I'm considering using Channels to overcome the issues I'm facing with an underdocumented toolstack our teams have to use. I'm hoping it would enable users/devs to create and find very focused and practical solutions, instead of having to wait for 6 to 8 weeks before everything is only half documented. The wiki we have doesn't fly.
for years we handled a regular stream of emails from folks wanting to buy a version of SO for internal use with a canned email that strongly encouraged them to look elsewhere (I had a big long list of clones I'd send 'em). Didn't... make 'em happy. They wanted SO because they could see that it worked, live, in public, every day; you don't get that from someone's knock-off.
It's not doing much to resolve out-of-date documentation.
Oh, actually, it is doing one thing. It's showing dates on responses. I've seen internal tools that omit dates, so you can't tell if what you're looking at is current or not.
I would guess that for these Channels and Enterprise installations they can "enhance" them by recommending review of old posts from time to time... with a setting to somehow remove from circulation old information for products no longer being maintained.
@sh1 Eh... Maybe more than you think. There's no silver-bullet there; someone has to write an update. Whether that's an editor or a new answer or an entirely new question, someone has to write it - it won't happen by magic.
I'm pretty sure I've seen requests around for how we can keep old questions on SO up to date... same solution used here could be used on private sites but possibly only bug specific people about keeping them updated rather than a general userbase.
I'm kinda crap at SQL, so there are a few topics I regularly visit when doing stuff on SEDE. I've watched them gain new information on new versions of SQL Server over the past 6 years.
oh - and I sort by "last active" when visiting them, so that I know when there's new info added (whether new answer or edit)
@JohnDvorak But that's a setting because of the public nature of things... on a private site, you could likely disable voting entirely to some degree... there's probably only going to be one "current" answer... and you could even give "accept" status to specific people rather than to the OP of the question.
@Magisch Ironically, I was much, much worse with SQL when my job depended on writing it for production use. My go-to technique was "pull entire table into memory, index and filter with bespoke C++" - the results were just as bad as it sounds.
I prefer to avoid javascript where possible. To the extent that I outsource business logic into SPs because I don't like doing lots of javascript stuff
@ShadowWizard Oh, sure. I was 34 when I had Ben and my health hasn't changed much at all... so I'm not expecting some crazy change... but the terminology could use some... bedside manner.
man, who are these people using Opera mini? I know Opera has a fanatic following... but it seems like Opera mini hasn't implemented any interesting features. It's always a red box on caniuse.com
... and I think Opera was going to use blink for its rendering engine too.
@ShadowWizard On the fence. Ben is great. We love focusing on him. But I was an only child and I think (with absolutely no personal knowledge of being a sibling) that it'd be better to not be an only child.
My wife and I are riding the "no kids" train. We freely admit that we're not qualified to be responsible for the physical and mental well-being of another human being.
@canon well, to be serious, we're not really "responsible for the physical and mental well-being of another human being". We just show the way, give some tools, and hope for the best. :)
WTH? Posted a FR over on SO meta and literally between the time I pressed the button and then scrolled to the top of the page, some a***ole downvoted it!
I know it's been asked before, but can we PERMANENTLY LIFETIME BAN jerks that downvote without even pretending to read?
@JohnDvorak The problem with decaying votes is that they're constantly reinforced by people who only read and upvote the first answer that "seems to work". So outdated answers can still get stuck at the top so long as they work even after they develop serious caveats.
Every now and then I happen to come across JS questions that involve canvases and images in some way.
When attempting to answer, I usually create a runnable snippet.
Now, because of same-origin-policy, any images I use will "taint" the canvas, thus breaking some functionality I sometimes require....
@rene , I can't address vague FUD. That's a lose-lose proposition. I just googled for exploits and so far haven't found anything that wasn't patched years ago.
Speaking of exploits; is it WAI that meta.stackexchange.com/help/security-reports points to the same form as would be used by people who think that SE made a dog look at them funny?
It's just my own "I have something important to say!" arrogance that makes me overlook the ultimate futility of listening to people on the internet, isn't it.
(FTR, I don't think any dog has ever looked at me funny as a consequence of something it read on SE)
... so it's possible that the DV on that question wasn't due to someone manually downvoting it when it was posted but, instead, someone with a script that did so?
We don't want a bunch of one-offs to "deprecate". We need to automate. The way to do that is: 1) Unpin the accepted answer after 1 year, and 2) value more recent votes more than much older votes.
@Catija anyway, that specific app/script was removed but it did what was still visible in the explanation in the onebox: it down voted posts when you loaded them in your browser (assuming you installed the script).
Hmmm. yeah, that does seem like an interesting discussion.
Seems like something that could be addressed pretty easily by querying post age at vote time. Though, I could imagine someone on SFF who hates some property deciding to downvote all questions about that property out of spite... or, on M&TV, someone who doesn't like ID questions automatically downvoting any question with that tag.
I'm guessing that neither of those two things would be caught by the serial downvoting scripts as I'm guessing they're tuned towards users rather than tags.
Can be funny is such thing happens, flag is approved by high rep users, and Shog (or other CM) is chat banned. Though pretty sure they can unban themselves. :D
@JourneymanGeek There are a lot of things a lot of mods don't know. I'm really looking forward to having an onboarding set of posts on the new Mod Channel ;)
