Timeline for Show your work: one simple trick to make meta effective
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 24, 2017 at 5:41 | comment | added | gnat | "I put so much effort into my meta post and all I've got were these lousy upvotes" | |
| May 24, 2017 at 2:32 | comment | added | Makoto | @Shog9: Well...trial something. At the bare minimum, bugs which are truly ancient (like the one I highlighted) would be buried with minimal fanfare, and bugs which are truly nefarious will be lauded when squashed. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 23:24 | comment | added | Shog9 Mod | Someone suggested at one point just deleting bugs after a certain age, essentially archiving them away to reduce noise; this would also tend to resolve the "crickets" problem in a rather more final way than simply status-tagging... That said, we occasionally do get to fix long-ignored bugs, and it's kinda satisfying to briefly bury the front page of a meta with completed bug reports. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 23:05 | comment | added | Catija | @gnat I think that MSE is a bit of an outlier... As a mod I at least attempt, with my fellow site mods, to address somehow every question that's posed on our site meta... and most of them don't require any action on the part of the CMs. I've generally found most of the sites I use to be similar... so I don't really see your point, I guess. Even on MSE, while I'm not a fan, sometimes the posts get workaround answers for scripts that do what the user wants... they may not fix it within the site directly but they do get some help. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 23:04 | comment | added | Jon Ericson StaffMod | I can address the Documentation meta post: we had overwhelming feedback right after launch and immediately fell in the hole a few hundred meta posts. Most weeks I go through the [documentation] tag to find bugs and feature requests to work on. But we have a small team and a lot of glaring problems to fix, so we have to prioritize somehow. I can see how the Ctrl-W thing you describe is annoying, so I don't want to belittle it. That said, it's a UI tweak when we really need an overhaul. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 23:01 | comment | added | gnat | @Catija yes but it's followed by sort of a twist reading like posts that aren't "ignored/downvoted/tagged non-repro" are effective. Effective in what? in bringing their authors and readers sense of joy and entertainment, and maybe even a bit of catharsis? That kind of effectiveness would make meta sort of a "self-help group for commiserating" wouldn't it | |
| May 23, 2017 at 23:01 | comment | added | Makoto | @Catija: Perhaps you're right. I'm only acknowledging that this seems to cover 80% of the issue (stemming from the 80-20 rule in agile development). This time, I find myself more on the 20% side than the 80% side, which is where the aim of this Meta post is meant to go. So yes, perhaps I am derailing this a wee bit, and that's definitely not my intention. However, I do feel like this kind of thing is important to bring up regardless, since "doing all the things right" is sharply undercut by "not hearing anything ever". | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:57 | comment | added | Catija | Heck, if it gets a non-repro tag, staff (or a moderator on another site) had to have responded to it. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:56 | comment | added | Catija | @gnat and Makoto but the first paragraph of the question is specifically about posts that are ignored/downvoted/tagged non-repro... highly popular FRs are not really what this question is about. I'm not saying that having a word-of-god answer isn't awesome. I know I've complained about not getting a response or even a status note in the past... probably even here somewhere. My point is that that's not what this post is discussing... Why would staff spend their time on a poorly-researched, downvoted or non-reproduceable question? | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:55 | comment | added | Makoto | @Shog9: I don't disagree necessarily; automated responses aren't the most pleasing responses, but they're still responses. Much of that boils down to how Stack Overflow (the company) does its backlog grooming. Ultimately, we as mere mortals want to see some kind of general acknowledgement of our conversations which require the company's input. As for general discussions...that's more of a CM matter, isn't it? Would codifying discussions as "official" or something analogous help? This is a tricky problem to solve and I'm not sure it's easily done through just commenting on it. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:45 | comment | added | gnat | @Catija what you describe makes meta feel like a "self-help group for commiserating" | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:44 | comment | added | Shog9 Mod | The feedback loop is an important point; something that's bothered me for years now is the ever-growing list of unanswered questions on meta (both this meta and MSO). I've said this before, but... I don't think auto-declining things helps here; you're still getting crickets, you still don't actually know if anyone's read the post or not. A big part of what motivated this today was seeing someone lamenting that their call for consensus on a meta site (not this one) had gone mostly unaddressed - they had no idea of they were completely off the mark, or if they'd just been overlooked. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:44 | comment | added | Makoto | @Catija: A feature request that has a thousand users behind it but no response from higher up is equivalent to no feature request. Without any indication that anyone's even acknowledged it, they float off into the void, often never to return again. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:41 | comment | added | Catija | You're implying that "effective" means "Get the powers that be at SE to respond"... I disagree. Regardless of whether the SE staff implement (or plan to implement) your feature request, what's important is phrasing it in a way that the other users can clearly understand what it is that you want and either agree or disagree. MSE gets lots of really poor questions that don't really make their case. I think this is attempting to address that. Yes, getting a response from SE would be nice but I don't really think that's necessarily the only goal. | |
| May 23, 2017 at 22:36 | history | answered | Makoto | CC BY-SA 3.0 |