Droning On

Quick update; there's been a change of plan. The photo competition will begin once the current situation changes and travel restriction have been lifted.

What should the name of our main chatroom be?

@Nai45 hi, say hi please say hi please

As a result of the near-perpetual freezing of this chat room, the bot keeping our HNQ feed chat alive has been removed. In theory, this should result in that chat room freezing over instead of this main one. (fingers crossed!)

Just FYI guys, the elections for community moderator are open now: drones.stackexchange.com/election for the next 8 days.

ping............. ping.............. ping................ (I'm underwater, save me plz)

Worth remembering that this is the first beta in nearly a year and the first since Robert was fired, so ... I wouldn't necessarily expect it to follow the identical pattern as it used to. :)

And bringing the topic that it can answered somewhere is a common thing among sites, just because it could get better answers somewhere else doesn't mean it's not on-topic here

@JacobB I blame the rollout of cheap drones for "dumb" or untrained pilots. In the past, RC aircraft required a fair bit of commitment (cost and learning) whereas now anyone can buy a drone that will happily get them into trouble, damaging things or hurting passers-by

@NikeDattani Good memory - yep, I was, but mostly I'm on Pets chat - The Litter Box. I am slowly adding more SE sites to my network profile... you may see me more often next fall :D

BTW @NikeDattani you've been doing some serious work yourself over on the Materials Modeling SE...

I'm not saying that every bad question should be left open. Far from it. Just that, where possible, new users should be given a chance to improve their question before it is closed, and also be given some explanation of what they can do to improve it if/when it is closed.

@Daniil Because I wanted to give the OP a chance to read the comment before it was closed and/or deleted. I'd already flagged it as opinion-based on Robotics:SE.

If you happen to have a common question you know the answer to, and it's not asked and answered here, don't be afraid to drop your knowledge Q&A style in the form of asking then answering your own question.

@Catija Hello. Can I talk to you in this room please?

We're open for election nominations, since 9 minutes ago!!!

@Tinkeringbell That's a good idea. I think we might have most of the frequent questions here but I'm sure there's more.

Yeah, @Daniil Congratulations on getting that back :)

@Daniil Congrats on getting all your rep back. That's HUGE !!!!!!!!! And I'm happy for you. Sorry it took so long to catch up on the thread. There was so many messages constantly, I never managed to catch up properly until now.

@Tinkeringbell That's a suboptimal solution the way I see it... :|

IMO it duplicates information from the homepage and clutters the chatroom, but I may be in the minority here.

@Daniil I still feel like the answer to the first one is identical for me, even though we have little question influx by now.

To be clear... we were in the middle of a phone call talking about this site going into public beta when I got the pings earlier... so they didn't actually have any impact on the site status. :D

It's a problem on all SE sites; people who will recognize the effort others put into answering their questions are unfortunately rare.

Oh cool! My banner blindness missed that. Shows that I shouldn't talk like I know what I'm saying XD

Also: I think we might want to start a Meta thread on canonical questions, just to be able to track all of them and what we want to do to them.

@CaptainJ.LPicard I would like that question to be "what are relevant things to consider when speccing power supplies for a heavy drone?"

I doubt there has been a site without this discussion - it’s a good thing we’re having this discussion because it means we can lay down what should be applicable before we go public

My litmus test is whether @Daniil would get the identical answer if he were asking about electric cars, or even industrial steel mills.

I'm biased, but I think so. The current Meta consensus is that regulation questions are OK. If it was more along the lines of "If I do X, is the building under my control" then it would be less on-topic; as it stands, it just quotes the relevant regulations from a 137-page document which could otherwise be fairly inaccessible to a newcomer.

the goal in setting up SE was that it would be searchable and easily accessible

@KennSebesta One of the things that does work well on SE is tags. As an example we have Space Flight SE and also Astronomy SE and Physics SE. There are many questions that would be appropriate on all 3, but the focus has always been that as long as they are in scope, they can be asked where the asker wants them to be.

The main thing I learned was not to be too concerned about daily fluctuations in the early stages, to be encouraging to a wide range of questions, but to focus on quality - by editing, encouraging full detail in questions, incorporating comments into posts once they have improved info

@wizzwizz4 It does. It also gives me the right to do things like this in that case though :P