The Velodrome - 2014-09-16

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7:18 AM

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Q: should down-voting cost more reputation

...particularly if you a lot of reputation or you down-vote frequently? According to the help page: Voting down answers is not something we want you to take lightly, so it is not free. Yet it costs only 1 point to down-vote an answer and you can do 30 a day (with a reputation of >=125). If...

9 hours later…

4:13 PM

@BicyclesMeta Its an interesting question, but really, down voting occurs so infrequently that I'm not really inclined to care about it.

1 hour later…

5:27 PM

@Batman funny, we just had this on Meta.SU this morning

-2

Q: Effect of downvote on reputation

Should downvotes result into bigger reputation loss than -2 ? I believe that compared to +10 for an upvote, -2 is negligible and it would be fair to increase it. Also, since the community is reputation-based and the purpose is to provide high-quality answers and accumulate knowledge, is it worth...

discussion feature-request reputation down-votes

5:56 PM

@nhinkle - like buses!

There is a certain paradox when meta questions like this are themselves downvoted

6:24 PM

@PeteH huh?

So it seems like The Velodrome has been open for 1337 days prior to this one.

6:39 PM

@nhinkle have you never heard the saying "you wait half an hour for a bus and then two come along at once"? Must be something peculiarly English...sorry

@Batman did you also see that the site passed 5000 questions today?

@PeteH ah. I was not familiar with that idiom, although I have certainly observed that phenomenon.

Typically when there's a bridge lift. Most of our bridges in Portland are draw bridges, and usually when one goes up, they all have to go up in succession because whatever boat is going all the way through. And almost every bus line crosses the river, so if there's a bridge lift, there'll be no buses for 30 minutes, and suddenly a dozen or more.

@nhinkle I'm surprised - I thought my US geography was ok and that Portland was some way inland. And you have shipping? Is that cargo or cruise ships?

I mean, presumably there's a route out to the Pacific?

7:03 PM

@PeteH you're not wrong, but it is called Port land for a reason. The columbia river is huge (almost a mile wide in places) and runs from the ocean up all the way into canada. The Willamette river runs south-to-north and flows into the columbia. Portland is situated around that confluence, although most of town is a bit south of the columbia. The Willamette goes right through the middle of town. Lots of industrial shipping type stuff on the north end of town.

Some boats go through town to go further up river, but not a whole lot. The big cargo ships all stop on the north side of town.

A cruise ship comes through maybe once or twice every year or two, but there are smaller boats that can be rented out that hold a few hundred people or so that cruise up and around the river.

google.com/maps/@45.5740996,-122.6920874,25777m/data=!3m1!1e3

7:32 PM

@nhinkle ahhhhh maybe I'll have to visit there someday. My direct knowledge of the US only stretches as far west as DC! or Tampa, Fl (whichever is further W)

7:53 PM

LOL

Neither is particularly west, that's for sure.

@nhinkle yeah I thought the further east I stayed, the less I'd annoy people. In NYC I felt at home.

That's where I would have worked, had I stayed in the US

8:13 PM

Just watching a celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Amazing footage - I was brought up on Beatles music, coming from the same hometown..

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in the audience.....wonder what must be going through their heads

@PeteH No, I did not - that is kinda neat though.

@Batman just looking back and think it was marked as a dup. Shame it wasn't more auspicious.

0

Q: muddy fox " " Rebel"

Can i change my muddy fox rebels rear brake for a disc brake? It doesn't seem to have the mounting bit on it but I have seen that you can get some that screw into the couple of holes in the frame. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

brakes conversion disc

@PeteH Hm? It is the same problem. On top of that, it seems to be a BSO so I'm not sure why anyone would want to modify it anyway.

8:29 PM

@Batman I think that one was the 5000th. We've had a few along those lines recently - got rim brakes and want to put disks on instead. It's funny that we seem to get clutches of similar questions timed quite closely together.

@PeteH Well it makes sense to some extent. A lot of people buy their bikes at the same time of year or start riding them at the same time of year (e.g. when school starts). Plus, most people want discs cause they look cool (yet won't take their bikes out in anything other than perfectly dry and clean roads).

The influx is also similar to the "what should I buy" questions that come up more often at certain times (I can understand the temptation to ask them - I've been looking to buy a different drop bar for a while, but haven't found one priced reasonably that I like).

I have a problem with those questions, one the one hand it's site policy to mark them as off-topic, but often the people asking are so ....uninformed.... that you just want to help. Fine line.

There was a guy on a couple of weeks back, some problem with his brake lever, was contemplating gluing it at the lever.

Obviously that guy wasn't looking for a rec, but you just feel you need to step in and say "don't do it"

@PeteH Well that's a different question entirely - "I'm trying to repair this" versus "should I buy this bike?"

@Batman sure, different question, just used it to illustrate "uninformed".

I'm tempted to start a question + answer when I get home later tonight on "What should I look for when buying a bicycle?" and having a few community wiki answers for "General things to look for", "Commuter", "Tourer", etc. and then people can make a community wiki for other things (e.g. downhill, roubiax, gravel racing, etc.). Then, just mark all these things as duplicates to that question.

Some wiki type answers like that (drivetrain compatibility would be another useful one) would be useful. Its pretty broad, but I think you can be relatively objective with it (a commuter used in rain should have fender holes, for example)).

what are your thoughts on that?

8:48 PM

I thought a while ago about coming up with some kind of interactive flowchart to guide people toward a particular style of bike, but never got around to doing anything. For example, first question could be "would you ever ride offroad" or something. But a bunch of questions with yes/no answers.

Yeah. I don't think flowchart is necessary (maintaining one is a bit harder), but just a few lines of description on what each class of bike is good for is something. I think I'll do that when I get home.

Check it doesn't exist first :)

I agree with the flowchart comment, that's essentially why it didn't fly. It'd have to be quite loose in its recommendations as people may not necessarily agree otherwise.

Theres about 120 pages of questions which involve trying to buy something which is tough to sort through. But I think there are enough general truths to it that you can narrow down what you want reasonably for each class.

We should also have pointers to the other SE questions which are relevant for each class as well.

That would certainly explain why nobody has attempted it before.

I find a lot of "dup" spotting is done by memory......you know, "I'm sure I saw that question before".......rather than searching

Yeah, but I think a big-list type tag that they use on Math.SE for questions of the sort will work for this. It also aggregates all the relevant information in one place.

8:55 PM

Plus a lot of time the question might not be a dup, but the answer is

Yeah. I like the idea, but we'll see if people will close it. As far as I can tell, all the similar questions are of the form "I'm looking to buy an X bike. Is this a good deal?" and this is significantly different. Eventually, I'd like to aggregate it and put it on the blog.

I'd float it as a Wiki question first, if it were me.

sorry, I mean a Meta question

Hm, yeah, good point. Be a shame if people started contributing and the question got closed.

There are "close" questions like bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/612/purchasing-a-bike but they don't get the cigar.

No, as I say I think we're definitely lacking when someone comes on and says "please help me, I haven't got a clue"

anyway, its getting past my bedtime and I need my sleep these days! see you later @Batman, take it easy

1 hour later…

10:07 PM

Heres the meta question: meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/946/…

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Q: Big lists for common questions

Generally, I think the Bicycles.SE community frowns on product recommendations and we close a lot of questions of the sort. However, there is a decent number of questions such as "I would like a bike for commuting, is this one good"? I was thinking of something similar to the big-list tag on Ma...

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Sep '1416

The Velodrome

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