I am an ALLSTAR learner guy and an ideal teacher. I just oppose the network for its endless attempts to subjugate everyone to the same venture capitalists that own Facebook.
As if it wasn't enough for them to buy all the stupid reality TV Facebook and Instagram people. Now they want to own a Yahoo Answers knock off.
(also, man not having a dark theme sucks. Well, for transcript anyway.... I have porkchat for this. My eyes are still a bit screwy from yesterdays double fun case of allergies)
@ShadowWizard gee. Thanks :)
(and lol. Replying to everything I want to reply to there is going to require epic level pinging)
@TimPost I don't think its possible to go back to those days. Much smaller team for one and much smaller community. But its possible to have a functioning feedback loop, especially for stuff that affects communities. If you're going to look back, consider that you guys had CMs embedded in communities, and literally the first thing a community in crisis needs is a familiar, reassuring face that can sooth things over.
In a sense, this isn't an engineering problem. It isn't really about the software lifecycle (Well, I suppose parts of it can be, but its been years since I've looked at SDLC, and whatever I learnt at school dosen't apply to SE ;p ). Its a bit of a social/public-community relations problem.
@TravisJ I think the problem there is it pushes everything down to the community management team.
We actually manage to solve many things there ourselves - In a sense, ideally mods would be the interface between the community and the community team, who in turn would be the interface with the company
and if we need knowledge rather than firepower, there's actually really good, formal and informal ways this happens
If getting an answer to your questions is its own reward, and we're trying to build an artifact of knowledge not questions, why not remove reputation change from questions?
I do agree that some people got 'grandfathered' in and keep posting bad questions. But if we take a new user today... if they're gaining non-negligible amounts of reputation for asking questions, then I'd argue they're just as valuable to the community as the answerers.
And related to that; I think question bans need a bit of work. At least, allow moderators to see a bit of information, or to somehow influence it one way or the other
Too often I see people who asked offtopic, but not bad questions, being banned. There's literally nothing they can do except wait 6 months to ask another question. Then people dump rubbish on the site, and will never hit the ban
We already know that Stack Overflow is different. Let's act on that.
Stack Overflow is the flagship site, the one that gets the vast majority of the Google hits and activity. It's designed for that. Its stated purpose is to be a place for expert programmers to get in, get answers to their que...
@Mari-LouA Huh, I learned that "get attention for [x]" is a valid phrasing where I was taught. Maybe it's only valid in American English. Anyhow, you should generally keep in mind that some post authors (notably one who frequently messes up "its" vs "it's") often intentionally violate grammar rules in order to imply something, and when another user edits out the grammar flaw, they change it back. Please keep that in mind the next time you edit someone's post for grammar and it gets rolled back. — Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog2 days ago
Never really did anything with VBA. I do remember VB6 though, first language I programmed with... Nearly 20 years ago now. "On Error Resume next" was a magic command for me back in the day.. it fixed everything ;)
@Magisch I'm very grateful my only experience with VB6 was 'for fun', and not part of my schooling or professional life :). That said, though, I did build some pretty cool things with it, considering
@Shog9 Out of curiosity, what do you typically save in the US from duty-free alcohol in the US? Here, we have ridiculous taxes on alcohol (700ml of Jim Bean is around AUD 45), but I would have imagined the difference in the U.S... and most other places would be almost negligible.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49792481/how-to-compute-a-canonical-email I was going to respond with something but I don't know if it should be a comment or an (incomplete) answer.
Something like for gmail alone. 1 Convert all chars to a single case (traditionally lower case) 2 Remove all dot . chars. 3 if there is a plus in the user part of the email address strip the plus and any remaning chars in user.
@Mithrandir trust me, that is still far better than what some of the worse offenders do.
Recently there was a big scandal involving a youtuber that died while trying to film a video of himself getting shot in the chest by his girlfriend, and trying to stop the bullet with a big book.
BTW, the "gun" was nothing less than a desert eagle. I am not a fan of guns, but based on the comments the story got, that is basically the hand fitting version of a small cannon....
Are you guys developers? I'm wondering why I seem to hate writing documents so much is that normal? I can explain things when asked but asking me write that down well its just confusing. I freeze up and start trying to find other tasks or things to do (like visit this room)
I wanted to document the process of adding SSL to node.js site with dynamic firewall... But... Umm.. Forgot. Now I don't have a clue how to do it again if needed. :-(
FWIW, @JonEricson, I never felt like y'all did a bad job of communicating or responding to feedback with Documentation. In fact, I felt like you in particular did a pretty good job of engaging with the Meta community. IMO Documentation failed because there was never a coherent design vision for it that made sense.
Given a broad vision for how a product is meant to work that is coherent and resonates with people, you can throw together something horribly flawed and iteratively make it better through responding to complaints from the peanut gallery. That could never work for Documentation because we never had a clear vision to begin with; instead there was just arbitrary stuff thrown together and blind faith that spontaneous order would turn it into a useful product.
@MarkAmery My vague recollection is that Documentation failed because it rewarded adding detail to articles, so ... that's exactly what people did. And then the C++ Hello World example became so technically detailed as to be incomprehensible to anyone who would need a Hello World example.
@doppelgreener That was one of the reasons yeah. You'd get contributor status (+5 rep every time the example was upvoted) for adding a certain # of characters to it
removing gave you nothing in fact it could revoke your already present contributor status
the only thing i could figure out was that it suffered from the tyranny of point systems: if you reward people for doing a thing, as many people as possible will do as much of that thing as possible, no ifs ands or buts, so be careful what you ask for because you will get it. :)
I know chat rooms exist however SE isn't social I don't think. I used to look at rep to see how likely an answer was to be good or well thought out. That doesn't work on a site of this scale with this many users. With people who have been on here years.
IMO some of the fundamental problems were: - What sort of thing should be an "Example"? How about a "Topic"? We did not agree! - Limiting the number of Examples in a Topic means that many things that naturally seem like Topics cannot be covered comprehensively. Removing the limit would've made many topics sprawling messes. - Lack of any tools to make sweeping structural changes to existing documentation. Lack of community clarity on what those tools ought to look like. - Lack of a clear idea of who readers should be or how they would arrive at Documentation.
@JourneymanGeek no, I didn't meant that. I was trying to catch up with all the post around that usual topic starting from shog ones and reading on. But it felt like reading smoke.
Is the cool stuff('What's important is you can expect something special every 7 - 10 days from now until just before the start of Winter Bash ') from 10 years birthday out yet?
I don't actually see what was missing from it myself
user392547
Anybody ever seen anything like the right panels here? I don't have enough about it for a meta bug post, but when the link points specifically to that answer by Smokey, the right panel shows up in Consolas with weird spacing.
@doppelgreener Have you seen something similar before? I tried using a link pointing to a couple of the other answers to that question but it doesn't repeat.
@TimPost Sorry to hear that, especially if it was somewhat my fault. I'm... probably still a little too sensitive when judging answers on IPS - overall, the answer was much better than what IPS usually gets as a first attempt, with a couple paragraphs that could use some more backup. I... probably should have customized that comment a little more. I'll be stepping back a bit from that site for a little while.
@TimPost That's entirely understandable. Hopefully we'll be able to smooth out those rough edges... We're working on it, but it's been challenging. Seems like we're in our terrible two's and we just learned the word "no" sorry about that.
I really wish we could get more granular "view" information, i.e.: timestamp when views occur, what portion of each post was actually in the viewport during that user's visit, etc. Could go a long way for properly attributing value to answers... not just for the "people reached" metric but also for showcasing hot answers over questions.
@ShadowWizard he wrote a good answer that (IMO) did meet site guidelines (and was better than most first answers), got a negative comment saying he hadn't explained his reasoning when he did, and deleted his answer.
My tweet is pinned? Huh, things you don't learn by mostly skimming the transcript.
(Well, not yesterday; way too much transcript for me...)
We already know that Stack Overflow is different. Let's act on that.
Stack Overflow is the flagship site, the one that gets the vast majority of the Google hits and activity. It's designed for that. Its stated purpose is to be a place for expert programmers to get in, get answers to their que...
