Questions tagged [discussion]
Questions that may not necessarily have a clear-cut right or wrong answer and are often subjective. If your question isn't a bug report, feature request, or request for support, it's probably a discussion.
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How can I stop receiving downvotes from a question that the community is keeping up? [duplicate]
Recently, I read the [help article on bounties][help-center/bounties]. I initially misread the article and asked the following question based on that misunderstanding: https://meta.stackexchange.com/...
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Are there any clones/alternatives for running a Stack Exchange style Q&A site?
Since the source code for this site isn't available for purchase or external use, I'm looking for software that can run a Q&A environment similar to Stack Exchange. Are there any such pieces of ...
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What are private reputation events?
The accepted answer to the question "Why is my total reputation less than my monthly reputation?" talks about private reputation events. If I correctly interpret that answer, then these are some ...
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What should I keep out of my posts and titles?
I've recently been editing out things such as "hope this helps" and "good luck" from posts and was wondering if that crosses the imaginary line that seems to not exist in the scattered mess of ...
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User activation: Learnings and opportunities
We mentioned in our roadmap update that user activation was an area that we are prioritizing. In this post, we will go through the background, challenges, and opportunities that we will be focusing on....
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Why does Stack Exchange receive so much negative criticism?
I’ve been using Stack Exchange for a while and must say that it is an awesome site. For every question, you get a useful answer within a short period of time. Recently, I began to research deeper ...
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Formatting Sandbox
Notes:
Answers will occasionally be moved to the Sandbox archive when there are too many of them. When using them to report bugs, keep an eye on the post.
You may also want to take a look at the ...
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Could I rewrite my answer after it got an upvote?
I researched a topic and posted an answer to a question, then conducted additional research and decided that the initial version contains factual inaccuracies and should be substantially rewritten ...
GlorfindelMod
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Lack of Company follow-through / Company failure to meet expectations
Update 2024-09-13
On 2024-Jul-12, Philippe promised a response to the community after following up with Legal:
On 2024-Jul-20, Philippe updated that he was still awaiting an update:
Since then, ...
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answer
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How long can a temporary suspension be?
I ran into a user profile that states:
This account is temporarily
suspended
to cool down. The suspension period ends on Apr 27 '24 at 7:54
At first, it seemed like a somewhat longish suspension ...
SpevacusMod
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2
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What should we do for the tag wiki of [pre] tag?
We have a pre tag on this site.
This tag was previously used in this question: What is a pre vote? , but a user deleted this tag and mentioned that this tag does lack a tag wiki. (see here)
I have ...
GlorfindelMod
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Join Stack Overflow’s CEO and me for the first Stack IRL Community Event in NYC on October 10th, 2024 (space is very limited)
One of the great staples - and most fun parts - of online communities is, ironically, the chance to meet offline. It’s something that I’ve enjoyed greatly throughout my career. Since joining Stack ...
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Upcoming Community Asks Sprint Notice - September 2024
Update – September 10, 2024: Thank you everyone for submitting your issues and requests; we appreciate you taking the time to raise them. Keep them coming. We will take these into consideration ...
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Bringing clarity to status tag usage on meta sites
Let’s talk about the status tags. Every single user who visits a Meta believes status tags mean something. They’re not wrong, of course. But what, really, do the status tags mean? Do users’ beliefs ...
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Upcoming initiatives on Stack Overflow and across the Stack Exchange network (July 2024)
Today I shared an update on progress from last quarter and what we’re up to this quarter on the blog.
TL;DR - top areas of focus include:
Community Asks quarterly event
Iterating and scaling Staging ...
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Upcoming sign-up experiments related to tags
Update August 29, 2024
We launched the recent tags experiment on Stack Overflow. A bug is currently causing it to show up network-wide. We are working to correct that, but if you find yourself ...
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answer
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AI generated answers promoting a personal app
I've been reading a lot of answers about how to react to AI-generated responses. There is one particular case, a user who answers based on AI and gives credit to the source of the answer. So far, ...
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Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers
Today we changed the way we sort answers on Stack Overflow. We no longer pin the accepted answer (with the green checkmark) to the top of the list of answers. By default, we now sort strictly by votes ...
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Why does this code block has weird formatting? [migrated]
COMMAND and OUTPUT is formatted as italic in this post. I know <pre><code> can be used to format texts in code blocks but this answer uses just a normal code fence ``` ```. Here's the ...
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Why does the counter in the Votes/Revisions tab reflect activity immediately but not the public counters in your Activity page?
I noticed that if you go to your Votes tab in your profile, vote on a post, and then check back, the X Votes counter at the top of the list of posts you voted on will immediately update to reflect the ...
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Announcing a change to the data-dump process
UPDATE August 29, 2024
This new post has updates related to various bug reports and feature requests.
UPDATE August 14, 2024
Over the past week we’ve scaled up the availability of the new page and ...
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Do we want questions about Staging Ground on Meta SE?
The Staging Ground semi-recently went live on Stack Overflow. The company has, in the past, mentioned that it may be extended to other sites on the network. At the present time, this has not yet ...
SpevacusMod
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On which SE can I ask theme park related questions?
From an online theme park survival guide:
5) Know the loopholes. Help the adults you're with to read up on the theme park's special time-saving tricks and programs so you can do less waiting in ...
CommunityBot
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Let's update our blatantly off-topic close reason to use the 5 available close fields!
In case you're unfamiliar, I asked the question that lead to us updating our site-specific close reason to use the modernized close fields. The benefit of doing this is that the right information is ...
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0
answers
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Links to Imgur sometimes become dead [closed]
It seems sometimes imgur.com go dead after a while.
Going through top-rated visualization posts here I see that about half of the image links are dead (the posts are 1-4 years old)
For instance:
Is ...
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Is Replit suitable for the Stack Exchange Network?
Recently, Replit shut down their support forum, Replit Ask, now linking to Stack Overflow. As a result, many users with Replit-specific problems are now posting questions which aren't about code and ...
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answer
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If a post seeks general advice on dealing with a perceived problem in a community, should we always migrate it into that community's meta?
I asked a general question here a few days ago about strategies for curtailing overly zealous deleting. I think it received about 8 upvotes here. A resourceful user deduced which site I was ...
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What are some deferred, ignored, or sunset projects we wish SE would work on to facilitate the community?
We all have our pet projects - things we wish SE would do but which seem to be forever stuck in the backlog pile. Other times, something that's well received gets forgotten in the shuffle.
Inspired by ...
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Let’s Encrypt chain of trust changes will affect a small number of users on Stack Exchange
tl;dr: As early as September 9th, some users accessing the site from old Android devices (running Android 7.0 and earlier) may see SSL warnings in their browser regarding an invalid certificate when ...
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GitHub briefly closed the SmokeDetector repo - what exactly happened?
On Tuesday, September 3, 2024, around 15:05 UTC, GitHub sent out email notifications to SmokeDetector and all users who had a fork of the repository, notifying us that it had been disabled because of ...
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Is cross-posting wrong (to an external site)?
I made a question at Stack Overflow long ago and also posted the same question in a non-Stack Exchange website (Xtreme VB Talk). The question was answered, Combining two PNG images into one image ...
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Is there going to be a process around hellbanning?
Given Jeff's recent blog post about hellbanning users, I must say I think the idea (making that user's content visible to only them) is a good one.
However, the people in whose hands that power will ...
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Where can I watch or download all of the DevDay videos?
There are a lot of us who are unable to attend any of the DevDays because the locations are too far from where we reside. I was wondering whether there's a YouTube channel or a page where we can watch ...
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Does Stack Exchange implement "shadowbanning"? [duplicate]
When a user is shadowbanned their contributions and their user profile is made invisible. Does Stack Exchange implement this? Or are all bans/suspensions made transparently?
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What strategies are effective at curtailing overly aggressive deleting of compliant questions and answers? [migrated]
In our community, it only takes three delete votes to delete a post.
I've observed that one member of our community in particular is aggressive when it comes to casting delete votes. For answer posts, ...
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Essential Stack Exchange user scripts and the dependencies they utilize
As part of our discovery for providing a JavaScript API for user scripts, we want to know what user scripts you're currently using. This can be used to report user scripts that you use and the global ...
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What can I do if originally accepted and upvoted answers suddenly got a large number of downvotes? [duplicate]
The last two weeks saw an exceptionally (and to some extent, abnormally, since I'm new to SO and don't have much posts) large number of downvotes to my answers. Most of those answers originally got at ...
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Should the vote lock-in time be extended? [duplicate]
I think that voting should take at least a day to lock in. Someone could vote down accidentally on a good post, and then, 5 min later, the vote would be locked in.
reneMod
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Dealing with old MSE questions specific to Stack Overflow
It seems that many years ago, MSE and MSO didn't have a separate identity. As a result, MSE has been left with probably thousands of questions - a significant percentage of them - which logically ...
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Why does Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange work?
I have a few questions about Stack Overflow (or any other Stack Exchange site) and how it works:
How do intelligent programmers (or other subject matter experts) the world over find time to answer ...
reneMod
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Does Stack Exchange allow registration with "disposable" email?
There are several services on the Internet that offer this: you create an email that's only valid for a few minutes. Are these email adresses allowed?
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Shifting the data dump schedule: A proposal
My colleague Rosie recently announced that, because of our difficulties predictably getting data dump files to the Internet Archive[1],[2], we are setting more realistic expectations for completing ...
CommunityBot
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Is Stack Exchange still planning to respond to the community's open letters?
On October 6th, moderators, ex-moderators, and members of the community published two open letters to Stack Exchange Inc.. These letters have, as of today, been signed 768 times (general letter) and ...
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Data Dumps - updates and bug fixes
Thanks to everyone who posted bug reports and feature requests related to the updated data dumps process. Below, we’ve detailed some work on those reports and requests.
Issues reported on this post:
...
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Dramatic increase in New User accounts - why?
I've noticed a big uptick in "new user" account creation on Bicycles:
Zooming in, we can see a cliff between 5 and 12 June 2024.
Before that, new users were steady at 6-15 a day. After ...
8
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1
answer
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Remove (again) and prevent creation of the specific-user tag
From the accepted answer at Should any Meta post that calls out a user by name be deleted, not just downvoted? :
There's a reason we always kill off the specific-user tag every time it appears.
...
SpevacusMod
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Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange points system exploit discovered [duplicate]
There are a number of users who are gaining points by either creating posts and having their friends upvote, or else they are copying another (often accepted) answer, and then rephrasing it. Although ...
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How long did it take to program Stack Overflow?
How long did it take the Stack Overflow developers to build the Stack Overflow site (in the state where you could ask questions and get answers, vote, and post comments)?
CommunityBot
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Please welcome Spevacus and rene to the Meta Stack Exchange moderators team!
After discussing it with the Meta Stack Exchange mods and some potential candidates, we are excited to welcome Spevacus and rene to the MSE moderation team. As with previous moderator appointments on ...
SpevacusMod
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Is sponsoring a tag open to any company? [closed]
I just saw that Adobe sponsors certain tags. Whoa! Very cool. A welcome and smart way to bring users and company together in a way that benefits everyone involved - exactly the kind of advertising we ...
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