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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 ...
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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 ...
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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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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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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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Some kind of notification system for when tag synonyms are suggested

I have recently suggested tag-synonyms for a couple of tags. There have been no activity on them, regarding up-voting or down-voting those suggestions. Probably because no one knows that they have ...
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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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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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Plans for Updates to Review Queues

We are planning a series of releases over the coming months relating to the work being done on improving the user experience for all aspects of reviews queues. To quote from the preview post: In this ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...
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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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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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1answer
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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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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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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 ...
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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 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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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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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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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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“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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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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Syntax Highlighting FAQ List Updates

Update: I've gone ahead and updated the FAQ with the specified changes I recently became aware of the fact that the full list of language identifiers for the syntax highlighter on SE is a bit... ...
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Stack Exchange Privacy Policy Revision history

On https://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy, there is mention that "If we change this policy, we’ll update this document to keep you in the loop".. Great! However, I have never liked ...
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2017: a year in closing

Last year I posted some numbers on how many questions were closed on various sites around the network in the preceding year. This ended up being kinda handy to refer back to, so I'm gonna do it again: ...
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Can we add whatexactlyisyourquestion.com to the blocked list?

I just stumbled on this and I think we might do well to squash it before it becomes a wide spread problem. http://whatexactlyisyourquestion.com/ I found a particular user, who shall remain nameless, ...
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Better tools to handle spam on low-traffic sites

On many Stack Exchange sites, particularly during the hours when Europe and America are asleep, spam can survive for hours. This gives a bad impression. What can we do to allow the community to ...
32
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Results of Pro Tempore elections experiment

Last year I announced an experiment of electing Pro Tempore moderators. We've completed 26 elections (with 4 more scheduled), including the Parenting pilot. One election, Tezos, picked the initial ...
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Hide Left nav everywhere with a global preference

We have rolled out a change to make the "Hide left navigation" preference global. This means that changing the preference on any site will change it for all sites. We will also be making the "enable ...
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Can we set better expectations for private beta?

When an Area 51 proposal makes it to private beta, the site has 2-3 weeks to show viability or be closed instead of advancing to public beta. I agree with that, but I wonder if we're being clear ...
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Severe traffic drop for some sites since the last Google algorithm update

The recent update from Google to their search algorithm seems to have hit a few sites rather severely. I can't say for sure that this change is responsible, but the traffic graph from Skeptics looks ...
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254 views

Add captcha to anonymous edits

I reached 1k rep on Chess.SE, now I can review suggested edits, and I see anonymous edits from unregistered users, all bots and spammers. I know that you are not willing to turn off the anonymous ...
31
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We’re Updating The GDPR-Related Sections Of Our Legal Portal

We’re doing a bit of an overhaul in our legal portal when it comes to how we organize our GDPR-related pages and information. There’s no change in what we collect or how we use it. Our goal is to make ...
31
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Change the colour of quotes to blue, grey or black?

Note: not a duplicate of Please revert the quote background from white to yellow Many people dislike the change of citation colours from yellow and orange to white and grey: Please revert the quote ...
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Rollout of responsive design site themes - Tracking post

This post will be updated as the responsive design and left navigation layouts are released on each site. Previously, we tried this out by releasing still screenshots of the site designs and getting ...

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