Software Recommendations

kalina

07:56

morning

Izzy

08:09

@kalina Morning! Sobered? #D

I was asked whether I was partying with you. Said I couldn't remember where #D

kalina

I'm only 20% sober at best

Izzy

08:34

Uh-oh... Ask me tomorrow (birthday today)... But I guess for me it won't be much more than a few glasses of wine :)

kalina

08:50

I had very little alcohol

but let's not go into too many details

my brain is still misfiring

I really want to sleep

my body just won't let me

probably means I'll be asleep at work

Izzy

@kalina Helps avoiding errors: who's asleep, cannot break things #D

kalina

09:21

right so, did I miss anything important this weekend?

Angelo Neuschitzer

10:20

@Gilles My line of thought was very much oriented on the concept "If I look for Software with tag X would I mean tag Y as well?" I know very well that synonyms on other SE sites are not meant that way, but I think that here we might need a different approach.

kalina

12:26

I would really like your support in this to help make the site great going forwards - it's your choice though

Stack Exchange

13:48

0

Q: Tag pluarilzation

I have noticed that we are inconsistent on tag plural forms. The question here is do we want to have plurals or do we want to have singular (or don't we care). As soon as this is decided I will create a list of the wrong ones so a CM can rename them (afaics none of us has the rep yet to do so ou...

kalina

@Izzy do you have any examples you're thinking of?

I'm not seeing any instances of plural form tags on the sites I use

other than ones we've already marked for cleanup, that is

hmmmm... gaming does have a controllers

and ask ubuntu does have a scripts

It seems pretty inconsistent though because they've also got a video

Izzy

14:07

@kalina "Don't touch..." – "Didn't :)"

Oh – you didn't refer to the linked message #D

Sec...

kalina

oh no I'm talking about pluralisation

Izzy

See Android.SE tags. Except for "names" (devices, apps), we keep plurals (settings, notifications, etc.)

kalina

ok cool, will have a look through

the application seems inconsistent but using the two that I've linked on the question I would actually go with plurals

Izzy

Well, for some other termini it makes no sense (e.g. command-line).

kalina

is the intention of this post for tags like firefox-extension - vim-plugin etc? — Flyk 7 mins ago

firefox-extensions seems more correct to me

I have just noticed something I've missed though

When and why did Sam get banned?

Izzy

14:11

@kalina See? :)

kalina

I thought I had sorted him out, what did he do after my last discussion with him?

Izzy

There are things where it doesn't make sense (as pointed out; also add "audio", "video" and the like).

kalina

@Izzy I was thinking of "audio" and "video" when I said singular

Izzy

@kalina Huh? I didn't notice a ban

kalina

Sam

1 7

discussion question-quality vote-to-close scope questions reputation answer-quality

Izzy

14:13

@kalina Yepp, for those I agree – you don't say "audios".

kalina

videos is a word, you wouldn't use it for a tag though

that's the approach I was taking, you're right though, vim-plugin should be vim-plugins

Izzy

Nope. Just checking SU currently, they seem to follow the same "rules" as we do on ASE (plural forms where they make sense).

kalina

if we're not careful with wording though, we'll end up with several hundred edits with people renaming every tag to add (e)s on the end

Izzy

But not really consistent: "drivers", but "email". Hm, for the latter it might be discussable. What distinguishes those terms? I know that's right, but I cannot put it into words.

Fractaliste

U_u Why Sam was banned?

Izzy

14:15

@kalina Hehe, guess not. Once it's there, only mods can "rename" them.

And if one form already exists, you cannot add the other.

kalina

we had a pretty recent change from vim-plugins to vim-plugin

Izzy

@kalina Huh? How should that work? The system checks singular vs. plural.

Ah, and the terminus I was looking for might be something like "standing terms"? Including names and "generic categories" (audio, video, bios, vpn, browser)?

AU also seems to tend towards plural forms in the same way.

kalina

@Izzy I'm not sure how, I'm just saying I saw them change

what about library

would you say libraries or leave it?

0

A: Tag pluarilzation

As per the discussion in comments against Angelo's answer, we should primarily use plurals for tags - where it makes sense. This means for standard terms or application names we would use the terminology most frequently used (audio, video, visio, office, networking, etc) but for the vast majority...

Izzy

14:32

@kalina Yuck. Bringing up things like that almost convinces me of "using singular forms whenever possible" #/

kalina

@Izzy :D

hence my original response

it's alright saying "most sites use plural" but they don't

it's very inconsistent

Izzy

Less headache. And though consistency across SE sites makes it easier for partiticipants to "stick to the rules", my check in the past half hour made me shaking my head almost second-wise.

Braiam

@Izzy AU has a lot going on with the darn tags...

Izzy

For many tags I had to think twice to figure why they were put either way. For some I didn't get it.

So as often as I've seen the "we-should-use-plural" call, I start doubting its sense.

Angelo Neuschitzer

I updated my A on "Tag plurals" to include this sentence: singular is always meaningful while plural makes no sense for stuff like "audio" or "command-line"

Izzy

14:36

We say a question should be specific. So what, is the questioner looking for "word-processorS" (how many does (s)he need?), or for "A word-processor"?

kalina

I've removed my answer because I think this needs a significant amount of discussion

I don't think we're going to be able to conclude "use singular" or "use plural"

Izzy

I guess that discussion will be "conformity versus common sense" #D

kalina

doing it different from the rest of the network just for the sake of doing it differently is the wrong way to approach the subject though

remember that this site's core group of experts are going to be coming from the rest of the network

Angelo Neuschitzer

@Izzy Then I vote for "common sense" here.

@kalina Of course it is. If we go the other way then we should have reasons for this.

But at least on SO I can't find a common usage.

kalina

I'm thinking more from a point of not alienating our future experts by making this site radically different from the rest of the network

Angelo Neuschitzer

14:39

Both forms exist without something I could call "consistency"

and this has bugged me (a little) since a while.

Izzy

@kalina Sure. But is that the reason? I started arguing "pro pluralis", as that's what "the rest of the network" does. So I didn't end up against it "to be different", but due to the fact that "that mess" doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

@kalina Yes to that! That's why I hesitate.

Angelo Neuschitzer

@kalina I'd say that people from other SE sites don't usually type the end of their tags anyway but let the autocompletion do that for them :)

kalina

@AngeloNeuschitzer perhaps so, but let's not rush into this one

Angelo Neuschitzer

(Also, I mean its like one or two chars / tag - how "radical" can this be)

kalina

@AngeloNeuschitzer oh, you won't reach radical from a simple choice like this one, but it's more an accumulative effect

the fact we allow recommendations confuses a lot of people already :p

Angelo Neuschitzer

14:42

@kalina Great, so if we not that far from the other SE sites (except that we allow recommendations) than maybe we can do this "harmless" change toward "common sense" and get away with it?

Izzy

@kalina LOL!

@AngeloNeuschitzer Interesting reasoning :D

"They're crazy anyhow, so what?"

kalina

@AngeloNeuschitzer I'm not arguing against you, but the answer "lets use singular" while stating that at times we're going to use plurals is crazy talk

we need a nice long answer that fully expresses the policy on tag naming

and that will require discussion

Angelo Neuschitzer

@kalina I don't say that!

Izzy

@kalina Maybe that can be found on the Metas of sites already having decided that?

Angelo Neuschitzer

My reasoning is: Singular always.

kalina

14:43

*-plugins still looks more natural to me

@Izzy I'm looking already

Izzy

@kalina Great, I can't ATM (I am already multi-tasking ;)

kalina

@Izzy me too, I'm debugging our software doing something weird

Angelo Neuschitzer

I looked at mSO and couldn't find a consensus. Most of the time the most upvoted answer was "use singular, saves a keystroke" but it was never decided and after the feature to autosupress one if the other one already exists the discussion went quiet.

Izzy

@AngeloNeuschitzer Couldn't find anything on mASE either.

@kalina Yuck. That's what I call "divided loyalities". They always say girls are the better multi-taskers; can you really concentrate on both at the same time?!?

kalina

@Izzy I'm also doing 2-3 other things :p

in addition to working the review queue on 4 sites

Angelo Neuschitzer

14:53

@Izzy (OT: When this sentence fell in the last meeting of my "emancipated" leftist action group recently the erupting "THATS SEXIST" calls went on for about 10 minutes. What fun!)

kalina

I say working, it's more like monitoring, since I've already actioned everything

so, we would always prefer library over libraries

we already use ebooks instead of ebook

but we also use game instead of games

Angelo Neuschitzer

@kalina library, ebook, game.

(even though "ebook" feels odd - even to me. But so does "-plugins")

kalina

*-plugins and games seems right to me

libraries doesn't

ebook seems a bit weird too

Braiam

"ebook" alone is weird...

kalina

we already have "game" though and nobody else has questioned it

so I can defer to an assumed community consensus on that

*-plugin makes sense in terms of our individual questions, too

since they're asking for a single plugin to fulfil a role

although collectively, the questions are about plugins

"tags should be named according to what they're being used against collectively" means that it's games, not game, but it also means it's libraries, not library

"tags should always use singular form" means it's ebook, not ebooks, but it also means it's server, not servers

DanteTheEgregore

15:03

@kalina There's been plenty of discussion around the game tag.

kalina

@DanteTheEgregore that's a different kind of discussion to the one we're having

DanteTheEgregore

Ah.

kalina

we're not discussing if it should be on topic or off topic, we're discussing whether it should be game or games

in a more general sense, we're not specifically talking about game/games, we're talking about tags in general

3

Q: Tag pluarilzation

I have noticed that we are inconsistent on tag plural forms. The question here is do we want to have plurals or do we want to have singular (or don't we care). As soon as this is decided I will create a list of the wrong ones so a CM can rename them (afaics none of us has the rep yet to do so ou...

discussion tags

DanteTheEgregore

Is there any formal rule on that?

kalina

@DanteTheEgregore I don't doubt there may be, if there is though, it isn't applied consistently

Take for example this:

7

Q: Is the tag pluralization filter working correctly?

For a long time, there's been a tag filter that blocks the creation of a "singular" tag if a "plural" of the same tag exists. Here's an example* of it working correctly. Diamond mods can bypass it. The other day, this question created rectangle, while rectangles exists already. Earlier today...

bug status-completed tags plurals

This is asking for singular tags to be merged into plural tags

As is this:

38

Q: Merge singular and plural tags

I noticed there're tags that are actually the singular and plural forms of the same term, e.g. string and strings, and I guess most of them should be merged. Here're some possible candidates (tag counts are as of 7/17): Edit: grouped tags by count and sorted alphabetically. > 1000: array (575...

discussion stackoverflow tags retag-request

Same direction again

Singular into plural

And this one:

65

Q: Clean up of run-together/hyphenated and singular/plural tags

The Stack Exchange user interface now prevents creating tags that differ only in hyphenation or pluralization. This hasn't always been so, however, and there are currently many such tag pairs, like log-files and logfiles, or author and authors, or mobiledevice and mobile-devices. Let's clean up!...

discussion stackoverflow tags clean-up

by our very own Gilles

Which states:

> There is no consensus for plural vs. singular for nouns. This old thread very weakly suggest the singular, and among popular pairs the singular is dominant, but recent practice tends towards plural.

which is basically the behaviour we've experienced if you look through tags on other SE sites

maybe it's worth deferring this conversation until @Gilles is active?

his opinion on the matter would be valuable since he's already obviously been through this exact discussion multiple times?

DanteTheEgregore

15:20

Perhaps Stack Overflow isn't the best site to be searching for examples of common noun tags on the front page...

Angelo Neuschitzer

@DanteTheEgregore Which site you recommend?

Izzy

@AngeloNeuschitzer In our context, noone is looking for an "ebook" (we are SOFTWARE recommendations), but rather for something to process ebookS. OTOH, nobody's asking for (multiple) word-processorS, but most likely will be using one word-processor. Maybe that's a way to put it?

Angelo Neuschitzer

I'm unsure if "been there, done that" is always useful

@Izzy until someone is looking for a tool to process "programming languageS" (as in a code analyzer)

Programs are data too, you know.

DanteTheEgregore

@AngeloNeuschitzer The bulk of the tags are language-related. I'm just fiddling around on Superuser instead to find examples of singular/plural common noun tags.

Izzy

And again, when it comes to "*-plugin(s)", that might not work: should the software be extensible via pluginS – or is the questioner looking for a plugin?

@AngeloNeuschitzer Yupp, we just crossed :)

So we cannot always decide on such a base ("what is asked for?"). But if we either end up with a "mixed case", maybe that's what we should base decisions on whenever possible?

@DanteTheEgregore I've rawly checked there already: mixed as well.

Angelo Neuschitzer

15:32

Maybe this whole problem is "opinion based" and serious nitpicking a topic thats not worth it.

I say if we here can't easily find consent among us, then we should just take care its always only one of them and then leave it like this.

Izzy

@AngeloNeuschitzer That should be the case automatically. With few exceptions (as the one kalina noted), you cannot create a singular tag of a term where a plural tag already exists, and vice versa.

Angelo Neuschitzer

(and btw. concerning "not irritating people so much" I considered bringing up a question if we should use synonyms differently than everybody else and decided against it. So its not like I would change stuff "just for the sake of it.") Just sayin.

DanteTheEgregore

Well of course there's already a Meta SO question on this with seven upvotes and an answer that fails to cover if the tag should be singular or plural. (well it kind of does)

kalina

@AngeloNeuschitzer this may well be the actual outcome we reach... "decide on a per tag basis and be sensible"

DanteTheEgregore

7

Q: Tagging as singular or plural

While tagging questions, it appears that there are both singular and plural tags for plenty of terms as stated in this question. Assuming that there is no semantic difference between the singular and plural state of the tag, which one should we prefer? The one which was used more or the one which...

discussion tags

Ugh

kalina

15:38

as long as it's been discussed and we've reached that agreement as a community it doesn't really matter what consensus we reach, as long as it's applied as agreed

DanteTheEgregore

Are we sure that a single rule would always be applicable?

kalina

@DanteTheEgregore no, that's why there is a discussion happening in the first place

@Angelo said singular based on a subset of tags, @Izzy said plural based on a subset of tags, when we compared how that would be applied to each subset of tags it was decided that it would result in things that both groups didn't consider

like plurals resulting in libraries instead of library

Braiam

actually, why the heck are we discussing this...

kalina

blame @Angelo :P

4

Q: Tag pluarilzation

I have noticed that we are inconsistent on tag plural forms. The question here is do we want to have plurals or do we want to have singular (or don't we care). As soon as this is decided I will create a list of the wrong ones so a CM can rename them (afaics none of us has the rep yet to do so ou...

discussion tags

Braiam

(as long I understand what each tag means and both tags doesn't exist at the same time)

kalina

15:42

that's the most important part of any outcome, yes

sensible tagging

Braiam

> sensible tagging

kalina

yes

keep it simple

DanteTheEgregore

@kalina I believe you've mistaken this for Bizarro World.

kalina

what? A world where sensible tagging won't occur?

A world where the idea of sensible tagging is insane?

Braiam

I said, as long as I look at tag and have an idea of what kind of questions to expect from the tag without reading excerpt/wiki, a tag plural/singular is just irrelevant

kalina

15:51

@Braiam post your answer on @Angelo's meta post then!

also, is it me or since I've started doing first/late posts on AU has the number of posts to review started to reduce

there was always a bunch of stuff that needed reviewing and now it's nearly always at 0/0

Angelo Neuschitzer

@Braiam Or just downvote the question. I was unsure if this is useless nitpicking anyway :)

DanteTheEgregore

It is against the Mac OS X EULA to install OS X on any non-Apple branded hardware ("hackintosh") Does Stack Exchange actually enforce this to anyone's knowledge?

Izzy

As nowadays it's in to have a coming-out: Are we going public tomorrow, by the way?

Braiam

@DanteTheEgregore no...

(well, Ask Different does, anyone else just don't care)

DanteTheEgregore

@Braiam Okay.

@Braiam Just wondering if any of the sites actually cared about the EULA.

Kind of surprised even they would.

Braiam

16:06

15

Q: What are the technical obstacles that doesn't allow OSX to be installed in a PC?

Before starting: lets forget about the EULA and any other legal regulation. I'm not interested in those. Also, since this is a grey line about what I'm going to ask, Ask Different may not be the place to ask: Installing or using Apple operating systems on non-Apple hardware (and most other ex...

osx mac

DanteTheEgregore

meta.apple.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/poo-storm

What?

Angelo Neuschitzer

@Izzy Yeah!

DanteTheEgregore

C-can we have a poo-storm tag? .-.

Izzy

@DanteTheEgregore LOL Yeah... #D

OK, I've just prepared folks at Android.SE to check with me before "delegating" questions to SR. Hope I got that right, pointing out we've special requirements on questions:

> E.g. a simple "I need an Android app to flush my toilet" won't do; you'd have to specify what toilet, which paper, and what flushing speed you require...

Don't hit me: Yes, that has a hidden "don't migrate shit" in it. If people feel upset about my phrasing – yupp, guess then they tend to remember #D

DanteTheEgregore

We're going to be seeing a lot of migrated questions.

Izzy

16:24

@DanteTheEgregore Sure. I'm trying to filter those on Android.SE

DanteTheEgregore

I assume someone's done the same for Superuser already?

Izzy

Just told my fellas to approach me before migrating things, at least when unsure, and told them we've got some rules here, too :)

I guess @kalina will do that on Arkade (and maybe some of the other sites she's active on).

kalina

I already have

Izzy

Thought so :)

kalina

I'm still trying to convince them to add our gaming questions to their feed bot as well

there is such an acidic feeling towards recommendation questions that it might not be worth the trouble though

Izzy

16:27

Don't know who's active on SU/AU here to keep care there?

kalina

I'm still working on it

@JourneymanGeek on SU

@Braiam and @Seth on AU

I could do AU as well if need be though

Izzy

Good! Looks like the major "sources" are covered.

Yeah, I'm on AU/SU as well, but not that active. Hence I've picked ASE :)

kalina

I could also do infosec as well, for security

but they don't actually have a feed

Izzy

A quote from Android chat:
> yeah, the usual rule applies: if you're not an active user on the destination site, don't vote to migrate

Mega-LOL! Just got informed at Android chat: We don't need to be afraid ASE "migrates shit", as that takes an iPoo'd, not an Android device... Muahaha (still rolling on the floor)...

iPoo'd... yo! ROFL

Braiam

@kalina mm?

Izzy

16:41

@Braiam We were just discussing our "coming-out" tomorrow, and that other sites will start sending "stuff" over.

And who might act as "ambassador" on that end.

Braiam

well, yea, I wouldn't recommend to migrate stuff from AU... askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/software-recommendation

most are list questions

Izzy

I volunteered for Android.SE, as that's the site I'm most active. kalina takes care for Arkade. And we thought one of you could do the same on AU...

@Braiam Yepp. Just brought up a similar thing on ASE (see my "toilet-example" above).

On our (ASE) end, questions are missing the "specifics" in many cases.

DanteTheEgregore

17:02

Oh.

Does Ask Ubuntu just not enforce the "No software recommendations" rule as strictly as most SE sites?

Because I've not seen much on it, but I've seen recommendation questions pop up from time to time there and they're not immediately shot down as they are on Superuser and Stack Overflow.

I mean, I assume now the user would be directed here.

But before what was the rule there?

Like uhh...

16

Q: Recommendation for editors

I like Notepad++ under Windows. I was wondering if there are some similar ones for Ubuntu? Or just the powerful and convenient one in your opinion. ADDED: Features that I like are: syntax highlighting for language X theme support line numbering code folding regex style Powerful, yet not resou...

software-recommendation editor

10

Q: Recommendation for Regex editor?

I asked for recommendations for Regex editors on stackoverflow a while ago. Following is one of the replies: What is "good" depends on what is most useful to you. For me, though, these are the key features for a good regex editor (besides the ability to test and create regular expres...

software-recommendation editor regex

3

Q: Recommend an Outlook replacement

Not a fan of Evolution or Thunderbird. Is there a decent alternative to Outlook on Ubuntu?

software-recommendation email client

Those exist which is odd to me.

Braiam

@DanteTheEgregore that one could be salvageable

Izzy

@DanteTheEgregore Check the tags there :)

DanteTheEgregore

So tags exist.

Izzy

software-recommendation

Braiam

@DanteTheEgregore that is not perfect and I think we have a dupe...

DanteTheEgregore

17:10

Because I've heard from different sources that they're disallowed, but the rules just aren't so strictly enforced. Others say they're perfectly fine.

Izzy

That's up to each site's community.

DanteTheEgregore

I meant specifically on Ask Ubuntu.

But I guess because tags exist, they're perfectly fine.

Izzy

Yes, so it's up to them. That tag wiki (or rather excerpt, no wiki there) states: Questions asking for specific applications that perform a given task or work with a given file format.. So no "do" or "don't".

I'm not that active there, but as a "normal user" I'd deduce from such an excerpt that such questions are perfectly "on-topic".

Which obviously means, they wouldn't migrate them to us – as long as they're strictly targeting Ubuntu. Never ask for Mint over there, or they'll grill you #D

Braiam

-3

Q: Just lets drop the software recommendation mess

Lets face it... software recommendation were never good questions for Ask Ubuntu, and don't tell me "but they are popular"... the popular questions got their popularity because they are too broad or fit lots of questions, not because they were good. But let me not rant about that and lets see wha...

discussion scope

+3/-6

Izzy

Yupp, that's a "community agreement" then, I'd say?

DanteTheEgregore

17:15

TL;DR: "Let's look at questions on an individual basis and close the bad ones"

So they're a sane community then... xP

Stack Exchange

0

Q: What would be our stop gap for other sites to migrate over question?

Ok, we know the golden rule of migration: Don't migrate crap Well, there are some questions that meet our (SR) criteria of a good question for recommendation: It has requirements Correctly scoped It won't degenerate into a list It's not already a list (preexisting questions) But, are we goi...

discussion migration

DanteTheEgregore

Well

Seth

I was summoned?

@kalina ?

Izzy

@Seth Yupp

We're still on the same topic – but it looks like your "summoning" was... um, a "bit early".

Just taking pre-cautions for our "coming out" tomorrow.

And looking towards what will come "over the fence" from other sites.

So we checked who's active where to take care.

I'm doing my part at Android.SE, kalina at Arkade, and on AU... well, turned out they probably won't "migrate" things to us as SRs are on-topic at AU.

Even has a specific tag: software-recommendation

@Seth What'ya say?

(summary between the last two "summonings" :)

Seth

Alright. I'll keep an eye on it.

Izzy

17:28

Great, thanks!

So we can call Mr. Gorbatchov to "tear down thse wall" #D

Gate-keepers all around :)

Seth

But, like you said, we probably won't be migrating much.

lol

Izzy

No, guess so. The tag was what convinced me already you won't. Though I'm over there at AU from time to time, I'm not active enough to "keep track" there. ASE and SR keep me busy enough already :)

Seth

;)

Izzy

Oh, and just in case: Guess I'm off today, having a little party.

Dinner, actually. Time passed me by for another year...

(Again closer to the "wooden box below the grass")

Seth

@Izzy Quick question, I'm told we don't migrate to beta sites.. Did that change for this site or something?

Unfortunately I haven't had as much time to devote to this site as I would have liked lately.. :(

DanteTheEgregore

17:47

@Seth This is a really good point I've been wondering about myself. That being said, wouldn't software rec questions just get removed on most sites if they weren't migrated here?

jokerdino

Hello. Most often, public sites don't really migrate questions to beta sites, especially if they are ontopic on the host site.

If the question is off topic for the parent and the OP wants it migrated (after knowing the recipient is still a beta site), the migration might happen if the question is salvagable.

Seth

@DanteTheEgregore Depends. On AU we allow some SR questions. I don't know about any other site.

DanteTheEgregore

@jokerdino Software recs are almost never on topic or salvagable.

AU is a special case.

Will they be directing people to Software Recs after it's out of beta?

Or continuing on as they are?

jokerdino

I was talking about migrating questions in general.

DanteTheEgregore

I wonder.

Seth

17:49

@DanteTheEgregore They will be directing people here as soon as it opens.

We're talking about migrations.

I see this:

2

Q: What would be our stop gap for other sites to migrate over question?

Ok, we know the golden rule of migration: Don't migrate crap Well, there are some questions that meet our (SR) criteria of a good question for recommendation: It has requirements Correctly scoped It won't degenerate into a list It's not already a list (preexisting questions) But, are we goi...

discussion migration

2

jokerdino

regarding software-rec questions, it is still puzzling to see a site out of it.

DanteTheEgregore

I still feel like we've a lot of loose ends to tie up. The public beta will be interesting.

kalina

18:06

The public beta will be interesting

3

Michel

19:08

9

Q: XML inspection tool

I develop a lot with XML and use mostly XmlSpy. It's really great and also really expensive. I am looking for a cheaper/free alternative. Must-haves: XML grid view (viewing the XML structure like a datagrid/tree) generate XML data from XSD files and vise-versa check XML files for validity and ...

windows xml

Why the down-vote on the answer of this question?

*Want to know if it fits or not. No clue and I don't wanna "up-vote" something that I don't know

Braiam

@Michel If I have to guess

> Doesn't quite meet 100%

Michel

@Braiam This is the only "guess" that I have too ... but it's a valid answer, not to be accepted. But still valid for others to look after it.

kalina

since downvotes are anonymous, we don't know who downvoted it

it could be the asker, due to it not meeting what they were after

it could be a random passerby

we'll never know unless somebody owns up and that's their prerogative to do so

now brb while I stuff my face full of kfc om nom nom

Gilles

19:29

@DanteTheEgregore No, SE is not Apple. It's up to Apple to enforce their contracts, not SE.

kalina

@Gilles what kind of answer are you looking for in response to that?

there's nothing that I feel hasn't already been resolved

there's certainly nothing post-undeletion that is relevant

and as you say, ultimately it's about what SE wants

Braiam

shhh... he's reading the transcript :P

Gilles

be vewwwy quiet, I'm hunting ponies

kalina

I'm going to be very disappointed if you dig up out of context stuff to make me look bad

Gilles

@kalina don't you know me well enough to know that I wouldn't dig up stuff out of context?

kalina

19:36

@Gilles don't you know me well enough to know I have been on my best behaviour and avoided trouble since my account was undeleted?

I wish I could tell you more, but I promised I wouldn't talk about it

I have already checked that me following this course of action is OK

The sudden rush of downvotes makes me think you're getting people that haven't contributed to the site to vote

Braiam

@kalina mm...? what we are talking about here?

Izzy

@Seth No, it didn't. But with SR "open", people might get the idea to "send others over"; if doing so, they should at least point out that "you might need to add XXX so the question qualifies over there".

@DanteTheEgregore They get "put on hold" or "closed" on most sites (except for AU, where they see to be on-topic), but not "removed".

Gilles

3

A: Nominate temporary moderators for this site here

I'm a little uneasy about nominating myself for this but I feel like this site requires somebody with my level of activity in order to be effective. Why me? (TL;DR edition) Extremely active History of reviewing, editing and flagging across the network Prolific starter of cleanup up posts The u...

Braiam

okey

Gilles

<grumble> @AngeloNeuschitzer All my votes (both up and down) yesterday on your answers on meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/423/… have been reverted

Izzy

19:46

@DanteTheEgregore On Android Enthusiasts it was already discussed to take SR into the "regulat migration path" (Close→Off-Topic→Belongs to another SE site). But we have the rule that only active participants of the target site (in this case: SR) should do that; which would restrict it to a few (Journeyman, dotVezz, Nicolas Raoul, and me, for example). Others should simply use "off-topic→software/hardware/... recommendation"

DanteTheEgregore

@Izzy Perhaps I should rephrase then. I just meant that they're put on hold. Software recs don't stay open on most sites.

Angelo Neuschitzer

@Gilles Oh! How come?

Izzy

@kalina They are not really "anonymous". We just might lack the rep :)

kalina

@Izzy downvotes are anonymous unless you have access to the database

@Gilles You're right though, I should totally change my avatar back to Rainbow Dash

right, important question

American Hustle, Elysium, or Captain Phillips

or - continue watching the last season of Burn Notice

Izzy

@Braiam The reason for downvote is especially not given when the answer is close and the miss is even pointed out.

@AngeloNeuschitzer Didn't check, but could it be the "serial voting" checker got triggered?

Gilles

19:55

@AngeloNeuschitzer too many votes for the same user in a short time interval

Izzy

@DanteTheEgregore That's correct, yes.

Gilles

this probably affected other users as well, I remember voting on answers that had other votes and now they're sitting at +0/-0

Angelo Neuschitzer

@Gilles crap! Yeah, I kinda posted a lot of stuff on that Q.

Gilles

not that it matters a lot, we should have general strategies rather than discuss every single tag

Angelo Neuschitzer

But that would explain the low vote count there. I was wondering...

@Gilles Yes, still we should do some cleanup before the site goes public.

Gilles

19:56

speaking of general strategies, do keep in mind that “synonym” means “A and B mean the same thing” (or close enough), not “A and B are somewhat related” or “A is a subset of B”

Angelo Neuschitzer

@Gilles I know that.

Gilles

@AngeloNeuschitzer no, that can be done little by little

Izzy

@Gilles "serial trigger", yupp. Though I always thought that was just for "serial upvoting" (to prevent "sock-puppeting"). Limit btw is IMHO ~7

Gilles

What we really need to do before going public is answer quality

Angelo Neuschitzer

Its just that I feel that this is maybe not the best idea for this site.

@Gilles So, what can we (here, now) do to improve that?

Transcript for