The Whiteboard

12:25 AM

crap-throwers from SO never sleep:

@ColonelThirtyTwo Please stop using Programmers.SE as your toilet bowl -> meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/a/6367/31260 — gnat 47 secs ago

user41796

1:32 AM

@gnat There's a lot more monkeys than there are of us. I do wish they would evolve a little bit though.

gnat

1:50 PM

folks, I am pondering the idea that when question enters close queue, system would automatically check and raise flag for moderators if it detects cross-post or that asker is question banned / limited / warned at SO. Would such a feature request make sense, what do you think?

gnat

4:21 PM

-2

Q: Proposed Change to Community Deletion Criteria

Per this answer, the Community user autodeletes any answer that matches this criteria (among others): The system will automatically delete closed (not as a duplicate), unlocked questions with zero or negative score having no upvoted or accepted answers or pending reopen votes, that were close...

@MichaelT ^^^ you may find it interesting

Stack Exchange

5:07 PM

Ars Technica » Stack Exchange: Why is multiple inheritance so abhorred?

posted on August 02, 2014 by Stack Exchange

MI can be a powerful feature when executed correctly, but it's hard to master.

user55340

5:21 PM

@gnat Its an interesting bit... appears to stem from some refusal of 10k users on Math.SE to delete crap... and someone going through and down voting questions with one up vote to a crap question.

user55340

32

Q: Is it appropriate to downvote answers for the sake of deleting a question?

I have noticed that sometimes answers are downvoted in order to cause the automatic deletion of a question by the community user. In particular, there are closed questions with $1$-point answers - when the answer(s) are downvoted to $0$, they are then eligible for automatic deletion, which can on...

discussion closing down-votes deletion

user55340

11

A: Incentive for downvoting?

I'm leaving aside the "simply flagging" part, which probably stems from unfamiliarity with how flagging works. Downvotes are major contributors to both automatic deletion of posts, and to their manual deletion. Apart from software-forced deletions, downvoting gives authors an incentive to rem...

user55340

42

A: Around how many questions get deleted in Stack Exchange and by who?

I'm glad you asked this... There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding how much stuff gets deleted, and who is responsible - so I'm going to provide a bit more information than what you asked for, in hopes of clearing this up. Questions deleted during the past 365 days on Stack Overflow 659...

user55340

From Feb '13 to Feb 14... 10k users only deleted 218 questions on Math.SE (200 asked questions/day). (On P.SE we deleted 851 (36 asked questions/day)).

user55340

Or another way of looking at that, Math.SE deletes less than 1% of its inbound questions via 10k users.

user55340

5:26 PM

On P.SE we delete about 10% via 10k users.

user55340

Now, some people are apparently fussing about this on Math.SE meta... and now its spilling over into Meta.SE. I think that ChrisF has the proper answer there.

user55340

You saw the numbers, Hurkyl: over a 12-month period, the 10K users deleted 218 questions in total, 0.6 questions per day. Compared to the amount of garbage pouring it, this is nothing short of pathetic. 10K users collectively failed to protect the site from low-quality content, substituting endless pondering on meta for taking action on main. Years into the debate, you are still waiting for your belief to "cement" into doing something. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer... — 900 sit-ups a day Jun 30 at 15:00

gnat

6:01 PM

@MichaelT agree, his answer makes pretty good sense. You know, what really strikes me in this complaint about cliff questions is complainers appear unwilling to put their own effort, although it's pretty easy to do: run the same cliff script and vote stuff up. Heck I mostly run it to vote down, but even I routinely vote up to push it to the opposite side of the cliff when I believe content is worth keeping

user55340

@gnat Sometimes there is a good answer there... though I'd take ChrisF's approach - fix the question. That way it can get reopened.

2

user55340

There's more math.meta drama about this at:

user55340

8

Q: Under what circumstances is it appropriate to delete a question that has received a good answer?

I would like to have a discussion about the following question: When is it appropriate to delete a question which has been closed as "missing context or details," but which has generated mathematically good and upvoted answers? What considerations should be made when voting? The recent spat...

discussion voting deleted-questions deleted-answers

user55340

And they're in a 'scope redefinition' problem currently:

user55340

34

Q: Fate of the (homework) tag: The community voted.... now what?

Well, the results of the voting seem pretty conclusive: Leave homework alone: 43 upvotes (20.38%) Deprecate but don't delete homework: 12 upvotes (5.69%) Burninate and blacklist homework: 156 upvotes (73.93%) So we'll be requesting that the homework tag be hanged, drawn and quarte...

discussion featured tag-management tag-blacklist

user55340

6:06 PM

Part of Math's problem is that the tolerance of crap went on for longer than it did at P.SE and is thus a bit more engrained in the culture there.

user55340

-1

A: Under what circumstances is it appropriate to delete a question that has received a good answer?

What considerations should be made when voting? The premise of the question is flawed in that it proposes there could be some consensus about how people vote. Voting is not by consensus, it is everyone's expression of their own opinion. I know you already replied to that When your o...

gnat

wow, they're living in interesting times. Gotta get even more dramatic I guess when auto-deletion will be expanded further, to questions with accepted answers and dupes...

64

Q: What should the system be deleting automatically that it already isn't?

So this question got me thinking... We have several automatic processes in place for cleaning up cruft, deleting questions that are very unlikely to help anyone else. They're fairly conservative though; an awful lot of lousy questions hang around much longer, occasionally cropping up to annoy fo...

discussion deleted-questions auto-delete se-quality-project

user55340

0

Q: Is there an MSE-like site that is more pleasant to work in?

Introduction: It becomes more difficult to help people on a site in which there is mass closing of questions. And I am disturbed that a small group of people is engaged in trying to delete permanently some of the questions I have answered. I interpret it as systematic deliberate erasure of my wo...

discussion

gnat

asker spotted a... slippery meta guidance:

@gnat recommend considering: getting started/resources — Jordy 1 min ago

user55340

6:40 PM

Gah... I'm gonna rep cap from that *ptr answer.

user55340

Found it! (the thing I was asking about)... Hacker School banning "feigned surprise" is absolutely brilliant

user55340

@amon (this was touched off by that "it should be obvious..." thing in the answer the other day)

user55340

>
The first rule means you shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you don't know what the stack is!") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it's usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of pe…

2

user55340

hackerschool.com/manual

amon

7:00 PM

@MichaelT meh, I was angered more by the suggestion of using 64-bit without any justification, less so by the inappropriate tone of that answer.

If you have to compile some application with 64-bit, that program scales by “throwing more RAM at it”, not by using clever algorithms or employing caching wisely.

user55340

@amon The thing was... he put it back in after I took it out once. programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/251893/revisions

amon

@MichaelT why can't I upvote edit summaries? That was brilliant :)

user55340

@amon heh... save it for when I get around to writing another meta post on the subject now that I've found the thing I was looking for.

user55340

11:02 PM

@gnat I finally gave in to the rant...

user55340

0

A: Proposed Change to Community Deletion Criteria

I've sat and ruminated on this for awhile. I think that ChrisF's answer is indeed the right answer (saving one from one of the Community Managers to really say one way or the other). On occasion, I do exactly this - use a down vote to try to cut down the amount of crap that is out there. I'v...

user55340

11:43 PM

BTW, it appears that I can exclude math questions from the hot questions list with one weird trick... rep whorers hate me. (I'll post about this separately). Yes, you correctly judged that this thread is a spillover from the lovefest on our meta. A little cross-site exchange of opinions is refreshing, like opening a window from a stuffy room where debates went on for hours. Now linked from my answer on meta.Math. — 900 sit-ups a day 3 mins ago

user55340

@900sit-upsaday given that I spend time in a chat room with gnat, I can assure you I'm familiar with the workings of the hot question list. ;-) — MichaelT 34 secs ago

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