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I submit to you the following quartet of indisputable facts:

  1. Stack Overflow is for people who are bored at work.
  2. Having animations and video games are more exciting (and therefore less boring) than not having animations and video games.
  3. Chrono Trigger is the best video game ever made.
  4. Downvoting, closing and deleting things is the highlight of my day.

So I propose the following indisputably fantastic feature request:

Crono animated actions!
Crono is so manly

Crono will destroy you Instead of that usual boring grey downvote arrow turning orange, a little animated Crono sprite coming from offscreen to beat the living crap out of the question's (or answer's) score, dealing it 1 damage and reducing its HP accordingly.

Crono is a time-travelling ninja Instead of closing a question, Crono could fly down and use his special Confuse attack against it, leaving it injured and defenseless.

Crono is the natural predator of Lavos And for the coup-de-grace, deleting a question, Crono will appear out of nowhere and cast his ultimate attack, Luminaire, against it. Not even Lavos can stand up to the awesome obliterating power of Crono's Luminaire attack.

This new feature will make Stack Overflow much less boring to use and will draw in the retro-SNES programming crowd which, according to my made-up-just-now statistic will draw in at least 25% more totally rad programmers:
A DIAGRAM

These new programmers will be naturally good at answering concurrency questions because they are easily able to grok the temporal distortions and causality loopholes that are commonplace in multithreaded systems.

Are you going to let Lavos destroy Stack Overflow? No! Help Crono help you, no matter what time it is!

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  • 19
    @peacedog: Having played both Chrono Trigger and Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When they Roar, I can safely say that Chrono Trigger offers superior entertainment value in the long term, while Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When they Roar offers a relatively large spike of short-term entertainment. Overall, Chrono Trigger is the greatest game known the man. Definitely better than whatever Final Fantasy games they're making nowadays.
    – Welbog
    Jan 8, 2010 at 13:58
  • 5
    +1 for lolz (15 chars)
    – Jon Seigel
    Jan 8, 2010 at 14:00
  • 12
    @random: I don't think you understand the word "indisputable".
    – Welbog
    Jan 8, 2010 at 14:06
  • 7
    +1 for the rad graph
    – harshath.jr
    Jan 8, 2010 at 14:32
  • 4
    Andrew Moore or Jonathan Sampson need to placate with some Greasemonkey for now.
    – random
    Jan 8, 2010 at 14:35
  • 1
    I agree we definitely need more animated GIFs on SO.
    – Tamas Czinege
    Jan 8, 2010 at 15:07
  • 1
    Ahhh, Meta Friday, how I've missed you! OK, so ChronoTrigger, so not the best game ever. Not even in the ballpark. And I love me some seriously retro games. But I gotta give this +1 anyway; I just can't help it. It's probably for the rad graph.
    – John Rudy
    Jan 8, 2010 at 15:29
  • 1
    @Termifish: Go buy yourself a dictionary and look up "indisputable" for me, would you?
    – Welbog
    Jan 8, 2010 at 15:34
  • 4
    @Gaspar: Is that kind of like the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world? What's all the damn fighting about then?
    – John Rudy
    Jan 8, 2010 at 16:59
  • 16
    picking up the dictionary and flipping through the pages... incontinence, no... insult, oops, have to go back... ahh, here - indisputable (adj): Used by Super Mario Landians if they know they are wrong and therefore have no arguments left. Best thing to do is ignoring their statements completely. Well, that's fine with me :)
    – Ladybug Killer
    Jan 8, 2010 at 17:03
  • 2
    +1 for the MS Paint graph
    – Heather M
    Jan 8, 2010 at 17:36
  • 2
    I don't want it, but +1 for entertainment value.
    – Margaret
    Jan 8, 2010 at 20:28
  • 9
    Obviously I am a tremendous hit with the ladies of Meta.
    – Welbog
    Jan 8, 2010 at 20:40
  • 26
    I have no idea what any of this means, but +1 WOULD READ AGAIN A+++
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jan 9, 2010 at 9:30
  • 3
    Best idea ever I think. Jeff, stop whatever you are doing now, and implement this feature! Stack Overflow will only benefit from more TOTALLY RAD programmmers.
    – TM.
    Jan 9, 2010 at 16:06

7 Answers 7

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92

I don't know who that fancy schmancy "Crono" guy of yours is, but do you remember this guy:

Commander Keen

Here's the Greasemonkey script to have Commander Keen help you out with downvoting:

install script – view source

In case you're not brave enough to try it out, or too nice to ever downvote, or not greasy enough to have a monkey installed, here's a crappy screencast to give you the idea.

Happy downvoting.

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  • 2
    Make that Crono, and you have yourself an accepted answer.
    – Welbog
    Mar 6, 2010 at 15:52
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    @NIfE: Whatever, dude. Commander Keen FTW.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Mar 6, 2010 at 15:57
  • 4
    No way! This really works? How long did this take to do? I'm not greasy enough for a monkey but I might install it just to see this in action. And +10000 for Commander Keen - I've never heard about this other guy.
    – Pekka
    Mar 6, 2010 at 18:02
  • 1
    @Pekka: About four hours net, I'd say. Most of it is jQuery magic.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Mar 6, 2010 at 18:37
  • @balpha brilliant work, I think I'll check it out. That Crono must be some obscure canadian thing. Are those maple leaves on his head?
    – Pekka
    Mar 6, 2010 at 19:01
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    This deserves that big green checkmark for the effort. Good work, balpha. Now we just need to turn Keen against Atwood to fight his conspiracy!
    – Welbog
    Mar 19, 2010 at 10:44
  • 1
    +1 for the mooning at the end!
    – Ether
    Apr 14, 2010 at 17:50
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    @Ether: Most of the credit goes to ID Software for actually drawing those sprites (it's an easter egg in Keen 4)
    – balpha StaffMod
    Apr 15, 2010 at 8:52
  • I Used to play Keen, and someday I got angry. This game sucks, sorry Chrono is way better.
    – Gabriel Guimarães
    Nov 23, 2010 at 14:51
  • Hey, it works in Opera without any greasy monkeys at all! Wonderful, I <3 it!! AAA+++++++!!!
    – Piskvor left the building
    Mar 3, 2011 at 8:51
  • 2
    @balpha Please consider adding a userscript for the dancing uniprong ponies to this answer or as a new answer to this question.
    – Pollyanna
    Apr 14, 2011 at 15:58
  • Happy to be of service.
    – Keen
    Apr 4, 2012 at 2:30
  • This just replaced my Unicorn voting script.
    – Dennis
    Apr 28, 2012 at 4:19
  • Awesome script! Modified to work on gravatars as well github.com/Manishearth/Manish-Codes/blob/master/StackExchange/…
    – Manishearth
    May 29, 2012 at 4:45
  • Should this work on Firefox 13? I installed it without apparent effect. I'd love to get this working.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Jul 5, 2012 at 8:03
38

I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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16

I think this is a very good idea.

This kind of thing should happen on (seemingly) random days. Much like google doodles :D

We can have a flock of birds doing all the heroic deleting and downvoting and closing on twitter's birthday.

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  • 25
    -1 because I hate Twitter more than you can possibly imagine.
    – Welbog
    Jan 8, 2010 at 15:19
  • Can we have the flock of birds flying on Mike Score's birthday? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Flock_of_Seagulls
    – John Rudy
    Jan 8, 2010 at 17:02
  • 3
    How is it that 9 people can "like" Wel`Bog's -1 statement, yet there's only 2 downvotes. C'mon people, back up your talk with actions!
    – Mark Henderson
    Apr 14, 2010 at 3:36
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  1. Stackoverflow is not boring.
  2. I read Stackoverflow posts at home when I'm sharpening the saw.

I'm not necessarily against making the site more entertaining.
But it is quite engaging as presently constituted.

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  • 2
    30000 feet and climbing.
    – squillman
    Jan 8, 2010 at 19:14
6

This idea clearly isn't entertaining enough, being almost totally focused on the voter/editor and not the recipient. So, I think the recipient of the votes/edits should also get some screen candy. Perhaps, for example, when they receive a downvote a little animation should cross out their old score, write in the new one, then blow a raspberry. I nominate Frog for this role.

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  • 5
    If SO blew me a raspberry for being downvoted, I think I would shlort coffee through my nose and onto my keyboard. Hilarious, but bad for productivity.
    – Heather M
    Jan 8, 2010 at 17:38
  • 4
    Isn't SO itself bad for productivity?
    – John Rudy
    Jan 8, 2010 at 20:01
  • @Termifish: Depends how stuck you are...
    – Svish
    Jan 9, 2010 at 14:26
  • I'm stuck pretty bad.
    – harshath.jr
    Jan 9, 2010 at 19:57
  • I'm stuck pretty good.
    – John Rudy
    Jan 10, 2010 at 7:02
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  1. Write a browser plug-in to make voting or any other aspect of the site more entertaining
  2. Profit
  3. Wash, rinse, repeat for the rest of the Stack Exchange sites
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6

On a serious note, I hope SO will not have any animation with bright multi-colored characters or flocks of birds. When I am programming, I am not bored at all, and I don't want to have any distractions. Right now the design is extremely elegant and usable, and extremely fast, and I'd rather see it stay this way. If anybody is into plugins, no problem; and I love Commander Keen too, but you know, less is more.

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  • 4
    I like this answer simply for the last paragraph!
    – Andrew Barber
    Oct 8, 2013 at 16:04
  • 2
    @Andrew Barber: I went on and removed everything but the last paragraph.
    – user179079
    Oct 8, 2013 at 16:41
  • +0 for serious answer. That's right. You ain't seeing Commander Keen.
    – Marc Claesen
    Oct 8, 2013 at 18:38

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