I can't start bounty on questions on child metas. How to promote them then? I think it is better do so as I can offer a bounty on it, points for which will be deducted from my main reputation.
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While the discussion of promoting meta questions has merit, this feature-request does not (specially without more support and justification).– asheeshrCommented May 17, 2014 at 16:28
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1I don't get the point of the bounty. What are you expecting to see/get?– asheeshrCommented May 27, 2014 at 1:35
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2 Answers
Bounties are a good way to promote questions on the main site, but they don't work for meta (as you know). Changing that would require a lot of analysis of use cases, policy, and existing code to make cross-site rep changes work right.1
However, there are other ways to promote a question on meta:
If the community generally agrees that it's important, request that it be featured. This is a moderator-only tag (you can't add it yourself). Featured questions appear in the community bulletin on the main site (so long as you don't have too many to fit), and that red tag on meta draws the eye.
Bring it up in your site's chat room. Start a discussion there.
Link to it from related questions on meta and main, if there are any. If the issue is important it probably affects some active questions elsewhere; if so it's generally ok (and sometimes actively good) to leave a comment pointing to the meta discussion. (Don't be spammy, of course.)
Share the link through other means -- Twitter, Google+, your blog, anywhere else where you have readers who care about your SE site.
1 Here are a few issues that would need to be addressed:
What does it even mean to give a bounty (= change rep) on a child meta? What behavior will users expect?
They would need to manage cross-site bounty tracking, including reversals. Right now bounties are given and earned on the same site and the code might assume that. The only cross-site rep-related code right now is association bonuses.
Meta tracking of rep is cached (you've probably noticed that your score there lags changes on main). How does that interact with this? What happens if I offer a bounty on meta after I dropped below the threshold on main but before meta noticed? Is this just a matter of doing an extra check at bounty time, or is it more complicated?
If you want to pursue meta bounties it's probably better, from a code-architecture perspective, to give and award the bounty on main for answers on meta, because main already has reputation and users understand that. But to answer the question of "how to promote questions on child metas", see above this note.
answered May 25, 2014 at 18:22
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5"Changing that would require a lot of analysis of use cases, policy, and existing code to make cross-site rep changes work right." Why "a lot"?– ArjanCommented May 25, 2014 at 19:12
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@Arjan: rep changes having effects on different sites (and metas are different, albeit linked) is new; what it means to award a bounty on a site without rep is new; UX (how do users expect this to work) is new; I'll bet there'd be a non-trivial amount of code to be refactored (but I'm guessing here) as currently the only cross-site rep code is the association bonus; multi-site race conditions would now need to be checked (what if I try to set bounties on main and meta and don't have enough rep; could caching cause problems?). That's off the top of my head. Commented May 25, 2014 at 19:20
There was a lot of discussion about it, saying that it makes zero sense to add rep points on the main site by bounties on meta. I think that there is a way how to allow bounties on meta and yet meet this rep mixing problem:
Let's make the bounties remove rep from the donor but give no score to the receiver.
I know, this is asymmetric in some sense. However, I as a donor can choose to burn my rep points on my meta. It's my decision and I don't see why would someone need to stop me doing that. Of course, if would be necessary to make it clear that the points would actually never be given to anybody.
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@nicael You lose the rep points always. So it matters to you as the donor.– yo'Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:07
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But I wouldn't start 500 rep bounty - at main site, more answers will receive a question with 500 rep bounty, than the same the question with 50 rep bounty, on meta there will be no matter what bounty to choose, because "receivers" will know that won't be awarded any bounty.– nicaelCommented May 17, 2014 at 17:14
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@nicael Well, IMHO a bounty is a good way of promotion, no matter the value. 50 seems to be a reasonable minimum that prevents people putting bounties everywhere. Mostly you need to promote feature-requests and bugs anyways, and these are monstly answered by SE stuff. Do you really think they care so much about their rep on TeX.SE or any other site?– yo'Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:16
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8I think you're missing the key part of a bounty. It's not the fact that someone chose to give up a part of their rep that drives folks to answer bountied questions. It's that they will then have a shot at getting that bounty. Remove the reward part and where's the incentive that promotes the question, exactly? Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:20
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2@AnnaLear Well, from that perspective, we are losing the key part of metas then: getting rep. The promotion is in the fact that the question gets into the featured list. Even on a small metas like meta.TeX.SE and despite I visit the main TeX.SE circa every other day, I miss important unresolved meta threads quite often. As well, some bug reports gets overseen, etc. The bounty attracts attention just by its existence, no matter if any rep points can be gained from it or not. For instance this question would get a bounty from me every week until resolved: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/4007– yo'Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:24
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@tohecz Ahh, the joy of multiple site designs. I'll fix that one up on Monday. However, a bounty there would not help you in any way, since we don't visit the sites individually to check for bug reports - we have a dashboard page that aggregates questions tagged [bug] from all meta sites. Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:33
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@AnnaLear Well, if bounties on child metas existed, couldn't they promote to your dashboard? :) And thanks for fixing it, looking forward to that!– yo'Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:35
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1Having said that, I think we can do better than having folks throw rep into the ether on child metas. The community bulletin was meant to alleviate some of the issues with promoting meta posts - active discussion posts, featured posts, etc. are supposed to show up in there. If important stuff often gets missed, perhaps we need to adjust the thresholds in those algorithms, but that's a different (and likely site-specific) discussion. Commented May 17, 2014 at 17:36
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@AnnaLear Btw, another one (again mine) that would use some promotion: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4303/… (Just to show that there are posts which stay open-ended. I would really put a bounty there if I could.)– yo'Commented May 17, 2014 at 23:22