so lucky

That period seems to be a theme now @JasonC

At least it isn't an interjection. If they used the same approach they would get caught in an infinite loop, period. Just like this, comma, comma, comma, comma

And so on and so forth, ad infinitum

@rene Haha

There we go

/me sets trends

That is probably the most egregious example of unicode in messages that I have seen

Can you see it? It is an empty line

I do not see an empty line.

I think we had a discussion about empty line rendering in here before. IIRC the spacing is higher on FF than Chrome, or something.

I see that

When they merge, on Chrome, there's no extra padding.

There was another one just above your at rene message (you should see a floating pencil there)

OMG I SEE IT I SEE THE FLOATING PENCIL

lol

BURN THE WITCH

smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/…

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with email in answer: Is it normal to see nails coming through the roof decking after a new roof was installed? by Philip Stanley on diy.SE

@Gerry ref mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/125025/…

y u no link? I hate googling

I don't see the problem with commenting like that. Although, it does get back to an interesting question. Are comments contributions or are comments fluff?

Usually some measure of both.

I had heard "comments are temporary" so many times that when I was first here I believed it. After years of observation, they are clearly contribution.

Perhaps with this specific case you could go the "remove greetings and thanks route" (re: tanks in advancing), but are those fluff comments really hampering the site?

If no one wanted fluff then we would all have stuck to RFC pages.

Those will put you to sleep, or keep you up in horror. One of the two.

I disagree. I think it is often a cultural trait. If you could prove that "hello everyone" as a phrase logarithmically increased over time, which was to say that the more it was used, then the more it was used, then perhaps it could make your case. However, I think it is more personal style than observed behavior.

@TravisJ "Comments are temporary" is something folks like to vomit all over the place when it's convenient, because regurgitating meta rhetoric feels awesome. I wouldn't think about it too much. "Sometimes comments are temporary" is more accurate, and "it's a good idea to improve answers when possible" is more in the intended spirit.

I doesn't keep me up at night ;)

Cheers to that.

This keeps me up all night...

Wth is that

A history of one of our plants going through a production cycle.

(src: genius.com/Tool-parabola-lyrics)

@Gerry insofar as there's a limit to how much complexity I'm willing to handle on a monday morning, yes

@JasonC I primarily say comments are transient when someone comments about a comment being deleted

@Gerry You are temporary too

@JasonC I tend to over-use analogies, but in this case I've been pretty happy with the one I used years back for comments:

> Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer. They can be up-voted (but not down-voted) and flagged, but do not generate reputation. There's no revision history, and when they are deleted they're gone for good.

There's nothing inherently transient about comments - or Post-It notes - apart from the way they're intended to be used.

In practice, you'll find a whole lot of both lasting for years. But, if you're wondering why the glue on your note doesn't last very long, or why your comment disappeared... It can help to know this rationale.

Which reminds me, it's always endearingly facepalmy how much folks love to quote the help center when it makes them happy, but universally ignore "When shouldn't I comment: Discussion of community behavior or site policies".

tl;dr

Remember when we had all the official documentation for the site in a single page FAQ? And no one read it all, so we broke it up?

...We didn't break it up enough.

Break legs, not FAQs.

Needs to be 140-character quotable passages

@Shog9 I always felt the break-up made it slightly harder to link to

"Lack of research is bad" + "don't answer bad questions" = some of the most well-received questions and answers on SO is another fun quirk.

@JasonC and people complaining people are too fast to close

Or "SO is not a code writing service" combined with how often "give me the code" questions actually do end up with code dump answers.

hah

We've been informally telling people that on SU

and closing effectively

FGITW always trumps "SO is not a code writing service". Somebody really ought to tell everybody that "Yeah, sometimes SO is a code writing service, just shut up and own it already."

@JourneymanGeek It's because it's hard for most people to grasp the bigger picture for some reason, especially if they're butthurt about something that happened to them.

@JasonC and that SO's too fast paced, I suppose, to catch em all

MSE is way more fun. So much less pointless drama, and the drama that does happen is way more entertaining.

SO is kind of the NYC of Stack Exchange.

#OccupyWallStreet and all.

lol

tbh, while I love SU, it feels like I'm just grinding through end game content now.

I've not 'won' MSE yet ;p

(quite literally the next milestone for me is 250k, and that's some way away)