@AirThomas The site is still finding it's feet. Vote to close where you think it's warranted. If others agree we'll start to see questions being closed.
@ChrisF I haven't had much luck in the past VTC-ing top rated questions on a beta site. The community likes what it likes. But if it were a big deal, I certainly would bring it up for discussion.
@AirThomas Don't be afraid to vote to close popular questions. Popularity should not be used as metric for deciding what's on or off topic. Some of the most popular question on SO (for example) are off topic.
@AirThomas I give about ⅓ of the questions from the private beta as a loss. Now everybody will want to keep them because look we want content and it's more important to have quantity and we'll care about quality later.
Six months down the line everybody will worry about all the accumulated crap and want to clean up shop, but the highly-upvoted questions from the private beta will be sacrosanct because look, man, they're upvoted, it means they're good, and OMG reps
Aw, damnit. Since my account got merged with some other idiot's (my friend) (the SE team is very helpful in sorting this out - they haven't responded to my email yet), because the login system is borked, and probably more borked on a51, I may never get the mail.
@AirThomas Software Recommendations, to some extent... But that's because we started the site with the assumption that we'd be inundated in crap and there was a tough-on-crap lobby from day 1
On this site, clearly a lot of participants are starting with the assumption that they know everything about SE and their stuff can't but be good. Yet the result so far is average at best.
Still, I have half a mind to request closing the site and doing a new private beta from scratch where SE mods would be banned
@Gilles I know, but people should learn with time really
user61230
Gilles' point, I think, being that because we're all Stack Exchange moderators, the questions and answers we'd give are solely from the perspective of Stack Exchange
@bjb568 When Area 51 started you had to have committed to get into a private beta, then they opened it up to anyone who got a link from an existing member. Now you just have to request access - to show that you're at least semi-serious.
@ChrisF "To log in, you must have commited to the Area 51 site proposal and received the invitation email. Click the invitation link in the email to log in!" No google openid button or form or anything.
@MattGiltaji Every page, whether it exists or not redirects to login, except signup which displays the same useless page. Wait, no, the stupid thing serves different content depending on refferer.
@Gilles Well they're tagged as stack-exchange (or should be) anyways, so why don't we just close the ones with SE relevance? I saw that happen to ambiguous ones, so surely the ones that are outright SE contextual should be closed too? Then people would learn.
@bjb568 no actually that is incorrect, things were changed and so a private beta can be fully accessed and signed up from going to the proposal page and clicking "visit site"
@HarryLudlow the problem is the mass of questions which pretend to be generic, but make a lot of assumptions that pretty much pinpoint SE (content is organized in posts, moderators are elected, etc.)
@Gilles if you are worried about the content being too SE centric then do something about it (edit posts, provide non-SE answers, ask non-SE questions). If you're not interested enough to do anything about it don't participate.
According to Area51, Stack Overflow (in Portuguese) is still in private beta. But yet I just signed up on it http://br.stackoverflow.com/users/582/christmas-unicorn (already deleted the profile now) despite I didn't commit to the proposal or recieve any mail.
Why did this happen?
@bjb568 Oh, if that's what we're doing, then it appears I'm missing an eye. And my left arm is... well, suffice to say, there's something very wrong with me.
I have several co-workers or friends who are active on a site that I moderate, they also know that I'm a moderator. I've come across a situation where one of these users has been participating in inappropriate behavior directed at other users.
When a moderator has a personal relationship with...
@badp in a legal setting, yes. But is SE legal? No. We harvest the work of unicorns to keep our databases running and make Jon Skeet recode SE daily... yes.
Wow, when I committed I wasn't sure how many questions I'd have (that I could ask publicly), and I assumed that everybody else would beat me on answers... and here I am, apparently one upvote away from Mortaarboard. Ok then!
@AnnonomusPenguin OTOH, I just got +3 for an upvote.
@AnnonomusPenguin definitely not the only one. :-)
user15026
I want to participate, but I don't have many questions, nor do I really know how to phrase "how I do things" as answers without it turning into weird piles of discussion like the kind that helped kill off LIS.
@AnnonomusPenguin Someone (in this case, me) would look through all the people who'd been participating in the private beta and pick out some (figuratively) good-looking users.
@Pops do you pick mods during private beta, or do people coming in at the public beta get a shot at it? (In this case you have plenty of capable candidates, but for other sites I've sometimes wondered -- mods-for-the-life-of-beta get set before we see what most people can do?)
The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two purely "rational" individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and gave it the name "prisoner's dilemma" (Poundstone, 1992), presenting it as follows:
Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages...
@MonicaCellio Private. Waiting for new people to be active in the public beta would mean leaving the site mod-less for too long. Although I've only done it once, so, grain of salt.
@Pops ah, that makes sense -- the longer you wait, the more work the CMs have to do. So, self-defense and all that. :-) Plus, as I said, in this case for sure you've got enough people who know what they're doing already.
I moderate a community where transparency of moderator actions is highly valued, and we recently opened applications for new moderators. The applications were to be posted publicly, so that members of the community would be able to view the entire pool of applicants and comment if they had any q...