Y'know how gnat keeps harping on about the hot network questions?. Yeah. They break small sites. See the top network question that is on The Workplace, we got 10k views on that single question, which is our regular volume of hits per day across the site. I was quick enough to get it protected before it destroyed us all, but...
Really, it'd be nice if we could get that fixed sometime in the near future. Keeping up with that many visitors is really hard for a beta site. Or at least having someone from the community team keep an eye on any small site that has a question pop up there, or...
@ShadowWizard Basically, smaller sites have very little capability to moderate such huge volumes. Without a moderator on at the time, you can't effectively protect questions, and the sheer volume of new users means there is a lot of effort that needs to be used explaining how the site works to people who aren't familiar with it
@ShadowWizard In addition to the moderation issues, a lot of these questions are not the greatest examples of what sorts of questions are good for the site, and give a lot of people the wrong impression of what our site is about. That question has 19 answers (3 deleted), and starts to look more like a forum thread than an SE question
@ShadowWizard It also runs in to a lot of trouble because the volume of new/inexperienced users trump the number of experienced users, and community decisions about what we expect in an answer, or what sorts of answers are acceptable get blown out of the water by people thinking, "I like that" and upvoting answers a-la-reddit or the like.
Well, such question can be temporary locked then with proper message. I saw it in action on Stack Overflow once with a question about a goat in iOS which got TONS of attention leading to tons of useless answers.
But such a lock can't be done by smaller communities unless a moderator is around, and while I can come in here and ask (as I did this time) for it to be protected, that solution is less than ideal and doesn't lend itself to steady community participation/growth/moderation.
The question itself isn't necessarily bad, but it certainly isn't as great as the amount of attention it got. Looking at high-view questions, it's about 50-50 on The Workplace between 'popular' questions and actually 'useful' questions -- and that's not a good ratio in my view.
Here is a good question: How Should I Indicate Language Proficiency on my Resume? (full disclosure: I wrote it). It is one of three questions on the site with over 50k views. Most of those are coming from google I'd assume because it gives great advice on how to tackle something practical that many people face
@ShadowWizard I disagree with the statement 'nothing wrong' -- ideally communities should be self-moderating, and should not have to go around the available tools to handle something we don't necessarily want or need (a hot network question). Either fixing the formula to have less of an impact, auto-protecting, or having community managers be 'on-call' in the site's chat when something like this happens would all be far preferable.
Sorry, this is a bit of a rant I s'pose, and I'll try to put it all in a feature request sometime today. These hot questions really do add a burden to community moderation, and I really would prefer being excluded entirely (or being allowed to select which questions are eligible for the hot network questions with a special tag or somesuch for trusted users).
In Stack Exchange portal, it says:
Stack Exchange is a fast-growing network of 112 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on the most important topics in each...
I think your view on the issue is strongly related to which sites you hang out on
SO and MSO are very very very quick to moderate themselves because of the number of high-rep users and active moderators from various time zones. When you get to smaller sites (like The Workplace) you have very geographically similar user bases, two moderators in virtually the same time zone, and far fewer active users at many parts of the day. That can cause issues.
You have no idea how horrible I am at understand SQL. Concepts? No problem. I get what I want to do. But I totally lack any feel for the language or how to turn concepts in to working syntax.
@hichris123 Why what? Why can't I figure out SQL you mean? Because I'm not a developer or a programmer, professional or enthusiast. I learn by fiddling.
@hichris123 That's what I do, but it's not as easy as you'd think when you're starting from scratch. Most of the queries on data.se are either: (a) super-simple, (b) super-advanced, and there are few queries that you can find that allow you to bridge the gaps to create a new type of data (you can only create derivatives of existing tables mostly)
Is there any way to download numerical data from the quantcast stats normal folk have access to?
I have this great chart but I can't see any way to get data without hovering point by point even after checking the source.
With my query above I can get up/downvotes, as well as questions and answers per day. It would be interesting to match that with traffic.
Since views aren't stored with a timestamp, there is no way to go backwards and see what people are looking at, but if you have a list of visitors, you can see which questions were getting the most votes and sort of guesstimate backwards
or at least do a bit of analysis on what is causing spikes of traffic.
but in order to do that, I can't use a graph (I mean, I can eyeball it and then fiddle around), but I would much rather have the data so that I can do all sorts of statistical-sounding tests with fancy names that I can ooh and awe folks with
So, going back to my query, I can get the 'most voted' post for each day, and then toss that in there to guesstimate.
@hichris123 Well, I can theoretically take the SVG data from the graph, and then write some sort of algorithm to detect the height compared to the baseline, and then scale that according to the scale on the right using the data from one day as a baseline to scale the rest against. It'd probably be pretty accurate, but it'd be a lot of work since I'd have to learn SVG syntax first.
Concept is simple. Execution is well above my knowledge level.
so I'd have to figure out what the heck that thing parses to in X/Y coordinates or the like, and then parse through that
the only SVG I know is from google-visualization so I have a general grasp of what a lot of it means. Basically I think that each of those commas is separating a point on the line, but since it's an area chart it likely loops back later on
So I'd have to somehow parse through each of those coordinates to get the X/Y, and then figure out how those images relate to the larger size of the graph.
The hard for me isn't actually in doing the math, it's in writing code to actually do what I would need it to. I need a siamese programming twin or something.
What I would probably do is dump the data in to MS Word, use the regex expressions to split it up, move that in to Excel, and then figure out the outliers (the peaks on the graph) and try to guesstimate what it's saying, throw together a guesstimate algorithm, and then check it against the data manually for a few points
@hichris123 That is excessively trivializing the difficulty of learning / understanding SQL. Especially for someone who doesn't use programming / math concepts all the time.
Aaaaaand it works in Firefox. Now I'm going to have to figure out what version of Firefox she's running. Although I'm starting to be concerned there is something wrong with her PC that might interfering.
I hate having low rep on some of my accounts. This edit of mine was refused, despite being completely valid. They probably thought "Tusk, 100 rep user trying to deface this question".
I am far more proud of this question I asked which has over 50k views because it helps people who are googling that exact question.
Anyone can answer soft questions. And soft questions about soft skills for (soft?) programmers are useful to a large segment of SE, but are not a long-term way to create value. So I really hope that the hot questions bug gets fixed so that we can focus on questions that matter rather than ones involving programmers with a lack of diplomacy.
(and man, that question is going to be at the top of the hot questions list for quite a while due to the quantity of votes and the fact we're going in to the weekend. Oh dear.)
I keep being tempted to write a semi-rant answer that highlights why I think he's got a mistaken view of the world, but I keep having to remind myself that it won't answer the question.
that question basically reads to me... "I'm contracted to work X hours and I currently only bother being in the office for Y hours but now my manager has pointed it out. How do I tell him to shove it without losing my job?"
I really want it to have harder questions for HR professionals beyond the software industry, but a lot of the questions are from disgruntled software engineers.
Ah, and anyone who wants to show sympathy for my issue with hot questions is cordially invited to read this and upvote it hopefully.
"This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site." Ha! That's odd. I assumed my 101 starting rep would solve that problem, but it doesn't.
Hmmm, I'm not convinced by that policy. Are there really that many users with 200+ rep on another site who will stupidly write thanks, or "me too" or write spam?
I recently started an account on Android Enthusiasts, and went to add an answer to a question which was protected. I have enough rep on other sites that I have the "Association Bonus", so I was confused as to why I wasn't being allowed to answer the question.
This question is protected to pre...
Any ideas how I can get more attention to my SU question? I think it's on topic, but I'm surprised a Tomcat guru hasn't already commented/answered it already. Am I just used to the speed of response on SO?
I followed this tutorial to install OpenGrok on an Ubuntu server using Tomcat 7. I have created a cron job that will trigger OpenGrok to update its indexes overnight.
If I browse my source tree, by visiting http://mysite/opengrok/xref/, the contents displayed are up-to-date. So the indexing clea...
Hmmm. Well, that was part of the reason behind my suggestion to post something on (this) meta - perhaps the people who can wade in would read it an act upon it.
It seems the SU users are rather stingy on question up-votes. I've asked a couple of (I think) well worded questions on there and only ever received on up-vote. Scanning the question list, there's not a single up-voted question on the first page. Bunch of Grinches!
@Duncan -yep, just noticed that. Simply too tired to think to look at the flag results before.
at the moment I just want to take an hammer and drop it on this rgbw light led that stands on the table in front of me, laughing at me and keeping repeating "No more"
I am broken! Well, maybe not me specifically, but I don't see this issue when looking at other people's reputation pages/graphs, so this isn't something specific to the browser I am using.
This issue only seems to occur in Google Chrome 31 and 32 only (the main browser I use). I tested it in Fi...
@Duncan Thanks for that. You've got my vote. I didn't want to provide an answer. I'm not confident enough in hitting the correct tone of voice in that type of questions
As an active, non-moderator user, I'd like to be able to see some graphs of our statistics. Is there any way for me to acquire these visualizations of data?
This is new. Now that we no longer have to run site evaluations manually ourselves, we figured we would expand them to graduated sites.
Tim Stone hit the nail on the head in his comment:
Maintaining quality over time is just as important as starting off on the right foot.
Now, this is so...
^^^ @Undo
" In the meantime, the queue should pop up for a week every 90 days."
What would I see in the close review queue if a question was VTC using a non-existing close reason? Does it show the old text, but obviously I need to pick a new reason? Just wondering...
Yeah, @Bart. I think that's what's going on. And I'm wondering if it's messing with my attempt to attach event handlers to dynamically generated anchor tags.
In Stack Exchange portal, it says:
Stack Exchange is a fast-growing network of 112 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on the most important topics in each...
I recently started an account on Android Enthusiasts, and went to add an answer to a question which was protected. I have enough rep on other sites that I have the "Association Bonus", so I was confused as to why I wasn't being allowed to answer the question.
This question is protected to pre...
It seems nobody in Java world care even if it sucks...
I am broken! Well, maybe not me specifically, but I don't see this issue when looking at other people's reputation pages/graphs, so this isn't something specific to the browser I am using.
This issue only seems to occur in Google Chrome 31 and 32 only (the main browser I use). I tested it in Fi...
As an active, non-moderator user, I'd like to be able to see some graphs of our statistics. Is there any way for me to acquire these visualizations of data?
This is new. Now that we no longer have to run site evaluations manually ourselves, we figured we would expand them to graduated sites.
Tim Stone hit the nail on the head in his comment:
Maintaining quality over time is just as important as starting off on the right foot.
Now, this is so...