That hammer is cool. If one side had been made for really small nails, and one side for really big nails, I'd only need that and a normal hammer - Rather than the three hammers I had to use last weekend. Sometimes the weird tool is there to compensate for the fact that you don't want to keep walking backwards and forwards to the toolbox.
I have always admired how stupid most SO users are and how much time they will waste with useless commentary instead of making a simple edit to make a question useful. stackoverflow.com/questions/11257288/…
@DiscountGucciHandbags How will I know that unless someone posts a lengthy comment telling me that? Also, what does the red bar on the documentation page mean? I assume it means the function is extra-good?
@Disc, I'm mulling the ideas on comment moderation posted this morning; kinda feel like they're all missing the point. More comment deletion is putting the cart before the horse - context is key here, a comment that's helpful to a new user can be rude and patronizing when thrown at someone who knows what they're doing. The reverse is also true.
Folks get hung up on form: "this comment is rude because you didn't say 'welcome' and use exclamation points" - no, the comment was rude because you didn't actually say what was wrong with the post.
Kinda thinking the biggest problem is simply that comments hang around too long - all comments. Even those that are useful at the start. Who gives a shit about some tagging discussion on a question that's two years old? Or two months old?
I regularly use MS project on 6-12 month duration programming projects
with several hundred steps and half a dozen engineers.
Its ...ok... in that I can define lots of project steps, dependencies,
task size estimates and resource assignments.
Ignoring that any project plan is actually a bad m...
@DiscountGucciHandbags This is really what bothers me; that quoted bit in your answer? That was me too - I watched the folks who were actually answering questions leaving forums in disgust over the combination of lousy questions and folks preferring to nag them rather than help them. SO offers that third alternative - just fix the damn question.
@GEOCHET that's not the point at all. I don't mind offending a lazy user. It's seeing dozens and dozens of questions where the first and only answer is "what have you tried?" "We are not here to do your job for you." and stuff like that. It creates a bad athmosphere, is what I'm saying
@GEOCHET New people follow the example of those already there. If you show up here and see harassement rather than editing, you tend to follow in kind. But I agree - the solution isn't to stomp on comments, it's to encourage more useful participation.
But a lot of stuff isn't worth editing in the first place. "Code not workie plz halp" type stuff. Maybe that just needs to go away even faster than it does now.
What's kinda funny is that there are all these restrictions on self-deletion of an answered question now, 'cause folks were upset about losing answers. But if you delete the user, the down-voted questions go with it - regardless of answers. A fact that really should motivate more answerers to fix the questions they're answering.
Recalcs always led to drama, so naturally a continual recalc leads to continual drama. But, it was kinda inevitable; after the first recalc, no one ever quite "trusted" that the reputation was accurate.
The compromise on that was to preserve rep on things that were up-voted and stayed on the site for a while (two months I think). Which quieted the whining considerably.
If I'm asking a question, I know its good enough. Before asking a question, I have made searches about it in google and stackoverflow, when there is no suitable solution for me, i'm posting the question.
I know for sure the question would help me and also those who come around the same topics.
B...
I have it on good authority that it takes six flags from ordinary users to delete a comment. This makes no sense; it only takes five community votes to close a question, and three to delete a post.
Comment flags are not surfaced to 10K users. That makes it harder for the community to handle...