The Sphinx's Lair

Rand al'Thor

00:02

@LukasRotter Singular nouns ending with "s" take 's. Plural nouns ending with "s" just take '.

So we say Lukas's puzzles but the riddlers' riddles.

There might be some exceptions relating to Greek names - Socrates' wisdom? - but that ^ is pretty much it.

Lukas Rotter

So you would way "lens's, cactus's, bus's, etc."?

Gareth McCaughan

lenses', cactuses', buses' if those are intended to be both plural and possessive.

lens's, cactus's, bus's if they are singular

@Randal'Thor I'd rather wait and see if the author has a not-100%-sucky explanation for that answer (I am not optimistic) and delete it only when it turns out there isn't one.

Lukas Rotter

I intended them to be singular, yes. Just sounds odd to me, but OK. the article I was referring to was this one btw (rule 1)

Thanks for the input

Volatility

re: Socrates', I feel like you have just an apostrophe when the 's' is pronounced like a 'z', as they are in plurals

Rand al'Thor

@GarethMcCaughan Looks like @Emrakul is on the case.

Woo, Literature's committer count is a power of 2.

Lukas Rotter

00:21

@Randal'Thor As is the "% complete" number

Rand al'Thor

@LukasRotter Naturally, since that's now by definition half of the committer count :-)

(Of course the real reason I posted that was in the hope of gaining more committers and breaking that power of 2.)

Lukas Rotter

@Randal'Thor ? I thought other factors played into that? Welp, I guess not)

Rand al'Thor

@LukasRotter They do, but the overall "% complete" is the minimum of three statistics, and the other two are either at 100% or nearly so.

Rubio

Oooh. Yay. 5K rep for moi.

Howdy all.

Rand al'Thor

@Rubio Congrats!

Rubio

00:27

My answer to that silly mirror or portal question has earned me a rather ridiculous amount of rep

Lukas Rotter

Is there any clear policy on transferring rep to other users via bounties? Didn't find anything in the help center...

Rand al'Thor

@LukasRotter Bounties are supposed to be for awarding exemplary posts rather than particular users, but there's a certain amount of leniency there. Just don't start awarding bounties to a sockpuppet to give it enough rep to vote or whatever ;-)

Lukas Rotter

Note to self: Don't award a bounty to Will

@Randal'Thor Ok, so I'm allowed to start as many chat games with a prize as I want :P

Rubio

00:46

After reading through the whole @Randal'Thor rep kerfuffle it seemed like the Word of the Mods®™ was that it's your rep, you earned it, you can do what you want with it including giving it away to whomever you like. Obvious sockpuppet limitations would still apply.

Alconja

Haven't people been reprimanded in the past for using bounties to transfer rep? I would argue that chat "prizes" are a transfer (since it's not really rewarding what ever post is arbitrarily chosen in and of itself)... Happy to be wrong, just thought that was the policy...

Rand al'Thor

@Rubio Bounty abuse is possible, but it's harder than abusing ordinary votes. One important difference is that no new rep is being generated, just transferred; another is that bounties are by design a larger-than-usual transfer of rep to a specific person, rather than just marking a post as good or bad.

@Alconja I've never heard of anyone being reprimanded for that.

Rubio

I've only seen the discussion on when someone tried to give rep to Rand, and while that ended up getting reversed, the official stance at the time seemed to be that you're welcome to reward people for things as you see fit - either by giving them your rep as bounties, or by upvoting

Alconja

Yeah, I think that must be the one I was thinking of... And it was reversed because it was generally considered bad form (if not perhaps technically against a specific policy)

The idea of rep is as a (very) vague indicator of a user's knowledge of and contribution to a site. Transferring rep for reasons outside that site (friends, sock puppets, chat prizes) breaks that concept philosophically at least...

Not necessarily arguing against it, just saying some thought should be given to it and some vague consensus reached to avoid dealing with the fall out if some unforseen negative reaction/side effect.

Rubio

01:05

Well - in fairness - the caveat was that awards that would push someone into unearned privilege brackets would be given considerable scrutiny. I think as long as you're not making a material difference in a person's site privs by awarding them an unearned bounty, you're fine.

Gareth McCaughan

01:46

@Rubio Congrats on the 5k! At the rate you're (very deservedly) earning it you'll be ahead of all the rest of us soon :-).

Rubio

Bah.. I'm a scrub.

Ok serious question - cuz I know I've seen comments about how questions, which are far more important here than on other SE sites and which arguably take far more skill to build than to answer, tend to be undervalued in rep terms. It's my understanding that getting an exception to the rep rules for one site is unlikely to happen, so has anyone considered allowing questioners to post their question with a self-answer that is, in essence, "If you like this question, please up-vote this answer" ?

That would allow an individual voter to upvote a question by +5, +10, or +15. Or, by doing +/0/- to both question and answer, let someone award the questioner rep totals of -3, -2, -1, 0, 3, 5, 9, 10, or 15.

Gareth McCaughan

02:46

That's a cute idea. I suspect it would be frowned upon by The Powers That Be, though.

GentlePurpleRain

@Rubio I don't like the idea of awarding bounties for chat games. As Rand al'thor said, bounties are meant to reward posts, not people. I'm not sure about any official stance on the matter, but if you want to do so, I would suggest at the very least asking about it on Puzzling Meta.

Rubio

Meta post worthy? I had that thought a few days back and every time I see some of these truly exemplary puzzles that people craft makes me wish there was a way we could give back a little more than +5 for an upvote.

GentlePurpleRain

@Rubio That idea was discussed, and as I recall, was heavily downvoted. I'm having trouble locating the meta post right now, being on mobile, but it was one of the least popular options available.

Rubio

@GentlePurpleRain Not sure why you addressed that to me; I wasn't asking anything related to chat games.

@GentlePurpleRain Ahh. Ok I'll see if I can find the meta post then, I wasn't aware someone had already made that suggestion

GentlePurpleRain

@Rubio Whoops. You just commented; it was Lukas who asked about it. Sorry about that.

@LukasRotter See my above comment to Rubio regarding chat game bounties. It was meant to respond to you, but mistakenly addresses to him.

@Rubio The original question was by me, if that helps. The self-answer suggestion was one of many answers.

Alconja

03:02

It's also part of the reason behind the wrap up post suggestion.

Rubio

Ahhh.

That makes a lot of sense actually. Gives people that second-vote option without having to just bluntly ask for it

Sid

@Alconja I am still waiting for the wrap-up post on the insanely cool newspaper puzzle

GentlePurpleRain

@Rubio If you haven't found it yet, here's the answer in question.

Alconja

:) sorry. I'm not exactly known for my speed of output (that puzzle for example bounced around my head for 6 or 7 months before it made it out).

Rubio

@GentlePurpleRain thanks

GentlePurpleRain