Let's Plan the Second Iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality Project! [closed]

Question

In case you missed the first one, check out the se-quality-project tag. The quality project isn't one that we plan to ever finish, it's perennial and kicks in every 18 months or so after we've had ample opportunity to observe the efficacy of our previous efforts, changes in how people use our sites along with feedback regarding what they expected, and when new ideas seem promising enough to try.

It's time to talk about the areas that we're going to be focusing on. I'm going to give a high level overview of the types of things that we want to do, and touch briefly on things that we have in progress. I'll then turn it over to you.

It's then your turn to mention a feature-request that you think might be a great idea for us to evaluate for inclusion in this iteration, and we'll then take a look at all of it to see what we're going to be able to build.

We can't do all of it, but we're going to put the highest priority on small-ish things that could potentially make a big impact first, and then drill down into things that are going to take a bit of work, again with priority given to things that could help the largest number of users have a better experience on the site.

So, let's go over what we've got in mind:

Improving the new user experience

We want people to feel like they belong here. And in order to belong here you really need to be able to ask and answer questions competently, or contribute helpful things to documentation. It's that first part we're going to focus on first for the purposes of this project:

• We plan to test a new, 'guided' version of the ask question page soon. This page would essentially break down all of the elements that make a great question, and give the user plenty of guidance as to why it's to their advantage to understand what's needed in each of them, and provide it.

• We're launching an initiative with the University Of Melbourne in Australia. Some graduate studies have uncovered what (could) lead to much more precision in the detection of duplicate questions, as well as a huge improvement on what duplicates are suggested to the person asking. There will be a separate post about that this week. We need to help them validate a ton of data, they've come up with a system to make it easy for us to help. More to come on that soon.

Improving the experience of our existing users

We think the two things we've got planned in the new user experience category is going to have a pretty nice impact (most unhelpful questions don't need to be asked, if only we could let folks know we've already got their answers more effectively). But we want to do more.

• We're going to explore some ideas for better filtering of the questions that you see indicated by information that you give us. If you really only enjoy solving medium to difficult problems, that's what we need to prioritize showing you. We're going to have some discussions on ways this can be accomplished when we come to it.

• We're looking at some upgrades to the anti-spam and abuse mitigation systems. They've been good to us, but we need to keep them relevant. There are some awesome community-run projects that have been helping tremendously, and we're currently looking at ways that we might be able to integrate them more properly.

Improving the experience for our moderators

Because at the scale that we see on Stack Overflow, existing tools are really starting to show their age.

• We want to end the need to manually suss out voting rings. We're working on making the scheduled tasks that identify these things much smarter, by teaching them to think like Shog9 and myself do as we analyze all of the data that we have access to. We'll find a lot more rings where action is needed, and stop showing moderators patterns that are actually pretty benign (but the tools they have really don't indicate that it's benign). Mods will get a sort of 'minority report' in cases where the system couldn't make an automatic decision explaining why it couldn't decide, show all of the information that the mod needs to make the call, and let the moderator decide. This is actively being worked on for feasibility, once we're sure the model scales we'll kick off a discussion with more detail.

• We're going to do more to make certain that people understand what they're doing by flagging and help them choose the correct way to proceed (and in many cases that probably means not proceeding). We'll break out into a separate discussion when we get to this. Moderators are far too often called to look at things where they aren't actually needed, and this distracts them from looking at the stuff where they are actually needed. "Should I downvote, vote to close or flag? Should I do all of that?" - we need to make this much, much clearer. And we've got the inverse of that, folks downvoting spam when they really need to be flagging too :) It's not an easy problem.

None of these lists are exhaustive, there's more, but this is getting pretty long now. What's important is what you think we need to be prioritizing.

So what do you think we should include in this round? Try to link to the feature-request, but don't fret too much if you can't find it (just explain what it wanted, and we can rely on Shog9's RAM-like memory for the location).

Answer 1

Related feature-request: Could: "Possible duplicate of.." be given prominence for answering users?

Since you seem to be so much concerned about improvement on what duplicates are suggested to the person asking, it looks natural to additionally invest some effort into helping those who answer possible duplicates instead of aiding to properly handle these (by closing or by opposing the closure if duplicate suggestion is wrong).

This is especially so because it is so much simpler and it takes so much less engineering effort to help resolve matters after possible duplicate is discovered compared to searching for it, as proposed eg here:

showing a modal popup to the answerer if the question is voted / flagged as duplicate.

With the link (or better yet, full text) of possible duplicate and a message like: There is possible duplicate here, please make sure that you don't repeat already existing answers.

This would serve several goals:

• For responsible answerers, such an explicit warning would help to make better informed decision, whether to abstain of answering or even support a duplicate with their own flag / vote, or do the opposite, that is answer and challenge duplicate suggestion if they believe it's wrong.

• It will prevent complaints like "why am I downvoted, I simply didn't notice possible duplicate comment when answering".

• The last but not the least, it will throttle FGITW shooters who will have to go through an additional screen before dumping their garbage into the question...

Implementing such a feature needn't be effort consuming, at least in its simplest form: warning message text, link(s) to duplicate(s) and two buttons for user to pick either to proceed or abstain of answering...

And it can be tested say, at MSO / MSE prior to making decision on whether to give it a go at main site.

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Really, folks, you are going to go to such great lengths to educate askers about possible duplicates. But keeping the answerers oblivious about already discovered (!) duplicates kind of spoils all these efforts:

dupe close without answers teaches user: "next time, search and research". Close with answer teaches, "No need to research, just dump your question and it will be chewed up to you like it was to 10,000 guys like you before"...

Answer 2

The guidance for the "requires editing" button in the Triage queue currently states:

for questions where edits by the author or others would result in a question that is clear and answerable

However, if a question requires information from the asker, the question should be closed. "Requires editing" puts the question in the H&I queue, where editors are powerless to read the asker's mind.

My feature request is that you should strike "by the author" from this text. (There have been other proposals on Meta Stack Overflow about rewording these messages that may have better all-around text.)

Previous proposals/complaints:

• Adopt a consistent policy on what “Requires Editing” means in the review queues
• Triage Review Queue - Inconsistent guidelines for “Requires Editing”?
• Suggestion for rewording of triage review guidance
• Change triage guidelines for “requires editing”
• Wrong review: Requires Editing

---

In general, it would be nice to see triage and H&I evaluated before moving on to new things. I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned at all in this meta question.

Answer 3

Add cross-site links to the right-hand sidebar

As proposed in Display other SE site links in the linked questions sidebar.

The Linked section of the sidebar is an excellent tool for discovery. Over time we have seen the development of many smaller sites that would vaguely fall under the umbrella of an older, bigger site (like e.g. astro, space, scicomp, hsm and earth science taking up a fair bit of question space that might otherwise have ended up in physics), and one of the worries in this process is the fragmentation of question collections and of communities.

An excellent way to help avoid that is to make explicit those inter-site links where they exist: both highlighting off-site resources that are mentioned somewhere in a given thread and, more valuably, making it easier to discover off-site threads that comment or build upon the thread you're reading (i.e. linkbacks).

This is admittedly a relatively small population of questions, particularly if you insist on comparing apples and oranges by bringing up the total amount of questions on SO (as Jon Ericson does here). That's a dud argument - the measure is the high value that the feature brings to the threads where it does appear.

Ideally, this should also be coupled with a better cross-site question discoverability mechanism (how about a similar Related sidebar pulling from closely-related SE sites?), but first things first.

I'm also aware that there are nontrivial scaling issues in implementing this network-wide, but I find it hard to believe that they cannot be optimized with suitable indexing. If you're looking for places to put new code that will bring the network closer together, this is a good place to do it.

Answer 4

Easier tag handling

Currently, the most effective way to edit tag names or to create tag synonyms is to flag for moderator attention. They have the diamond power™. However, there is one issue that could, in my humble opinion, be made a lot easier a lot quicker; and a second issue that could be simplified but may require thought.

Allow renaming of a tag if it is only applied to one question

This is basically a rehash of this feature-request: A pox upon small sites: the thing that prevents you from creating plural or hyphenated versions of tags

Consider a site like Anime where tags are essentially series’ names. A user wants to ask a (the first!) question about soul-eater, but for some reason misses the hyphen key and creates the tag souleater. If they had created anything else, similar but distinct from soul-eater (except soul-eaters, which would have the same issue) one could simply retag to the correct one; the wrong one would then be orphaned and deleted at 03:00 UTC. Unfortunately though, the system forbids creating a tag that differs only in hyphenation or a trailing s from an existing one. So we flag for mod attention, waste a moderators time for something that could easily have been handled by any user with edit and retag priviledges.

I propose the solution (not in the present feature request) of allowing renaming of tags, if they are only applied to one question or have been created within the last x hours — whichever is easier to implement software-side. It would allow the first editor to fix the problem immediately and not take up any diamond mod’s time.

Do something about tag synonyms

feature-request Improving Tag Synonyms

We all know the system isn’t working unless again you waste a diamond moderator’s time (see linked post). There are a number of issues mentioned in the post and some sound difficult to implement. Here’s a biased selection, not meant to be exclusive:

• make synonym suggestions more visible

• if a synonym is approved, make that automatically retag all questions associated with the now-synonym (i.e. like moderator merges)

• increase the number of people who can suggest synonyms — I mean, what are generalists for, if not for this?

• Allow users with a score of x to suggest a synonym for an existing tag without having to apply that synonym to a question first.

• … open to further suggestions.

Answer 5

As far as I can tell about 15 millions views at Stack Overflow are on inappropriate (historically locked) questions.

_{(285 locked questions have views between 10K and 100K plus 158 questions with views between 100K and 1M plus 3 questions with views over 1M)}

Visual difference between historically locked and legitimate questions looks quite subtle to me, even though I have few years experience on the site. It can be even harder for inexperienced readers to tell the difference. This seems to create wide open broken windows.

Due to high views historical questions tend to rank highly in web searches. Inexperienced visitors coming from searches may think that these questions are legitimate and try to ask similar ones.

Suggest to invest some effort into making it easier for new users to see that historical questions differ from regular ones.

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• Related: Use pink background when rendering historically locked posts. (similar analysis at Software Engineering shows about 5M views at historically locked questions over there - meaning this issue isn't specific only to Stack Overflow)

• Also related: Automatic visual indication of old questions - this request shows an interesting mockup for how historic questions could be rendered:
   

• Yet another approach worth considering was proposed in comments below - grayout with un-fade on hover like it is currently done on low-score answers:

  ^{It already exists, it makes it very visually obvious that something is funky with the post, and it still allows for good reading conditions with minor effort. Moreover, it would bring the locked banner to greater prominence on the page.}

Answer 6

Give more power to the votes to close, etc. of silver tag badge holders.

The duplicate "hammer" for gold badge holders has worked very well, however we have a lot more silver tag badge holders than we do gold.

This could be one or more of:

• A close vote by a silver tag badge holders takes longer to time out.
• Close review queue put questions with a vote from silver tag badge holder higher up the queue.
• A close vote by a silver tag badge holders result is an automatic vote from community, so doubling the power.
• Two votes from silver tag badge holders is enough to close a question as a duplicate.

Answer 7

Ability to leave a time-limited comment that also mark another comment as obsolete after a time delay.

• Often someone comments on one of my post, I edit the post in response and leave them a comment to say I have done so.
• Both of these comments are of no interest to anyone else in the long term.
• Having to remember to go back and delete may comment and flag their as obsolete is a pain.
• If the other person agrees that their comment is now obsolete, it should be deleted without the moderators having to look at it.

Result, fewer obsolete comments, and fewer flags for the moderators.

Answer 8

Multiple Entry Boxes

Right now, everyone enters their questions and answers into a single box, and we rely on all users to use understand what a good question should look like. For the legions of users who come here from Yahoo answers and other question sites, there is no clear indication that SE requires a little more from its users.

I think for users with less than 200 points, instead of a single text entry are for the question, there should be two:

1. The actual question
2. How the asker has already attempted to solve their own problem.

So for Mathematica SE, a users would see two boxes - one for the question, and one to enter code and describe how they have already attempted to solve their problem.

For History SE, the second box would required what a preliminary search has revealed.

Having a simple form like this will start their walk through asking a good question.

Answer 9

Another pet popular-but-not-implemented proposal: opt-in notifications for specific posts.

EDIT: The original question asks about notifications for particular questions. I'd actually like separate opt-in notifications for questions and answers; a new answer would generate a notification for a question, but edits to that answer would not generate further notification unless the user requests notifications for that answer. This would be an important distinction on questions with lots of answers (such as this "Plan the Second Iteration" question!).

Proposal stats

• 96 upvotes, 1 downvote
• Three duplicate proposals/questions, none of which has any downvotes:
  • Please allow me to follow questions (28 upvotes)
  • Is there a way to get notification on Stack Overflow? (10 upvotes)
  • Can I get notified of changes to a selected question? (6 upvotes)
• A request for notifications on favorite tags: Can I get notifications from my favourite tags into the SE inbox? (7 upvotes)

Teach the controversy!

This request seems potentially more controversial than my other request, so I'll try to address potential criticism in Q&A format:

Q: How is this different from marking questions as "favorites"?

Note that all of my "duplicate" questions asked above are actually marked as duplicates of the official "favorite questions" FAQ question. This is not completely ridiculous, especially since one of the OPs mentions that they're specifically looking for something to replace in-browser bookmarking.

A: The proposal is for new notifications.

Marking a question as a "favorite" simply puts it in a list somewhere. In order to see if a "favorite" question has been updated, the user must remember to periodically check each and every favorited question for updates. I just checked, and I have over three pages' worth of favorited questions across the network. There is essentially no chance that I will go back and check each of those periodically for updates.

Additionally, there are reasons to "favorite" questions even when the user doesn't care about updates to the question. For instance, I "favorite" questions that I find merely interesting or amusing, or which explain how to solve particular problems that I encounter periodically.

Q: Don't you already get all the notifications you need?

For comment discussions, we already have @-notifications and the auto-notification feature that kicks in when the OP write a comment and only one other user has commented.

A: No, the existing features really are insufficient.

• There was a recent meta-question (I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately) asking about whether we could add a feature to promote use of @-notifications among new users.
• @-notifications are limited to notifying a single user. If someone has already written a comment asking a question to which you'd like to know the answer, you'd have to ask the OP to @-notify you in a separate comment if and when they get around to answering the user who originally asked.
• Similar to the above point, sometimes users may be interested in conversations to which they haven't yet actually contributed.

Q: Won't this generate too much noise?

A: That's why it's opt-in.

...and, once you've subscribed to updates, you should be able to unsubscribe, too.

This is a model that's already been deployed (and is in my opinion a success) on Bugzilla, GitHub (you can subscribe to and unsubscribe from updates for individual issues or for an entire repository), and Facebook. I believe it's even implemented on Discourse, another Jeff Atwood Project™.

Q: But wait, those example sites are social networks! We don't want more social networking features here!

A: This functionality is not specific to social networking.

It's unclear that the particular subscribe/unsubscribe feature is specifically related to social networking. This is a simple but extremely useful tool for customizing the notification features that already exist on SE sites.

Additionally, as pointed out by NathanTuggy below, Bugzilla (which previously wasn't mentioned in the list above) implements fine-grained control of per-issue notifications, and it is in no way a social networking site.

Random trivia

According to Jeff Atwood's answer on the linked proposal, this was actually implemented, then pulled, then replaced with the "favorites" feature.

Answer 10

I can describe my big desire, as a power user and an expert in some cross-site areas: discoverability and manageability of communities and questions, preferably without needing to be actually on the network at all times.

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It's not a feature request, at least in its present form, but:

The cross-site Filtered Questions on Stack Exchange are a bit awkward to use, making site and question discovery extremely difficult

It would be nice to have better discovery tools. There are a lot of sites in the network. Just looking at my professional interests, I can answer questions across over half a dozen sites.

This fits in with your filtering stuff that was mentioned in the question, but being able to put the right communities and the right questions in front of the experts is only beneficial. Ideally, you'd see higher quality answers to questions.

---

Something tangentially related to filtering and discovery:

Additional RSS feeds

As long as you aren't as aggressive in blocking feed readers as Reddit is (my Reddit feeds in Feedly rarely get updated because Feedly hits the Reddit rate limits and Reddit refuses to increase their allocation), RSS feeds can lead to some interesting discovery, data analysis in a closer-to-real-time situation, and integrations with third party tools (using something like IFTTT or custom software).

Answer 11

Flagging Improvements will Help Moderators' Experiences

I find as a moderator that many users get confused about when they should flag and when they should down vote. I see it go both ways. I see spam that gets down voted (but not flagged). I see questions flagged when a down vote would have been sufficient.

Any improvements to flagging should also include changes to down voting. When somebody down votes, a box could pop up asking for a reason. Clicking on some of those reasons could escalate the down vote to a flag. There could also be an "other" field that would be automatically left as a comment.

Some reasons for flagging could just turn into a down vote. Something like "there are inaccuracies" or "I disagree with this".

I'd also like users to able to flag posts to enter queues. It would be nice to be able to flag questions that need to be edited for grammar, spelling, or formatting. There are plenty of times where you may not be able to do that edit right then, but putting it in a list of things to get taken care of would make the site better.

Answer 12

Leave closed but change the close reason

Sometimes questions have been closed with a close reason (unclear, too broad, off-topic) which was correct at the time. Then, the OP edits the question. This now makes the former close reason obsolete but lets a different one kick in: for example, a question which used to be unclear is now off-topic because site-specific off-topic reason 2. Currently, the only thing possible is to either leave it as is, ask (/flag for) a mod nicely or attempt to reopen followed by reclose.

Instead, a functionality could be added to the reopen review queue along the lines of leave closed; apply different close reason. With a sensible majority of e.g. three people (which would kick the post from the queue anyway as is) the new reason would be applied.

If a closed question acquires both leave closed and change reason votes, let it go up to three identical votes. If the users cannot agree on a new close reason (e.g. two go for too broad, one for off-topic reason 2), wait for five close-type votes in total. If a majority of three hasn’t been reached, leave the reason as is.

I’ll admit that this is a not-so-often encountered feature, but in my opinion SE would benefit. It would be much clearer than commenting on a user’s comment ‘Why is my question still unclear?’

Answer 13

Give an incentive for finding duplicate questions and at the same time can we have a platinum badge for questions that get more than 500 upvotes:-)

At present if you see a question that may be a duplicate and has an easy answer you can post the answers or post a link to the duplicate question. (Or the few hi-rep users can vote to close it as duplicate, think of normal users here, not the people that read Meta)

It is better for Stack Overflow if a link to the duplicate is posted as a comment, or the user votes to close the question as a duplicate. However, the user gets more rep if he/she posts the easy answer quickly.

Answer 14

Enable the Triage Review Queue Everywhere

and possibly improve it.

As a moderator, these criteria make me edit questions the most often:

• Has only one tag.
• Does not have a top 5% (?) tag.
• Has tags that don't usually occur together.
• Has new or rare tag.
• Has a tag from the (implicit) black list.
• Has title that is very similar to many other titles.
• Has no or very little Markdown.
• Is only one paragraph.
• Has MathJax in the title.

If there was a review queue with questions that fulfill any of these or similar criteria, that would not only help me find them but also enable others to help with the task(s).

When a reviewer views the question, the reasons for it being in the queue should be highlighted.

Answer 15

Improve searching operators by adding options to sort

Searching plays an important role in find posts, matching duplicates for closure votes, and possibly many more.

I enjoy the search operators that can be used to limit the scope of one's search. Perhaps one can add more of these:

• Be able to sort your search as part of the search query using (say) sort:votes (for a descending list of posts by their score).

  At the moment, this is a click away with any query. When trying to find duplicates that I know are highly voted, I have to search and then click the sort. A sort: operator would help here.

• Be able to reverse the sort order using (say) sort:oldest or sort:-newest to have a look at the oldest posts matching your query.

  At the moment, there is only one suggested order each of the tabs (newest, votes and active).

Answer 16

Improve Searching

I know this is a can of worms, but let's face it: the search results usually ... disappoint. When I really need to find something, I use Google with site:x.stackexchange.com.

Part of this may be the "Relevance" sorting criterion. How does that work? Searching Meta I just got five-years-old posts that have status-completed right at the top.

Answer 17

For sites with large review queues, automatically set the review filters based on the user's most "active" tag(s)

• I can't be humanly expected to review 1000+ posts on Stack Overflow

  Yet that is the expectation conveyed to me whenever I glance at the top bar.

• I don't grok half the questions because I am not familiar with those technology stacks

  So how can I be expected to make a call on what is enough information and what is too broad?

• Yes, there is a filter that can be manually set

  But it is not obvious how to set this. And why should I have to set it when my site activity is captured as tag votes, question views, etc.?

---

I don't know what the right definition of "active" should be here. Here are some possible metrics:

• upvotes
• views on questions with those tags
• proportion of questions/answers in that tag compared to total questions/answers
• a combination of the above

Answer 18

This suggestion is three years old. It currently has a net score of +17, is not tagged with status-declined/status-complete, and only a single answer at net score +4. The latter even missed the entire point of the feature request, which is

Allow a single close-voter to give multiple reasons.

I have hit a dozen questions across several sites in the past week where multiple reasons applied. Some of them are straightforward: it was both too broad and primarily opinion-based. Others were a bit more complicated: either reason X applied, but if it didn't, then reason Z would logically have to apply, instead.

This is problematic in more than one way:

• if everybody votes closure for a single reason when two or more apply, and the first reason is inapplicable after editing, we now have a question closed on poor grounds, an asker confused or annoyed, and a dilemma for voters or moderators.

• close-voters have to pick the one reason. As an extreme example, someone may be unable to actually make that choice, and therefore doesn't pick either. I have not experienced the difficulty yet, but it has caused real (physical and mental) anguish.

• borderline cases get left unresolved, because each reason makes it hard to deal with others (it's hard to explain the way it is structured in my mind, but, imagine trying to see one tree in a forest without ever looking at others). Again, no close-vote.

There are several ways to implement this:

• each close-vote is a close-vote. Only the number matters; the reasons are a check box that select the information a close-vote wants to show to the asker.

• the close-vote gets divvied up. Pick two reasons and they each get a half-tick, three get a third, etc. If a reason no longer applies (other responses deal with changing the reason for a close-vote while it is still closed, due to edits) then reasons can be unticked, but the close-vote remains on the counter.

• ...?

Answer 19

Give us notifications for absolutely everything, and then make the non-essential notes opt-out.

Other responses have already pointed out a number of events that we receive zero notice of, despite the importance they have, to our work here.

But it's also been implied that some (especially higher-rep) users would be bombarded, and in any case, the individual might simply not want to hear about that event.

So, there are two requests here:

1. Give us notifications for everything. See previous responses for some examples of what this includes.

2. Let us make them go away, if we want to. I'll expand on this next.

---

That latter request can be fleshed out:

• when a person first receives a new type of notification, add a quick phrase to the notification box saying that it is the first such time, and pointing out a check box they can use to "mute" this type of notification. Either grandfather existing notifications or apply this rule "from now on" at implementation.

• add a link in the notification box which directs to a page describing the different notification types, and how to globally mute/unmute them when that is possible. This could even be on the same page. Make it a very obvious symbol and mode indicator - say, a red barred circle versus a green exclamation mark - right next to the name of the notification.

• make the muting question-specifiable. I don't want to hear about new answers on just that question, but I do need to know about other activity - bam, "mute answer notifications on this question" and I'm happy. Not interested in anything except closevotes or deletion - bam, "mute [everything else] on this question" and I can be on my merry, knowing I'll be told if that question might or has been removed.

• Subsequent to both of the above, separate the muting/unmuting for specific questions from the global toggle. I might normally block all the new comment notes, but want to keep track of a particular discussion for a couple of days, or change my standard preferences but keep the special mutes/unmutes applied. Possibly incorporate a "nuke" button as well, that removes all my current special mutes/unmutes.

• This kind of functionality already exists in the ability to block tags on a particular site, or even entire sites from the main page and sidebars. It enables us to get all the information we need at the time we need it, and also to ignore the information we don't need or want, and the change is as simple as a couple of clicks while we happen to be thinking about that thing already.

Answer 20

Ban "Try this [code block]" answers

I am getting tired of those numerous posts (in my case on Stack Overflow, but I guess there are similar cases on other sites), that say:

Try this

[CODE BLOCK]

I know we can't make rules for each and every low quality post indicator, but in my opinion this one does need attention.

I propose to show a notification to the user that "Try this" answers are discouraged and should be accompanied by some explanation. Maybe we should subtract the code block character count, so "Try this" would fall out the 30 character limit enforcing a little explanation already.

Answer 21

Support for tables/tabulation in posts

I'm not particularly concerned about how this feature is implemented, but it is cumbersome as a user to have to reach out to a 3rd-party ASCII-table utility (like this one) in order to convey one's message more clearly.

Answer 22

Help users understand that comments are not for answers

Across all sites on the network (though with varying frequency), inevitably, questions end up with "mini-answers" in the comments (even from high-rep users who should know better). Clearly, something isn't working here. Comments are for comments on the question (like asking for clarification), not for answers.

From my experience, here are the main types of question comments (ignoring spam and rude/offensive comments, as they aren't really relevant here):

1. Asking for clarification/trying to help improve the question: This is the main intended use for comments.
2. References to other questions/answers: These are very helpful - they populate the "Linked" section on the question with posts that are related (as determined by users, rather than the posts in the "Related" section that are chosen by the software). Often, the question asker or a potential answerer will see information on a linked post that helps them arrive at a solution.
3. Giving a partial answer: This is not a valid use of the comment system, nor is it a good answer. Incomplete, unhelpful answers are not welcome as answers or comments.
4. Giving an answer that the commenter is not certain works: In my opinion, this is not really different than giving a partial answer: it may or may not be useful to the question asker, and it certainly isn't of the quality that we expect from answers.
5. Jokes and chatter: While these sorts of comments can be well-received, they're not really what comments (in their current state) are meant for. In my opinion, chat is a better vehicle for discussion of questions (we have the "migrate to chat" button for a reason).

We need to emphasize that types 1 and 2 are the appropiate uses for comments, and other types should be made in chat (or not at all).

Answer 23

Help prevent new users from asking questions as answers

The number of times new users think SE is like a forum and post a question as an answer is upsetting.

Can a simple parser look for a '?' in their answer and say something like 'If you have a question, please use the new question link!!!'.

In fact, I'd recommend this just if it's their first answer, regardless of the existence of a '?' in the text...

Answer 24

We need a clear, defined process by which we can request the ability to embed YouTube videos on a SE site

We've been requesting this for eons on Mechanics.SE (questions related to strange sounds, part identification, etc.), written meta.mechanics.SE posts about it, discussed it with Jon Ericson in chat and nothing ever seems to happen.

Answer 25

Open Stack Exchange to the other 80%

Something like 20% of the world population can read simple English. Stack Exchange should expand to the other 80%.

Yes, internationalization is hard. But Stack Exchange has been around for a long time. It's diversified away from being for English-speaking programmers writing about programming, to being for English-speaking programmers writing about diverse topics, and has opened up to English-speaking non-programmers. Now, very slowly, Stack Exchange is opening up to non-English-speaking programmers. Open up to the rest of the world!

6–8 years ago…

Our mission is to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions. Nothing about that mission says the questions have to be in English. It is our long term goal to make the Stack Exchange Network a great, planetary resource for all the world's citizens no matter what language they speak.

3–4 years ago…

ETA: still 6–8 arbitrary units of time.

A little over a year ago…

We're saying not yet.

And still nothing coming outside of a few programming sites. And no respect for the existing communities of the sites about languages), which have all (at least the ones about non-extinct, non-artificial) been built by a small set of very persistent native speakers driven by the hope that the site would eventually open up to everyone, and not just the few who also happen to speak English well enough to participate on Stack Exchange.

In concrete terms, I'm only making some very cheap requests:

• Provide a user interface and the official documentation in all the languages of the existing sites (at the visitor's choice, of course). Cost: small, supporting a dozen languages isn't much more expensive than supporting 4.
• On each site, officially allow meta posts and chat in the site's language(s). Cost: 0.
• Allow proposals for non-English sites about topics other than programming on Area 51 (and allow them to go through if they reach the launch stage). “We can't allow T in L yet because we want to have an employee who speaks L” makes sense, “We won't allow T in L because T ≠ programming” doesn't. Cost: 0.

Answer 26

Can the tag suggestions get some love? Specifically, when the system suggest tags it should offer JIT help what the tag is about, probably show the excerpt below the tag.

Answer 27

Improvements to tags:

Allow tags to be marked as “obsolete” along with a message explaining why.

• An “obsolete” tag will not be allowed to be used on a new question, or added to the question that does not already have the tag.
• The removal of an obsolete tag from a question would not show the question on the front page.
• The person that asked the question will get an inbox request to remove the tag from their question.
• Maybe marking a tag as “obsolete” with a moderator-only power.
• This would make the process of removing tags less painful.

Allow a tag to require that one of a set of related tag is also used.

• For example, when SQL is used, we could require that a tag is used to say what data vendor is being used.
• A regular expression is another example, when it has to know the version of the regular expression engine to write a useful answer.

Answer 28

We need to make the migration feature more robust and intelligent for users and moderators

I don't think there is a topic more discussed on SE than this topic. A basic search for questions about migration lie in the 4,000 questions asked range. To me this indicates that the current way of handling migrations is insufficient and should be addressed and not simply rationalized away. Due to the length and amount of arguments in the community I will simply list a few posts for example, and then a proposed solution. I am posting this not so much for my idea to be used over others but that we can actually make a step forward in this area. I feel like the justifications to date are "its too much work", and instead we should be making at a minimum smalls feature steps to test if any of the ideas proposed to date would be beneficial to the community at large.

There are currently some open feature discussions on SO and SE on this Flagging migration should include more options and This question may belong to <Another site>, consider migrating and Propose Close -> Migration, as well as some that were rejected such as Migrate based on tags and More options when flagging for migration, but I don't think that the answers have been satisfactory given that the question keeps arising.

I think that we could potentially solve this issue by having a few criteria work together in concert. I propose using the current migration stats like SE already does, use the question tags to make more relevant suggestions, use the flaggers criteria such as reputation (in both SE sites) to expand their list options as well as if the flagger has recieved tag badges (arguably subject experts) to make this system more robust and intelligent for the community as a whole.

In many of the posts the argument is that community members of one community will not know the scope of the recieving community; or more generically that experts are few and limited and would not be best able to judge the correct action. I think this is a short sighted argument. This means the only option is to go to a moderator. To me this burdens a moderator both in time and in needing to confirm the destination community. In addition a queue would be adding to the slew of already exisiting cleanup the community endures (although such questions already go to a queue with some other flag applied in some cases such as deletion).

Proposel:

1. We leave the current commonly migrated based list as it is for those in the community below a certain rep level, such as new users.
2. If you have a tag badge (meaning you are an expert in the topic) and/or sufficient rep level in both the current community as well as the (proposed) destination SE community, then your list includes those sites as options for migration in addition to the ones based on migration stats. This would handle the situation of community scope, because the user knows the scope of both sites due to rep level that they have in both communities.
3. Over time we will see stat trends in tag groupings and can make the system wieghted to list the most likely migration at the top of the list based on historical stats. This is different than todays stats which is an after the fact aggregation. A great example of this is Android or Wordpress which have full communities on these topics.
4. After 3 or 5 flags applied(?) to a question by the experts defined in #2, the question gets migrated automatically OR to prevent all out anarchy, it goes into a queue on the recieving site for that community to make the decision to accept or reject the question. Although I would not want another queue, it would arguably remove this decision from the mods and at least allow BOTH communities to benefit in a sense that the FROM community can boot a question and the TO community can benefit and expand its question and knowledge base.

I know this might not cover any technical hurdles with the current system, but once again I think it's important to take one or two of the proposed options and make headway because this is clearly a painful item in the community that isn't going away and just keeps getting rejected based on opinions of difficulty to implement.

Answer 29

Order answers by most votes instead of accepted answers

A good percentage of answers I end up using are not the accepted answer.

But I see a strong correlation between upvotes for an answer and the its usefulness.

Would be great to see the most upvoted ones on top. In most cases, those are the ones that have been used by others and have helped others, so it makes sense to sort answers this way.

Answer 30

Make close votes on own questions binding, even for under-3k users.

A under-3k user can freely edit his question. He can see close and reopen votes on his question. His delete votes on his own question is binding - the question is deleted right away. So why aren't close votes to his own questions binding, insta-closing? I had this problem when I found out that my question is a dupe, but though I (an under-3k user) voted to close as duplicate, the question did not get closed.