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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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
...
balphaStaff
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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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We should have a notification system for when users suggest tag synonyms
I have recently suggested tag-synonyms for a couple of tags. There has been no activity on them regarding up-voting or down-voting those suggestions, probably because no one knows I proposed them.
So, ...
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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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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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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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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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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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Why are usernames allowed to be composed entirely of non-visible Unicode characters?
This user on Ask Different appears to have no name due to invisible Unicode characters:
he's the #2 user on the site:
Why is that allowed? I think it is confusing for users, e.g. when they will see ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...
AMtwoStaff
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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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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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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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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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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 ...
Jade SpragueStaff
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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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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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Can we get more opportunities to "earn" Stack Overflow swag?
In light of the Stack Exchange swag store closing (luckily I already got my SO shirt), I've realized it's very difficult to get a Stack Overflow t-shirt. I propose we get more opportunities across all ...
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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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Copycat site causes disturbing images to turn up in image search
Today I tried out various images search sites and one of my test search terms was my own name.
What struck me was that the false positives were mostly the same regardless of the search site used. Also ...
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Dogfooding and Jobs - what's with SE using an external jobs portal and... not their own?
I've gotten back into the habit of checking the "work here" page on Stack Overflow, partially because it's a good way to read the tea leaves on the direction of the company.
It has, as far ...
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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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Swag for non-SO folks - a couple of thoughts
The return of swag post is very welcome, however I see a couple of tiny things that we could perhaps improve.
In the early years of Security.SE, giving sec.SE t-shirts to speakers at conferences and ...
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Bug which mistakenly accuses the writer for shouting and issues a warning
Today, while typing an answer on Math.SE, I needed to use the factorial expression. While typing in my answer, I received the following warning:
DON'T SHOUT! All-caps posts are considered rude and ...
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How was the new SE arbitrator selected?
I was just reading through the arbitration clause (sec. 10b) of the new Terms of Service (related MSE announcement) and saw two references to "JAMS INC."
That name is never explained in the document ...
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Planned maintenance scheduled for Thursday, July 29 at 12:00am UTC (Wednesday July 28 8:00 PM US/EDT)
Update: The maintenance went as planned.
tl;dr; Planned service interruption that will impact all Stack Exchange sites, Jobs, and Chat. All sites may be read-only for up to 60 minutes on Thursday, ...
- 51k
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"Spare" rep for use on bounties for points over the cap
There are lots of very good reasons for the 200 point cap, but at the same time it adds an anticlimactic area above the 200 point cap each day.
Why not let the points over the 200 cap go into another ...
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