@nitsua60 yup

that's bout when everyone gave up, the first time

It'll be alright, it's a minute to go in the half and it's 1st-and-10 on their 29.

2TO left.

Should go into the locker room only down 2 scores.

So here's something which has been bothering me: closing questions doesn't make them go away, it just guarantees there will never be a better answer. Is there any reasonign behind that?

(not sarcastic; the stack system apparently works, I just don't get this bit)

The general theory is close fast, fix fast, reopen fast.

@fectin it's a sign that "this question, as it stands, is not acceptable per site policy"

Unfortunately, we're only really good at the first part.

The second part depends a lot on the original poster to engage with the system, and that's sometimes challenging.

thing's that are egregious, ie voted negative and no answers and closed, will be deleted eventually

And then the third part is often a matter of hours or days, as opposed to the minutes that closure often takes.

So there're orders of magnitude separating closing from fixing and reopening.

also, if something is TREULY bad, people can vote to delete (with enough rep)

But yeah, downvotes and closure and time (7 days?) will autodelete.

@fectin meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/161679

"7.The system will automatically delete closed (not as a duplicate), unlocked questions with zero or negative score having no positively scored or accepted answers or pending reopen votes, that were closed 9 or more days ago and haven't been edited in the past 9 days."

Alright, second half, only down 18 points. Here we go.

The thing I see, especially with a lot of older questions (1-2 years) is that they were closed, but with an upvoted answer (correctly upvoted). They never get deleted but they can never find any answers better than they already have. That seems to suggest a disconnect between "this question has no good answers" and "here is a good answer."

@fectin so, if the question is salvageable, you can edit the question and then vote to reopen

Again, the overall effect is that this site is helpful and actually nice (uniquely so!), so Chesterton's Gate alone makes me very hesitant to call anything bad. However, it does look weird to me.

That's a very good point.

@fectin there's a mantra that gets said sometimes, "a good answer doesn't save a bad question"

I will consider that carefully.

Is there a rationale for showing answers then?

Optimising for Pearls, Not Sand.

I will ponder that too :)

hmm, has the data that makes them think answers are favored in voting take into account that any question can have at least two or more answers in it?

it isn't like you post an answer and then get tons of questions added in later

I still agree with that post honestly, I just find that particular factoid a little odd considering the variables are already skewed in the direction of the conclusion, at least as it is used as a point

Closing questions doesn't seem to fit with the pearl-optimization. It retains the sand, and actually rejects possible pearls.

well no, I think closing questions does filter the sand out

(again, it apparently works, but I'd like to wrap my head around why)

if you have a bowl that you can filter out, and you dig up tons of sand with it looking for pearls, in order to get the pearls easier you would filter the sand out

if you don't then you are just stuck with the sand

(I know as a literal real world idea, this isn't the best way to get pearls at all,... but as an analogy I think it basically works)

okay. So (crudely) closing questions means that pearl-producers won't waste time on them?

I can buy that.

basically yeah

and the idea is not to close good questions

it's to close ones that don't conform to the system here in any useful way, or even for example downright spam questions

any question that isn't quite good enough is diluting the whole that we have built up

even taking it as a simple math problem, say you have a bank account with money in it, the amount doesn't matter, what matters (specifically this is a theoretical account instead of a real one XD) is that they tell you how much you have in it

So does that imply that old closed questions should be flagged for deletion or reopening?

if every single withdrawal you make is in every statement in single parts, you have to do all the math yourself now

that isn't exactly convenient

@fectin exactly. for instance, it's the site they built, but i am not a fan of what scifi allows on their site. i don't care about questions about what scares jk rowling (scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/23803/…), I'm only interested in the works she produces, so i got to movies (and now literature) instead

@fectin I don't know if I am exactly right on this, but I am pretty sure closed questions are already being looked at by mods and or the comunity

so flaging them might not be the response? again I am not clear on this point exactly

@fectin a lot of them fall into a hole of inactivity. if someone takes enough interest, they can edit it and hope to get it reopened. if it's bad, then it can be voted to delete

Nothing's given up on just because it's old.

but other than that, they sit in a bit of a no man's land

@BESW yeah fair enough point there

they're there because they probably have SOMETHING useful to someone, but we don't want people to use it as an excuse to ask similar questions

@CTWind looks like it got approved. good edit imo.

The Stack doesn't delete casually: because it's a well-sorted pile of questions and answers, less-then-stellar stuff just drifts to the bottom and doesn't get in anyone's way.

@nitsua60 aw. :'D (really though, i did?)

Closing a question signals that it needs improvement, incentivises the asker to make those improvements (because they can't hope someone will guess what they need), and keeps answerers from wasting time and effort on content which may not be useful and will likely be obsolete after the question's improved.

Deleting a question signals that it's actually causing a problem for the site (like spam or offensive content), or that it's so broken trying to fix it would be a waste of time and effort (like answers which don't try to answer the question).

@BESW honestly, what drives me BATTY, is people (especially those with high rep) that answer OBVIOUSLY BAD questions

@doppelgreener Yeah, and I can't think of why.

Steven Universe valentine cards

@DForck42 I've... done that before. Usually it's when I find a question to be an interesting mental exercise, even if it's not asked particularly well.

@DForck42 It's usually a priority thing: some folks see the Stack's close rules as obstructing Helping Real People With Problems in favor of Theoretical Community Curation, and find that objectionable.

I see it as a broken-windows issue: yeah, there's no actual problem with the immediate action of jumping the gun and trying to answer a bad question. But it teaches the asker that this site doesn't care about quality and they don't have to work on writing good questions. And it shows other people that answering poor questions is okay.

@BESW exactly

@CTWind so SHAME!! ;-)

But then, you know, sometimes a few folks genuinely don't think it's as bad a question as the rest of the community decides.

When it's a question about something I've got a lot of personal experience in, I may be able to read between the lines in ways others can't--so I'm effectively reading a better question than everyone else is.

I see the combination as bad ( same caveats as before though). If the answers are presented, that strongly encourages quick answers, and actively closes out slower, better answers.

@BESW +1 on that!

@BESW that's when i make edits to the question to make it clearer on what it's saying

@DForck42 That's definitely the better response. But it takes practice and self-awareness to recognise that the reason everyone else is slagging on the question is that I'm bringing more to it, rather than than they're just blind.

@BESW yup

@fectin Yeah, Fastest Gun In The west is endemic to the site even on good questions.

@Miniman it's worse the larger the site is, too

But for good questions, the normal democratic process triages it. Fo bad ones, that's blocked

closed and locked questions can still be valuable though in ways, so we don't want to delete them necessarily

Oh? What ways are those?

@fectin questions with a historical lock may contain useful information, but are no longer appropriate for the site. even closed questions can contain useful information -- they'll only be auto-deleted if they have no upvoted answers and no upvotes themselves.

Right, which was my original confusion - bad questions get removed from the SE answer sorting process, essentially protecting whatever answers slid in under the wire.

(I tend to think both that it;s a good question and that the first answer addresses it perfectly; that's neither here nor there)

If it's opinion, SE has still endorsed an opinion answer. If it actually is clear, no other answer can ever compete.

@doppelgreener In retrospect, probably just that you were one to offer guidance on an early, bad question when I was a new user. And like most noobs, I probably had a "screw that guy!" reaction.

@nitsua60 oh, hahaha

i'm glad things worked out eventually

@doppelgreener Too bad we couldn't cross paths last weekend. Next time I'm in London I'll give you a heads-up.

my first greeting when I answered a question on this site was SSD editing it

but I thanked him because I liked the edit XD

(part of the point being that in an alternate universe I could have NOT liked the edit so much, albeit a really freaking weird alternate universe)

speaking of dice rolling -- how do you folks handle "cocked" dice at your tables? I've noticed that at my meatspace AD&D table, we treat "cocked" rolls as valid, which is a fairly sharp break from my prior experience with dice games...

(i.e. a dice that's sitting with one edge propped up on something and the other on the table -- never mind dice that head for the floor mid-roll or somesuch)

Re-roll.

Last year I implemented the "roll in a big wooden salad bowl" tactic.

@BESW yeah, that's the "standard" thing to do AIUI -- I just was confused by the idea of someone not doing it that way

Mostly to help avoid couchdice, but it neatly removes cocked dice too.

@nitsua60 Sounds good. :)

@BESW couchcaltrops :P

@Shalvenay my group back in Aus use those if they're like, only a tiny bit tilted, but if they're quite tilted they reroll

@doppelgreener ah, so char sheet = OK but mini = reroll?

@Shalvenay said group didn't play RPGs but played board games; paper = keep, on the edge of a board or thick tile = reroll

@doppelgreener right

@Shalvenay For us, if there is any confusion or contention, re-roll. If everyone agrees that it's a 4, it doesn't matter how 'cocked' it is.

@GreySage ah.

most of the "cocked" dice I've run into have been fairly clear as to what they are (at least for d6s)

@Shalvenay Yeah, d6, d4, and even d8s tend to be pretty clear.

d20s can get tricky though

reading a tilted d100 is just the worst

I have some friends who have the "d10 inside a d10" d100s

@doppelgreener You can strike "tilted" from that sentence =)

they all seem terrible as there doesn't seem to be enough room inside the outer D10 to let the inner one roll properly

cute

@CTWind plus force you apply to the outer one doesn't necessarily do anything to the inner one

@nitsua60 hahahaha mentally i was already doing that

I keep seeing metallic dice on Massdrop. Those things have some heft to them.

@RavenDreamer +5 caltrop damage for d4s

And improvised brass knuckles if you palm them.

It works out pretty well.

/wave @Ash

Been a while. How's things in Canadialand?

Happy to hear that!

I got Google Fiber last week!

Felt good to kick TWC to the curb for sure!

Ugh. TWC frustrates me. My mom still uses them. It annoyed me so much that for any desktop mail client, you could only use insecure, plaintext options for sending your email password up. And last I checked, unless you were on a TWC-based connection, you couldn't access your mail through a desktop app.

I was glad to be able to switch to fiber for myself, though where I currently live Comcast is sadly the only option