the short term that a Community Manager having a Google Workspace account create a Shared Drive and add the Web Applications moderators as Contributors. Then the community could flag the posts having a valuable spreadsheet to be added to the Shared Drive.

Later this could be extended to other tags, starting with other Google Workspace Editors (documents, drawings, forms, presentations) and supported files from third party web applications.

P.S. Stack Overflow also has a google-sheets tag with an large number of posts having links to Google spreadsheets.

Answer 15

Ask Ubuntu

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Posted by user535733 here.

Better integration with other forms of Ubuntu documentation.

Many of the questions that we answer are already addressed in documentation.

But those answers are hard to find, hard to understand for some audiences, of varying quality, and spread among a dozen places I can think of.

So we wind up duplicating a bunch of it here. And then both the original location and the answer here slowly rot, both minimally-maintained and both hard to find.

I would use the magic wand to make the 10 minutes I spend writing an answer ALSO incrementally improve the existing documentation and make that improved documentation easier to find.

As a consequence, we would have better documentation that's updated (instead of languishing), more understandable by a wider audience, and every AskUbuntu answer becomes a more effective contribution to the Ubuntu community.

I realize that's a tall order, and I don't claim to fully see the path to get there from here. Good thing it's a magic wand.

Answer 16

I'd like to have the inverse of the existing Convert Answer to Comment function.

Users post answers in comments for several reasons - they can't be voted down, or the answer is not fleshed out enough. Or simple error.

I'd prefer to see that proto-answer moved from comments to Answers, where it can be edited and improved by a wider range of site-users.

The only option now is to delete the comment, which leaves the whole post diminished, especially if that was a valid point, or worse if it was the only answer.

Yes I know there's nothing stopping me swiping the point and posting an answer, but that doesn't build community and rep for the original commenter.

tl-dr: Please can we have "Convert comment to answer" functionality.