I recently asked a question on Stack Overflow which was primarily about UICollectionViewController, a frequently used class in UIKit on iOS 7.
I wanted to tag the post with the tag uicollectionviewcontroller, but could not do this because it exceeded the limit of 25 characters.
Please will you ...
@Helmar your edit must already have been rejected when I made mine, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to make it. I could have seen it pending, or seen it rejected in the author's activity (where I went to see after reading your chat message). But I hadn't.
@NapoleonWilson You want me to create another a sockpuppet on MSE?
Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch ist der Titel eines Kinderbuches des deutschen Schriftstellers Michael Ende, das 1989 erstmals erschienen ist und 1990 mit dem Schweizer Literaturpreis „La vache qui lit“ ausgezeichnet wurde.
== Handlung ==
Der böse Zauberer Beelzebub Irrwitzer, Personifikation der Wissenschaft bzw. die durch den Menschen verursachte Zerstörung der Umwelt, hat sich vertraglich bei Seiner Höllischen Exzellenz dazu verpflichtet, jedes Jahr eine vorgeschriebene Zahl an bösen Taten, wie Naturkatastrophen, Seuchen und andere Unglücke, zu vollbringen. In diesem Ja...
@Catija The Stack is totally fine with collecting answers which can be found elsewhere, because we're a neatly-sorted pile of solutions. The only problem is whether it's the kind of information we can handle well.
@BESW That really depends on the site. Questions like that would be utterly off topic on M&TV because we're not duplicating IMDb. Otherwise, we'd be full of questions like "Who was the star of _____"... we really don't need a site full of that crap.
@Randal'Thor this was one of the lessons of Stack Overflow's private beta; originally, there were no limits on how much you could vote... Then someone decided to upvote everything.
How should we treat "trivial question" questions?
There are a number of questions coming in that seem like exercises in laziness IMO. "What is a macguffin," "What is railroading," etc. At best these should be wiki entries, but really they are "I don't feel like checking Wikipedia, let me make ...
We have an old question about trivia questions that we wrestled with, without a real consensus emerging:
How do 'Trivia' Questions meet the requirements for posting?
I went searching out that question due to recent wrangling over various questions, but it's too out-of-date to be a good resour...
@Randal'Thor That's complicated. I often dislike it because it puts the worst of our stuff out there (I feel), but my last 15 WB questions have hit the HNQ. So I dislike it even though it's helped me.
@Gilles That's the general idea but I'll have to monitor the flow for a little while before I decide what goes in and which gets main-lined and which go into the ticker.
@Benjamin Extremely low activity would be a bad sign, but in the low-high activity range I don't think there's correlation between activity and success
As long as quantity is not abysmally low, and it isn't, the important thing now is quality
People are eager to throw out their stuff now. But once the gates get opened to the public, and contrary to what one might expect, it generally tends to decline from private beta traffic.
@BESW Quite honestly, I can't see any advantages in the ticker system. The onebox can be ignored; it doesn't block other messages; it slides off your screen without having to be manually dismissed; ...
@Randal'Thor ^^^^ Before someone wrote that for me, I spent months (years?) avoiding the Unix & Linux chat because of that *@#(&*(#@& ticker
“But no one goes to a sushi restaurant for shredded carrots.” [citation-needed] “I've never heard a group of friends walking out while patting their bellies and saying to one another, ‘boy howdy, the salmon was ok but those radishes - what a sublime delight!’” — I have (no these exact words, but the general idea. And the implied idea that nobody comes to a Q&A site for identification questions is total bullshit, since you are aware of a counterexample. — Gilles2 hours ago
@Benjamin Because it's too easy for a few users to skyrocket out of proportion. The reasons for the rep cap (encouraging consistent use and getting experts to go out and do expert things away from the site) don't magically vanish in beta.
@Benjamin Why shouldn't it be? Otherwise, it just serves to expand the inequality in rep between folks who join early and folks who join later if they put in the same amount of work.
user61230
@Benjamin It's actually more valuable in private beta: it prevents rep hunger from dominating the conversation, and helps keep quality up early on.
user61230
10:39 PM
That's always valuable, but particularly during the formative period of a site.
@Randal'Thor like you said, the rep cap is quite demotivating now. A compromise that SE could make is perhaps increasing the rep cap by, say 100 rep, (only during private beta). This could encourage users to visit and participate daily as well as encourage high-rep users to keep answering and asking.
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ for the record, I was the first to vote to close, personally I just thought it was broad/opinion-based because it's asking about the hypothetical actions of a character.
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ because of that, there's no real one right answer
A big pet peeve of mine about Stack Exchange's Science Fiction and Fantasy website is that's filled with questions that I describe as "why didn't character x act rationally" questions. Recently, someone asked the question Why did Hermione not kill Voldemort in 'the Prisoner of Azkaban'?, which is...
I came here to be able to talk about the meaning of literature, not to discuss fruitless hypotheticals that stem from laziness on account of the question asker :/
@DForck42 Yeah. The answer to "why not" is very often "well, because the author didn't think of it" or "because that would have made the book only 10 pages long, duh".
@Gilles true, but personally that question seems far too opinion-based to me. there's no real answer in canon and thus all answers will simply just be speculation.
@Emrakul I don't believe I assumed that. And sure, I think they can. However, I wish question askers would first think about the material at hand. I mean, what's the point of literature if you're just going to have it spoon-fed to you?
@Emrakul Exactly. To borrow a phrase from our old acquaintance AE: "just because I don't like sprouts, I'm not going to stop everyone else from being able to enjoy them".
Of course, that argument can be taken too far and used to mean "don't close anything ever".
@Gilles And it seems I wasn't the only one to feel the same way, others voted to close as well. There seems to be strong disagreement here in chat with my vote, so if you do feel that way, I may have been in the wrong on this one. go ahead and reopen if you happen to disagree :)