@SteveRobillard What's up with "in the past a slavish focus on the site's stats has led to some behavior detrimental to the site"? I noticed that comment somewhere else too, but there wasn't any explanation.

@goldilocks several members were going through unanswered questions and adding comments asking them to accept the answer for the sake of the site's stats and graduation. Or voting to close questions due to inactivity. While I agree that some questions can and should be closed - I don't agree that inactivity is cause enough. As you pointed out upvoting is the best course of action.

@SteveRobillard Asking people to accept an answer isn't so bad, although it is probably largely pointless with old questions. Obviously misplaced zeal is something to watch for (my own included). Closing stuff would still require the five votes without us, so I can't see that getting too out of hand. The most positive thing -- actually upvoting -- is also the easiest, and anyone can do it. I went through a bunch of questions yesterday and for a lot of them that's all I had to do; there...

...was at least one answer that was not too shabby, just likely the OP never came back or didn't care and neither did anyone else. As a quick guess, out of maybe a few dozen or so I went through, only 5-10% weren't changed -- either I upvoted an answer or closed. I think we probably have hundreds like this (that can be closed, or that already actually have a decent answer).

I'd like to tackle them gradually starting with the oldest, but I'm happy to keep a list if you want to double vet stuff.

There's no way I'd close a question just because it is unanswered and old. It has to be something that is dubious -- unclear, too broad, off-topic.

@goldilocks Like I said I agree, I just wanted to caution that overzealousnous can be a problem. I was getting flags to close questions that were a day or two old for inactivity, and dozens of comments were left to accept an answer only to improve the stats.

@goldilocks My opinion is that if we maintain a helpful community (providing answers and hence value the site will grow/graduate on its own) and I think the stats bear me out on that.

@goldilocks BTW did I see you had taken the edx CS169.1x couse?

Hmm, no. I'm currently taking some CS courses online (Athabasca) but that doesn't look familiar.

Is your github username goldilocks

I don't have a github account. Looks better than my current SO&D course, which is pretty much the same as my last SE course, lol.

Sorry -- SA&D

It is pretty good coversa lot of things graduates don't always get in the normal curriculum

FYI if you look through chat and meta You will see some of my past commnents on slavish devotion to the stats.

We can be good cop, bad cop ;)

agreed

I'm not totally 100% copacetic with all S.E. policies, so I don't want to hurt the place just to get out of beta.

@goldilocks I am glad you came aboard for the last few months I have handled nearly all of the flags and was starting to feel a little burnt out

Cool. I'm online all day at home and will be for the foreseeable future, so I'm happy to help.

One thing we may want to consider is asking the SO team if we can look at the site stats (answers, questions etc. on a year by year or month by month basis) to see what the trend is what do you think?

I got quite a bit more comfortable with the data explorer yesterday (learned you can do a join on the same table! My SQL is pretty theoretical), and I don't think it would be too hard to come up with something to do that, pull stats by date. The queries are saved, publicly accessable, and can be bookmarked, so if I come up with something I'll pass it on to you and we can tweak that, etc.

sounds good