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 assistance, or question with a concrete answer, it's probably a discussion.
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Stack Exchange Moderator FAQ
As per the FAQ for Stack Exchange sites, this FAQ will serve the following purposes:
To be the canonical reference for moderators across the Stack Exchange sites for things that are beyond question (...
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Moderation strike: Conclusion and the way forward
Negotiations between strike representatives and Stack Exchange, Inc. have come to a close, with a mutually acceptable agreement being reached and announced. With that agreement being reached, we'd ...
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Markdown change: Intra-word emphasis now works
There are tons of questions I could maybe post this as an answer to, but before choosing the best one, I'll just post this as an announcement question that can be linked elsewhere.
The short story
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We're regenerating all Gravatar identicons
We've recently discovered a vulnerability in our identicon generation process. To remedy it, we have changed how we approach generating them and regenerated all identicons. We do not have any ...
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How can we improve the Stack Exchange API?
The Stack Exchange API allows users to programmatically query and connect to the Stack Exchange Network of sites.
The API is currently in version 2.3. We’re collecting feedback from users of the API, ...
J007BStaff
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Nailing it up on your Community Bulletin Board
Community Bulletin was redesigned on June 23, 2014
More info on Redesigned community bulletin.
As some of you may have noticed, there's a new feature on Stack Exchange:
The Community Bulletin box is ...
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How is question quality measured in A/B tests?
As sites grow, there's a noticeable increase in community unhappiness with question quality. Quite a bit of the problem is simply a matter of scale, but sites sometimes optimize for extremes. Bad ...
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List of communities with base css updates completed
By January 2016, All communities have been updated
The design team has been rolling out design updates to sites as part of network-wide update to a new base css framework. The updates allow us to:
...
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2017: a year in spam
Last year, I posted 2016: a year in spam. Since that was pretty well-received, here’s the 2017 version. Ladies, gentlemen, aliens, and everyone in between: more statistics about spam that you never ...
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Add the ability to cite questions and answers on all Stack Exchange sites
The Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange sites have a great feature that allows a user to quickly create a citation to answers and questions. This is accomplished by clicking ...
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On downvotes, or more precisely, why people downvote things
After seeing the downvotes survey and, honestly, being very surprised that downvotes are targeted again, I took the initiative to sign up as a completely new user on SO, to understand, in my own way, ...
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Editing bounty messages, is it finally time for a little "Love"? (anti-Doh! feature request)
I start a lot of bounties and when I add a bounty remark I often get it right the first time. Once when a mistake in my message was problematic a moderator was kind enough to take the time to help me ...
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Plans for Updates to Review Queues
Update 2021-08-26: With the release of our Final Workflow Changes, we have finished our work on this project.
We are planning a series of releases over the coming months relating to the work being ...
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When implementing a major design / workflow change, offer an opt-in beta testing option before release
As we've seen recently with both the updated user profile and homepage designs, it's difficult sometimes to gauge the impact that this will have on users' experience just from screenshots or a video ...
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Steward badge can now be awarded multiple times -- backfill details
As we announced in our post on visual design changes to the Review Queues, the Steward badge can now be earned more than once per queue.
The purpose of this post is not to debate the merits of this ...
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Winter Bash encourages bad behavior
Besides bringing some fun at the end of the year, some hat awards are meant to incite good behavior and also serve as more relaxed introduction to the Stack Exchange sites and their policies. While ...
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Stack Overflow and CVE-2021-44228 vulnerability (in Log4J)
Update 2021-12-21:
Mitigation for all Log4j-related 3 CVEs is complete on the following products:
Stackoverflow.com and related (public) websites
Stack Overflow Teams: Free, Basic and Business
Stack ...
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Brief maintenances planned for Sat, July 22, 2017 at 00:01 UTC (Fri July 21, 8pm US/Eastern)
Update: The July 21st maintenance is complete. All systems are back to normal now.
There will be a service degradation for up to 20 minutes shortly after Sat, July 22, 2017 at 00:00 UTC (which is Fri,...
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Three-vote close/reopen test - results
Three-vote close and reopen has been something I've been thinking about for ... a really long time. I'm really happy to finally be able to present the results of this test to you all. This post is ...
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Two years later: How has moving the Meta link affected Meta usage?
Two years ago the link to a site's Meta was moved from an always-visible position in the top bar to subitems in the help and Site Switcher menus, as part of the top bar redesign progressively rolled ...
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Supporting your candidate for moderator & being nice
Elections are one of the backbones of the Stack Exchange network. It gives the community a huge voice in determining the handful of people to who will volunteer to have their role on the site ...
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Users with 100% flag decline rates will never know their flags are being declined if they flag infrequently
The flag warning is shown to a user based on flag statistics within a window of 7 days. This means that flag warnings, and by extension flag bans, are optimized for users who flag a lot.
Besides the ...
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TagOverflow - interactive exploration of Stack Exchange tags
I created a graph of tags from Stack Exchange sites (including Stack Overflow, obviously), TagOverflow.
It is a continuation of my previous project, which have met with a warm response here.
Nodes ...
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Moderator Elections: tools for Community Managers
We have just wrapped up our project to make it easier for our community managers to run moderator elections for our Stack Exchange sites.
Between April and June, we released a number of administrative ...
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Trying to hide spam/offensive deletions on user profiles announces them
If a post is deleted as spam or offensive, the user incurs a 100-rep penalty. But SE made the conscious decision to not call that out on the reputation tab; if you go to the page of a user who's hit ...
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Tag synonyms: show suggestions to people who can vote
I just found (by surfing other questions) the dsl tag (which seems to be used mainly for domain-specific languages, although there is no tag wiki yet), and saw that there also is the domain-specific-...
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Can we have a follow-up to "GPT on the platform: Data, actions, and outcomes"?
In answers to GPT on the platform: Data, actions, and outcomes there's been criticism about the methodology.
As the policy about suspensions and the strike is now ongoing for more than 30 days, can we ...
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More info on "For more info visit Meta" required
The current wording for content dispute notices is:
This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being
resolved. For more info visit meta.
To me, the emphasised part isn't ...
user200500
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Why we stopped using Stack Overflow for Teams, and why we won't use the OverflowAI
So, this is an attempt to give some helpful feedback about Stack Overflow for Teams, and explain a bit of why I think it's falling behind lately.
I was also very upset and mildly drunk at the time I ...
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Communication priorities
Two days ago, via a post on codegolf.meta which summarised a number of recent network-level issues, I stumbled upon Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow have moved to CC BY-SA 4.0. I was astonished to ...
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Linking "helpful flags" to available close-votes for 20k+
For people who are active in the SO community, it is quite common to run out of close votes. It is especially noticeable, when chat rooms like try to do some controlled cleanup in their particular ...
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Planned maintenance scheduled for Thursday, 16 December at 01:30-2:00 UTC (Wednesday, December 15 at 8:30-9:00 PM US/EST)
This work is now complete
tl;dr
Planned service interruption that will impact all Stack Overflow & Stack Exchange sites, Jobs, and Chat. All sites may be read-only for up to 30 minutes beginning ...
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The "Featured" tab is now "Bountied"
It's long confused me why we put bounties on a tab labeled "Featured" that has no connection to the "Featured" questions in the right sidebar. I posted a discussion about it earlier this year here on ...
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When posting announcements either post them as QUESTIONS so that people can actually answer or make the entire thread LOCKED if no input is wanted
Recently Stack Exchange posted a new question about a policy on AI generated content.
What is the network policy regarding AI Generated content?
The post was made as a fake question, with the actual ...
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Could the company explain how their recent actions fit in with the stated "commitment to rebuild relationship with our community"?
SE inc. has stated that they're committed to rebuilding a relationship with the community. Given this fact, I would like to ask the company to explain certain recent events. If you haven't already, ...
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How much more bandwidth is eaten up by SE in 2020 compared to 2012?
Many years ago, I asked the question How much bandwidth does SE eat up?
Nick Craver gave a detailed answer, and the short of it was a whopping 60TB of data per month!
I'm wondering how has SE's ...
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Stack Exchange Blogs Authentication, now with 80% less suck!
It appears that this post hasn't been entirely clear on how brand new blog users register. Check this post for a quick explanation on the process. Otherwise, read below for the announcement.
You may ...
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Lack of Company follow-through / Company failure to meet expectations
It brings me no joy to write this post.
Just over a month ago, Stack Overflow announced their most recent round of layoffs for the 2023 calendar year. Following that announcement, Philippe (VP, ...
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Stopping data dumps to "protect data" - harmful and threatening to the community
I find it a bit odd that "senior leadership is working on a strategy to protect Stack Overflow data from being misused by companies building LLMs", but historically has only cared about ...
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Planned maintenance scheduled for Tuesday, August 23, 2022 at 00:00-03:00 AM UTC (Monday, August 22, 8:00-11:00 PM US/EDT)
tl;dr
Planned upgrades that will impact Stack Overflow & Stack Exchange Network sites including Chat. All sites will be read-only for up to 3 hours beginning shortly after Tuesday, August 23, 2022 ...
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Planned maintenance scheduled for Saturday, March 27, 2021 at 1:00 UTC (Friday March 26 9:00 PM US/EDT)
Update: The maintenance went as planned.
tl;dr; Planned service interruption that will impact all Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange sites, Jobs, Chat, and Teams. All sites may be read-only for up to 15 ...
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Delay answer downvote rep loss to voter to help hide voter's identity
A while back, I posted an answer to SO, which was downvoted. I wasn't sure who did it, but had a suspicion because I thought I had seen a particular user lose a reputation point.
When I deleted the ...
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Please test design / colour changes in dark mode and site themes
It's become painfully obvious that design changes, especially around colours, are never tested in Dark Mode, at least not for https://stackoverflow.com.
These changes affect other themed sites as well,...
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What is the future for Imgur and SE?
SE relies on Imgur for hosting images and avatars on public sites. Most of the content is text, but the images are often important as well. So the part that is delegated to Imgur is a pretty important ...
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Planned SEDE maintenance scheduled for Sept 22, 2021 at 01:00-04:00 UTC (Sept 21 9:00 pm-midnight EDT)
Note: The originally planned second window on Sept 24 is cancelled as the upgrade was a success within the first window.
Note: 2021-09-21 0225Z - Maintenance has ended. Please leave a comment if there ...
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Is an option missing in the new off-topic reasons?
I really like the new option structure when flagging - I have in particular missed the "Minimal understanding" option.
However, I think that one option is missing. If we look at this ...
user213634
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Spot the difference
This reopen review popped up in the queue (and was unanimously left closed).
Update: The review link now points to a different edit (the latest one).
It states that a revision was made after it ...
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Does restricting the number of links for new users do any good?
New users with 1 rep face the following restrictions on all SE sites:
What are the new user restrictions?
New users cannot:
post images
post more than two hyperlinks at a time, ...
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Can we accept an answer more than 1 time? The reputation tab tooltip seems to think so
In the reputation tab, when hovering on the accepted answer, I can see the tooltip as "answer was accepted 1 time". It seems to imply that the answer can be accepted multiple times.
Wouldn't it be ...
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Yet another case of serial minor tag editing
Related
This user has been suggesting tag-only edits that, for the most part, just add mysql to sql questions, without improving anything else. He's at 60 approved (!) and 12 rejected (:(). (update ...
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