The Water Cooler

1:25 AM

0

I was looking at the new questions when I noticed this question which had three tags including elevator and lift which seemed to be proposed by the person who asked the question. Seeing that these do not seem like helpful tags I retagged the questions, removing the offending tags. I then went to ...

Ian Holstead

1:48 AM

There will come a day when I will be able to figure out how to craft an answer people will like, but today is not that day! (read in the voice of Aragorn)

On an unrelated note can I ask you ( @jmort253 ) a question about one of my questions?

jmort253

@IanHolstead Sure thing... ask away

On an unrelated note, it's probably best to always just go ahead and ask, as if we missed each other that would make it tough... plus, there are a lot of folks in this room with a great amount of knowledge too who are happy to help. :D)

Ian Holstead

@jmort253 I had a question I asked get closed (which I agreed with) and then deleted (which surprised me). I was a little surprised that it was deleted, I guess to keep twp clean, but I have seen much worse closed questions not get deleted. I guess my question is partially why was it deleted and partially do you think there is anything I should take away when creating new questions? I strive not to ask bad questions so it caught me off guard a little :P

this is the question (workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/28045/…)

@jmort253 Right I will keep that in mind (I just noticed you had just hopped on and hoped to catch you!)

jmort253

@IanHolstead Let me take a quick look.

Ian Holstead

@jmort253 Thanks

jmort253

2:03 AM

@IanHolstead I seem to recall a meta post about this as well. Was that you by chance who opened it? (Just trying to get more context)

It looks like this got caught up in a round of cleanup last week.

Ian Holstead

@jmort253 not me!

jmort253

If you want to edit it, I can undelete it for you. Just let me know....

I have some company at my house, so have to run....

Ian Holstead

@jmort253 no problem!

Ian Holstead

2:16 AM

@jmort253 I would like to make it a helpful question but if people found it opinion based, I don't know how I can change that...

I guess I feel that the question might add value to the site (much like some closed questions do) and as such was surprised by the deletion. It kind of begs the question (to me) what is the value of closing a question vs. deleting it. But that's why I'm not a mod!

Matt Giltaji

5:06 PM

Hey, we're the featured community today!

Monica Cellio

@IanHolstead I have undeleted the question for you so you can edit it. In this case do not worry about invalidating existing answers; I'm going to leave a comment about that.

Closed (undeleted) questions have value as negative examples (this might seem like a good fit, is in scope, etc, but isn't). Questions that are too far afield may get deleted. In this case, there was some general cleanup going on (other questions deleted at the same time were very opinion-y or otherwise off), and this got carried along.

Oops, have to run -- back in a bit to leave that comment.

Monica Cellio

5:44 PM

I have undeleted this question to allow the author to edit it. These edits might invalidate existing answers. Normally that would be a no-no, but I have given permission because the alternative is deletion. I will delete answers that no longer match the question after editing. — Monica Cellio ♦ 9 secs ago

If a couple people could upvote that comment to get it above the "N more comments" line, I'd appreciate it.

2

Monica Cellio

6:57 PM

Thanks folks; mission accomplished (with the comment votes, I mean).

enderland

8:02 PM

workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/31585/…

those questions are identical

Ian Holstead

8:38 PM

wow this question got at lot of attention. Not to mention a lot of bad answers, good thing we got the 'protect without having to wait 24 hours' privilege

36

Q: Junior colleague is questioning my methodology in front of client

My junior colleague and I attend a meeting every week. Last week I was giving a presentation about the proposed work to be done and my colleague questioned my methodologies in front of the client. At the time I was clueless what to do. I am still not sure how to handle this kind of situation. W...

colleagues team politics

gnat

@IanHolstead no, it's not that privilege, it's a recent network wide feature "community protection"

15

A: Auto-protect questions that get more than N answers from new users in a 24-hour period

This has been implemented pretty much as described in the question and is now deployed across the network. Default threshold is 5 answers in 24 hours (by new users i.e. users who earned less than 10 reputation on the site, excluding any association bonuses), at the point of which the question ge...

Ian Holstead

@gnat ahh I didn't realize, I had just read something the other day (from jmac in the chat) that said we had just got the option and not to abuse it.

(note, I dont think that the message was from the other day, I just saw it then)

gnat

@IanHolstead that new feature is great overall, only thing I dislike is it's "fragile", in the sense that quick lemming / sympathy / asker upvotes prevent triggering the protection. This makes it work only in terribly abusive cases, when answers are either so bad that no one hesitates to vote up, or pile on so guickly that protection kicks in even faster than upvotes block it...

1

A: Why didn't auto-protection kick in in this question?

What happened is that two of the people answering got fairly quick upvotes on their answers. Enough to go over the 10 rep requirements. At that point, when a new answer comes in, those are excluded. This is working as designed - may need tweaking though.

Ian Holstead

@gnat agreed

gnat

@IanHolstead ...sort of workaround (only against asker' upvotes) is to vote down a low quality answer at +1, that will bring new user site rep down from 10 and keep the condition needed for protection. This would of course break if someone else adds a second upvote, one can only pray that this won't happen (in the hot questions chances for this to happen are quite high)

Ian Holstead

9:01 PM

@gnat Yeah I saw that... I still have no feeling for people's voting patterns on answers but it seems petty common on questions to stick with the trend for voting, if the question is downvoted, it will keep going down. But since there is a penalty (however trivial) for downvoting an answer, people seem to not really vote down answers. I wonder if you could get a bad answer to -1 before it went positive if it would stay that way...

Matt Giltaji

@IanHolstead this is actually a well documented psychological thing

Anchoring

Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments. Once an anchor is set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor. For example, the initial price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that prices lower than the...

sticking with the trend, anyway

as for the downvoting answers penalty, I think it is more of a deterrent for low-rep users than high ones.

-1 rep on someone with a few hundred rep is big, not so much on someone with > 10k

gnat

9:24 PM

@IanHolstead in hot questions, it often would go positive (or at least zero) anyway, I recall a funny case at Programmers where three of the answers in particular question were at some moment at -1, -2 and -3. I noticed that and decided to follow, it looked like a great case to study. After a while, all of them went to 0 and stuck there

my guess is, at 0, passer by voters felt nothing about these. But at negative score, answers were standing out and making some of voters pity and wish to "reward the attempt"