New answers tagged discussion
6
I doubt you can find example questions where the VLQ flag is the most appropriate flag. Thus holds for most sites in the network; what the resident moderators do with those flags may vary on their workload, mood, time of day and moon phase. On Stack Overflow, the VLQ feeds the Triage queue (unless it's full already) and the moderators won't even see them.
...
-4
Questions which are on topic, but lack examples and are difficult to understand probably fall in to this category.
“My code is broke when I added a while statement that loops my userPosts variable. Why?”
Without an example, that question would be useless. It could be improved once the code has been shared and an MRE created. However, if the user becomes ...
0
Also please note, putting a question on hold or marking it as a duplicate has other benefits for the person who asked/posted it too.
One being giving them the chance of deleting their posts, there for avoiding any reputation loss as a result, before any (up-vote-able) answer is posted.
Why can't you delete duplicate questions with answers?
-1
There's a lot of questions - and its pretty rare that someone's going to always remember that there's another question that covers the same ground and goes looking for it.
Answering the question brings value to the OP - they are looking for an answer. The dupe closure brings value to others who find the duped question.
Posting a dupe is not always a bad ...
14
But shouldn't old users show concern for the new users and try to show directions before marking it as a duplicate?
That's exactly what duplicates are doing: showing users that a question has already been asked before and directing them to the original question. There's even special functionality where anonymous users are automatically forwarded to the ...
0
This answer from 2011 says weekly, and seems still to be up to date.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/77176/169312 (answered Jan 31 '11 at 4:33 by Jeff Atwood)
It also has pointers to places where you can attempt to verify that it is still correct.
As already mentioned in a comment, When will data.SE get updated data? also says weekly, and is slightly ...
5
How am I supposed to know that an author actually deleted his question, if my reputation is lower than 10k (and probably always will be) and not something else has happened?
You can monitor your recently deleted questions and answers using the "recently deleted question/answer" link at the bottom of both lists.
You can always view the deleted question if ...
5
I'm fond of that paragraph too - the pair date back to the earliest days of the site, when they lived under /faq. When we moved to the help center, they remained intact under /help/behavior - in fact, the old FAQ subsection link still takes you there.
The Code of Conduct replaced a different page, /help/be-nice - that page never had the emphasis on honesty ...
-2
Nah, joking doesn't serve any purpose. Posts should be all serious. And complete and argumented, not some one-liner.
12
Its worth remembering the goal of posting an answer is to share knowledge
I sometimes use humour in my posts - but I always try to remember that that needs to serve answering the question. Its tempting to be too clever but you're not as smart as you ever think you are.
When in doubt of how its going to be taken - its worth taking a fully serious, to the ...
12
From a random internet dictionary:
Facetiousness is a quality of joking around, or treating serious subjects in a humorous way. Your facetiousness might make it hard for your friends to take you seriously.
A stand-up comedian's facetiousness can be seen in her tendency to be sarcastic, or to playfully joke about serious issues. The facetiousness of ...
22
Stack Exchange is a pretty popular source of papers I think because we make so much of our data available for free. (Anecdotally, I met with a group from a local university who outright told me that's why they used the network for research.) When people contact us to let us know they are doing research, we've been happy to help. But often people don't ...
1
I don't consider myself a geek (I don't feel I'm smart enough) 😄 but I like the visual design: Greetings Earthlings. 😄
But I was more concerned with learning about what the section had to offer, offering suggestions, etc.
So there's at least one woman who likes the visual design of Area 51. ;)
1
The idea of paying moderators is nice...up until the site has an election/pro tem appointment. Then people nominate themselves for the money and not for the joy of taking care of all the flags and cleaning up abuse and such.
As it is, I've seen some sites get a lot of "low-quality" candidates during elections. In one case, there were several candidates who ...
18
Thanks for the interesting discussion. You discussed how (or whether) to factor answers into the evaluation of a question as good/neutral/bad and the hazards of edge cases there. Perhaps what you're seeing is a difference between good and interesting.
We've all seen questions that the community considers poor (lots of downvotes) but that nonetheless have ...
8
If you conisder yourself as a less experienced programmer or coder, chances very likely are, your questions have been asked many times and you don't need to ask one more. All you need to do is to search on Google for your problem.
If you insist that your problem is unique, ask yourself if you've really done enough research. "I Googled it for 10 minutes" is ...
2
You can't, at least within the boundaries of Stack Exchange, and this is by design. It doesn't offer a private message system, some of the reasons being that Stack Exchange's focus is the content, not the users themselves; also, private communication would be hard to moderate.
Users who don't mind being contacted sometimes leave an email address on their ...
11
TL;DR: it's not relevant. One vote is enough.
I don't think it's related to the amount. Also, the sock account is deleted or merged with the main account, and the suspension is applied to the main account, otherwise it's pointless.
Once a moderator finds out about a sock abusing votes, the action would be instant, whether it was one vote or 1000 votes.
...
2
A big thank you to StackExchange community for Stuff-A-way!. The package has arrived last month end. The stuff in it is soo cool especially sipper and bottle which my colleagues envy most ;)
I can't really express how much this means to me!... The SO tees are so cool to wear I didn't want to upload my pic PS- a bit shy :P
5
General "identify the place or thing on this postcard" questions are likely also on-topic under the [identify-this] tag at Travel.SE. Successful questions in that tag tend to be ones that are identifiable (major and minor landmarks count, random cafes and fire hydrants not so much) and interesting from a travel perspective. Since postcards generally fulfill ...
0
TL;DR This concern is rather tangential to main interest of active site users and moderators and if we want it addressed we better make changes to the system to make it easier for them to deal with it.
Let's not forget that primary motivation of site users and moderators is to ask, answer and maintain on-topic questions and it's unrealistic to expect them ...
9
Depending on the specific framing of your question it may be on-topic on either History Stack Exchange under the identification and germany tags, or on Genealogy & Family History Stack Exchange under the germany tag (Carl von Bergen was a German painter).
If you decide go for the latter, do carefully read through What is “Genealogy,” “Family History,” ...
4
It's essentially an image processing question cf. convolution. I believe it should be on-topic for Signal Processing, under the image-processing tag, whose excerpt is:
In general, image processing is any form of signal processing for
which the input is an image, such as a photograph or video frame.
Do read through their on-topic page and ask on their ...
0
We have had various meetups and competitions on security Stack Exchange, and back in its early days, I did an outreach visit to San Francisco security conferences to raise awareness.
I try to take SE swag to all the conferences I host or volunteer at, and even if I don't, I wear a Sec.SE t-shirt and encourage both asking if questions and general chat.
For ...
2
While @Glorfindel is correct as regards Stack Overflow, many of the smaller sites welcome beginners and students, so reading the Welcome page on the sites you are interested in will help you decide.
But if you just want to read and learn, all the sites are suitable - but I would advise searching Stack Exchange using Google or other internet search engines ...
15
On May 16th 2019 it was revealed that a hacker(s) managed to gain unauthorized access to Stack Overflow production systems on May 11th, 2019.
A new post was issued on May 17th 2019 to provide more information:
The intrusion originated on May 5 when a build deployed to the development tier for stackoverflow.com contained a bug, which allowed an attacker ...
8
Not really. If you look at the tour of each site, it'll say
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.
Emphasis ...
2
I have made those changes and submitted a Pull Request to have those changes merged to master.
Do know there are still older pending pull requests for Nick to handle. Allow for more then 6 to 8 weeks to get this into production.
I didn't check if the Active Directory login actually does lead to a working autocomplete ##userid## on queries on the internal ...
4
When I was more active at Wikipedia, I used to attend the Pittsburgh meetup fairly regularly, looks like it has not been active recently.
Wikipedia is has a fairly organized approach Wikipedia:Meetup that is successful in many areas. I don't see any reason why it could not work as well for a SE site. In my experience at Wikipedia, if you have someone (i.e. ...
11
There have been several opportunities for these kinds of initiatives to come to life. For example, our International Stack Overflow communities have hosted several meetups most of which have been community organized and led. I would be very interested in hearing about what ideas you have and also how we can support you to in helping other members and ...
2
It's acceptable on Stack Overflow, if it's not written so it's opinion based:
What topics can I ask about here?
We feel the best Stack Overflow questions have a bit of source code in them, but if your question generally covers…
a specific programming problem, or
a software algorithm, or
software tools commonly used by programmers; and is
...
9
If you want just a hint, not a complete solution, just state so in the question. Other users don't know you want just a hint until you tell them; most users are looking for complete solutions (up to the point where Math.SE has a special close reason for problem statement questions without context, but I digress ...)
I can imagine that there are still users ...
5
Yes. Too Broad is often applicable for questions with a very broad range of different answers. In some cases (I'm not sufficiently familiar with the topic to comment on your example) the issue may be that the question is lacking sufficient clarifying information to actually know what the problem is, causing people to post lots of different guesses, so ...
10
Does it have to be this way?
I'm going to go against the grain and say... yeah, it does. There are several reasons for this, and your post only brushes up against many of them.
First off: well over half of the people who come to Meta (particularly MSO) to ask about some aspect of a question or post they made (why was it closed/downvoted/etc) will not ...
-1
I don't understand why there is reputation lost there on MSE.
On per-site meta it's less problematic as people don't loose reputation and feel less attacked.
That really change the dynamic. I even see post on per-site meta from users that answer a yes, and a no (differents answers), for like a tag burninathing request to have fun.
To display a ...
2
Software Engineering seem a good fit for such questions.
To quote their help center;
Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for
professionals, academics, and students working within the systems
development life cycle.
If you have a question about...
software development methods and practices
requirements, ...
5
Motivation & Enervation
My sense is a lot of the regulars on Meta come here and hang out here because there’s not a lot on offer on the main sites for them anymore. I know it’s true for me.
Like a cop on a beat, when you’ve hung around on Main enough, you start to get a sense of endless drudgery. That you’ve seen it all, that each new question is a ...
1
discussion
As mentioned in the original post, the custom questions filter list is rolled out to all the Stack Exchange sites.
A wider alpha
Since we're nearing launch, we're expanding the alpha out to the whole network. So feel free to try this out on any site you frequent, to help suss out any site-specific issues.
But still in the Preferences ...
8
I wasn't going to go out on a limb but this answer really clicked with me...
I'm pretty sure comments are a key factor to how any post goes... The few posts I participated on did go south due to a well placed comment...
...and I would like to follow up on that.
Above observation rings true to me, I also have an impression that most of the voting that ...
1
This makes me think there's something systemic that's contributing,
something that works against good people trying to do good things.
Yeah, there is.
From my observation, this is primarily because how meta is explained and cultured to deal with posts. We keep saying "downvotes are different here" but that is such a vague statement that they end up being ...
36
This is a topic near and dear to my heart...
This makes me think there's something systemic that's contributing, something that works against good people trying to do good things.
That thing is people. I'm not saying here that people are inherently evil and any non-trivial concentration of people turns into some sort of carefully-concentrated balsamic ...
6
TLDR: Meta is scary, and we should consider disagreeing by posting answers.
There was an extremely long conversation (part 1 and Part 2 for context). I'd like to say - I'm posting this as a regular meta user over being a mod.
There's a lot of it, but in short the idea folks seemed to have was that meta was ... kind of broken in many ways. We have too many ...
13
I'm pretty sure comments are a key factor to how any post goes. We already know that for all other sites, it is no different here on Meta.
The few posts I participated on did go south due to a well placed comment, either by me or someone else. Having an up vote on a comment that is not in favor of whatever the post tries to discuss is bound to start the ...
-6
Despite having mostly upvotes and some reputation on the site, when I visit some sites I still get a banner encouraging me to upvote.
I don't think the solution is that simple. Some people are resistant to change and don't accept what's provided or offer better self answers. It's common enough to see a comment explaining that they don't see the answer and ...
0
Update 2019:
Voting for own answers/posts is still not possible. I also agree that it should not be possible at all.
There's an experimental social media platform called Steemit.com where self-voting is allowed and it's causing the whole ecosystem being flawed..
4
I say Keep It Simple. When trying to accept answer while there is other accepted answer, show a simple confirm dialog, same as other places e.g. voting to delete a post:
8
It's a pretty well known rule. The drama could probably have been avoided a few ways - quite simply by talking to folks first before nominating.
Now, let's say a user had what I call "a bad day". Let's call him Master Nerd. Maybe their cat walks all over their keyboard and they keep posting random gibberish in answers. I suspend them a day to sort things ...
7
Well, said user could have avoided the drama by not ignoring the dialog which was shown to them while submitting their nomination. If they were worried about the election not having any meaning, or leading to 'inept'* moderators being elected, as suggested in the comments, the correct action is not to submit the nomination anyway, but to contact the ...
7
feature-request Make it easier for moderators to find flags cast on HNQ.
Make a visual indication or some way to filter / prioritize for moderators flags that are cast on hot questions - or more precisely on questions having HNQ entry in history, being open and eligible by age. This would help moderators handle such flags in more timely manner. (This very ...
4
A simple way of making this obvious is to not allow accepting an answer if another answer is accepted. The user must unaccept the first answer before being able to accept the other answer.
A pop-up error message when trying to accept a second answer would explain this.
Top 50 recent answers are included
