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We recently learned that the Stack Exchange staff is reluctant to post things on Meta (SO). For example as indicated by Sara:

Stack Overflow Employees have panic attacks and nightmares when they know they will need to post something to Meta. ....

I can’t, with good conscience, force anyone to participate in a venue that causes that type of psychological damage at work.

This was written as an answer to We’re removing “Hot Meta Posts” from Stack Overflow's sidebar for now; moderators now fully control [featured] by Tim Post in which Tim indicates:

Employees will be posting updates on our blog, or sometimes coordinating with moderators to make use of a featured slot.

I for one haven't seen any post about the recent changes regarding the bounties and their design on the blog, or a meta post about them.

I think it would be helpful to have such post for various reasons:

So in conclusion: Will the SO staff be willing to post more of these "release note" kind of updates. I don't think these post will have to be very long, or very detailed. Just a quick heads up and asking for feedback on the changes.

A post could in this case have been:

[Title]: Displaying of bounties redesigned

[Body]: We recently pushed a redesign of how bounties are indicated on questions. This now includes a notice if a bounty is within its grace period and the time until a bounty expires.

If you notice any bugs or have suggestions to improve these recent changes please post an answer.

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    I don't think a full-out blog for such a minor change like this is really necessary. Most people probably won't even notice there was a change. And none of the reports you link are really confusion more than complaints about the way it was implemented, which would've spawned regardless of whether we announced it. Keep in mind we can only feature 2 blog posts network-wide at a time, and using up one of those slots for, well, this... seems like a wasted slot.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Aug 9, 2019 at 13:29
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    @animuson Neither do I think this case warrants a full-out blog, as I've indicated with the example that could have been used in this case. Really short, should take no more then 2 minutes to write. Any more time spend on writing something for a minor change, albeit with big impact as it changes the question page, wouldn't be worth it IMO. The first question I list writes: "Or is an icon or something missing? I've never seen this before. " To me this reads as confusion, although I have to agree that on other instances there are better examples to be found.
    – Luuklag
    Aug 9, 2019 at 13:32
  • The length of the post is irrelevant. Rather, actually posting a blog post at all is simply not worth it. -- And that example is more confused about why there's no icon there. Simply throwing the text "grace period" in front of a title with no other indicator is a bit off-putting and weird - they are expecting a number there for the bounty, or simply no text at all.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Aug 9, 2019 at 13:35
  • @animuson regarding your edit about featured slots: Both questions have been featured for a week or more now, so it wouldn't hurt to withdraw one of them. Alternatively you could sacrifice some of the blog spots that are used, as TBH something like this is far more relevant than a blog about what developers should learn early on if we are catering to "professional and enthusiast programmers,"
    – Luuklag
    Aug 9, 2019 at 13:37

2 Answers 2

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This specific feature wasn't announced because it was a bug.

When removing some dead code, I accidentally eliminated an always false component from an if (___ && ..., and inadvertently exposed some text that had been buried for maybe eight years. I'll do more of a write-up in one of the linked questions because this question is more meta than just this one specific issue.

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There's already a (community-maintained) release notes topic: Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange. The changes are almost always accompanied by a link to an employee introducing or mentioning it. This can be a full-fledged question, but e.g. the 2019-07-11 change for unread inbox notifications links to a comment by Catija on a bug report about the new feature. I've updated today's change to the bounty display but I haven't seen an authoritative source mentioning the change (maybe because of timezones); no doubt somebody will do so in the future.

Do note that when Stack Exchange introduces a major feature change, they do post an announcement: e.g. Moderator Flag Dashboard soft launch and Custom Filters release announcement. For small, merely cosmetic changes, it could be overkill to do so, though in this particular instance I agree that it feels like something has been shipped too early.

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