It's become habitual for me to say "Oh my God" in a situation where I am shocked or surprised, as I'm sure it's become been for a lot of people.
I said "Oh My God" in the presence of a friend of mine once, a long time ago, and he said, "Don't use God's name in vain" or "Don't use the Lord's name...
I think it would be appropriate on this site to add a new set of badges, based on Matthew 20:16, and should be awarded for reaching the following criteria:
Achieves negative reputation
100 accumulated down votes on questions
100 total down votes on answers
I'd say you generally want to avoid funny question on the site itself, it doesn't make a good impression. on meta, you can be a little bit more tolerant. (the tag is wrong on both sites, but don't worry about it too much - just a hint)
especially as I'm writing it here... "Usher: Was the top rep-earner for the day"... might actually be taken literally to mean they "ushered in a lot of rep" or similar
@Amithkk: I think many would take offense to that... it could be considered blasphemous.
@Amithkk and @Purmou et al. Typically SE sites get a design when they are close to launch. We have at least 90 days of public beta before we get a real design. And only a few SE sites have launched just after the initial 90 days. I'd say we are looking at closer to 6 months before we have a real design if everything goes well.
@Flimzy As Christians we're all strangers in a strange land, our citizenship is elsewhere. But yes I am an ex-pat on earth too at a place where it's definitly not night-time.
@waxeagle Yup. I was hoping that was the direction you were suggesting, although it would be interesting to see if there was a curve of diminishing probably for sites that take too long.
@Caleb no clue, RPG has been open for over a year and is just finally back to "ok". If a site is generating even a small volume of questions, but more importantly lots of good answers it will stay open for a while in beta even if its not close to launch. Not sure there is a standard yet, but they want sites to succeed
@Amithkk Is that posted somewhere? Obviously if a site if failing it will be closed, but I don't think there is a hard and fast rule for when a site is shut down.
@Caleb I'm not sure how productive the alcohol question's bounty really is, isn't that fairly subjective? I can see strong arguments from both sides with no real definitive answer...
the bounty on your question should be about 10x higher :). Thats a book waiting to be written right there
@waxeagle I agree. That might be something I add bounty points to myself, but I was thinking about letting it sit around for a while to give people time to research and wait until the site has some more expertise in that area, then using a bounty to get it back into view.
@CRoss yup, honestly if volume keeps up the way it has (I don't think it will but it might) this site could actually be ready to go live in 90 days....
Confound it all, SE is convinced that I must be a robot today. It has challenged me on almost every post or edit I have made. It probably hasn't helped that half the time I've gotten the CAPTCHA's wrong.
I prep them in the browser, but sometimes use a plugin that edits text-areas using vim. (Transparent to the site, outputs plain text)
I'm not doing anything different than normal and today is the first time I've had a problem. I've seen them occasionally before but once challenge a day and they usually go away.
@Caleb ooh you should check it out :). Its an anthem to nerd everywhere...(its about 4 nerd and a hot blonde who lives across the hall from 2 of them)...Anyways there is a scene in the first season where they posit that the least accessible of all of the characters might actually be a robot and start asking him if he followed the three laws...
@waxeagle Are you insinuating that I'm an "inaccessible character"?
It's not my day. First a piece of software decides that I'm a robot, now a human thinks I'm inaccessible even though we are chatting in the same language.
BTW @waxeagle after your comment above I started poking around. So far if I were to write a moderator nomination report it would have "- has previous moderator experience, - has no idea why he hasn't been nominated, - has dominated the calvinism tag". I'm not sure such an entry would do anything for either of our reputations however :)
By the way those are great questions. I was going to ask them myself but you beat me to it. It might take some time go get the right people around to do really good write-ups on them however.
@Caleb I just did one for IG. It was the one I was most disappointed in the answers to so far. Pretty disappointed on LA, but haven't had time yet
@Caleb you could cite meta/chat involvement
@Caleb I'm not a huge fan of pro-tem nominations. They don't add much value and the SE community team will decide who to pick by evaluating the whole site
@waxeagle Ya I didn't realize what I was getting into when I started that thread. I've actually thought of deleting it, but it seems to late for that so I'm just trying to make the best of it.
Hopefully the experience will be of some use to the community when it comes time for real elections.
I have an idea that this might be one of the hardest sites to moderate in SE history. Having a diamond next to your name is going to be the equivalent of "aim stones here".
@waxeagle Programmers is a black sheep. It throws off any attempt to generalize or do cross-site statistics. We might be another one of those. The black-sheep and the scape-goat.
@waxeagle How much has the experience on Gardening.SE influenced your knowledge? I see we already have more threads on meta.Christianity during private beta than there are yet total on gardening.
@Caleb yup. I have a feeling if Hermeneutics launches we might have an SO/Programmers type relationship
@Caleb Gardening has had an influence, although maybe a small one. Things like How to define whats on topic, how to deal with tags, when to close something outright and when to let the community act. We haven't had a contentious user to speak of so that's not something I'm skilled in.
@waxeagle Interesting idea. I've always thought they should be rolled into the same time. Christianity is going to suffer if the people with the best hermenutical abilities are all busy elsewhere. You might be right about how it goes down, but I kind of hope not.
@Caleb I see that site as being much more technical than this one. We will have some technical elements, but that sites scope is going to be much better defined from the beginning
Are there other folks in the private beta that have prior mod experience? I haven't done anything like exhaustive research, only browsed through a few folks that caught my eye.
I just opened the gardening meta by mistake thinking I was opening this one. I must have read the question title about vegetable tags three times before I figured out I was in the wrong place.
Personally I think the guidance should be if the Bible says X is sinful its worth talking about, if its silent then its probably best to just leave it up to the community...
@Purmou mine is 0% right now because none of my questions have what I consider to be a "best" answer yet. If no one posts a better answer on my IG question by tomorrow morning I may go ahead and accept mine, but I'm not going to do it right away.
@JonathonByrd I'm not much better! He asks hard questions.
I think during private beta it's ok for questions to sit around for a little while, accepting things before they have multiple good attempts at answering them isn't a great idea.
ok guys as much as I enjoy your company and dinging in the hidden tab of my browser, I need to focus on work :) last week was pretty unproductive thanks to you guys lol !
@Caleb I just started to read his question, comprehending little of what he had to say, I then noticed he hasn't accepted anything. so I chuckled, "not a chance"
@Purmou Thank you for that. I sent you a chat invite via gchat too so that I don't frustrate anybody here. As you can see Purmou I'm just a programmer, not a designer :) I use a lot of "inspiration" in my designs haha
@Purmou It doesn't show up until you have questions at least X days old with upvoted answers but nothing accepted. Until you hit that scenario at least once it won't show. Maybe it hasn't been enough days of your questions sitting around with upvoted answers.
@JonathonByrd Haha, programming's no fun without the graphics work! :P Though admittedly, CSS3 and HTML5 have replaced the need for graphics completely.
I personally found the suggestion to replace AD & BC with CE & BCE as the identification of the time before and after the birth of Christ to be offensive and sacrilegious. It is political correctness gone to far. I bristle anytime I hear someone use BCE.
I continue to use AD & BC wh...
@waxeagle I wanted to too (as not constructive: This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.) but couldn't bring myself to hit the button.
It's a "how do you feel" poll, but it also seems like there should be a way to ask something on the topic.
@waxeagle Done. This is a case where I'm glad I'm not a moderator and can just vote as a citizen, but I do think that question sets a precedent that we would rather curb than encourage.
@Caleb man, its a tough call some days...having wisdom to know when to let something sit and when to kill something outright is the hardest part of a Mod's job
Thankfully its not a job you do alone. You have your own site mods to help and the wider mod community as well. In addition to your own community
Eighty Three percent of college students and fifty five percent of pastors are said to be addicted to pornography. (link) Even the most Godly men, like David (OT) has been trapped by these desires.
It seems that the more I try to fight these desires, the stronger that they become. It doesn't ma...
Are the questions posted to this website ONLY to be about Biblical study or may they also be related to Christian Living?
Such as
Christian Living: How can one escape the desires of the flesh; lust?
Can't we also learn how to be better christians by asking christian lifestyle questions?
This is a good question, but it's not a good for this type of Q&A. Stack Exchange is designed to create an authoritative collection of answers to canonical questions about Christianity. I can see this being asked of a congregation to share interesting discussion an through-provoking stories. But this type of story-sharing and communing isn't really what this site is about.
"We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion." This is better suited to a discussion forum.
@JonathonByrd typically old closed questions are deleted. but not immediately. It also takes a recalc to remove rep (if I remember correct) from deleted questions
I think it would be appropriate on this site to add a new set of badges, based on Matthew 20:16, and should be awarded for reaching the following criteria:
Achieves negative reputation
100 accumulated down votes on questions
100 total down votes on answers
We have had a couple of questions along the lines of "is X a sin?".
Should these questions be on topic or should we disallow them?
I personally found the suggestion to replace AD & BC with CE & BCE as the identification of the time before and after the birth of Christ to be offensive and sacrilegious. It is political correctness gone to far. I bristle anytime I hear someone use BCE.
I continue to use AD & BC wh...
