@Lambie It's worth mentioning that I would like to add "don't plagiarize" to the ask question page onboarding. It would be pretty simple to make the wording apply to both text and images

@Laurel I think the "don't post content you didn't create without proper attribution" is something that applies to both questions and answers. I think we need something between the tour and the help center that lists very basically and concisely the rules for posting and interacting on a particular site and show it to everyone when they join as well as having it linked in the help center and the tour.

For example, Be Nice, write to the best of your ability, if you post content that you didn't create (text or images), put it in block quotes and attribute it properly, if you see content that violates the CoC flag it for the moderators, etc.

I think the documentation we currently have is either too high level (the tour) or too detailed/not task oriented enough (the help center). The worst of both worlds are the close reasons which are not specific enough and in some cases link to highly detailed posts that try to cover every possible context that advice might be needed for.

@ColleenV Well, I certainly made sure it does now: meta.stackexchange.com/q/318005/323179 :p

@ColleenV As you may be aware, we also can customize the part of the help center at the top of the page. See for example on SO: stackoverflow.com/help. I think that's the best place for general guidance like what flagging is

@Laurel Yeah, all of that is useful, but I think there should be a short list of guidelines for both answers and questions during composition. I wonder what the statistics look like for people visiting the help center pages. Which ones are the most and least read how long do people stay on them, how do they get there etc.

@ColleenV I'm curious if you can think of any specific improvements for our site close reasons (eg "requires research"). Not sure I linked this before but this is what I'm doing on ELU, with the plan to do the same on ELL: english.meta.stackexchange.com/q/15694/191178

I think the entire close system process needs to be revamped, and that diddling the close reason text even further is unlikely to have much effect

I think very few people read the help center, especially on sites where the regulars don't point new users to it like ELL

The underlying problem with the system is that it starts as a rejection of someone's question

instead of a "let us help you get this on topic"

I don't have a fully formed solution to it though

While I can think of plenty of ways the close process could be changed, it's very unlikely for dev work to be put into it. That's why I'm focusing on what we can change. The close reasons can be written so that they say what's wrong with the question and how to fix it (at least for the 3 most common problems…)

There are two types of question askers - earnest askers who want to follow the rules and engage with the site and people who just want an answer with as little effort as possible.

We need to separate the two and treat them differently

right now everyone gets treated like the latter unless the community steps up with comments

Frankly, I think inviting question askers to chat might help, but ELL would need a more active chat room

Inviting new users (ie less than 20 rep) to chat also sucks. It's so annoying to do

Like the system makes it very hard

In my experience, the askers that go on to engage with the community had people help them get their question in shape with comments and editing and personalized advice

Yeah, which leads me to how broken the comment system is... comments should be a discussion, which means putting them under the posts is counter-productive

Every post should have a public discussion (maybe not chat, because that has issues)

and it should be allowed to be as free-flowing and humane as possible and not "here are the rules and the facts and we all have to stay strictly on topic"

It should be a separate page that is preserved with the post much like Wikipedia, but less contentious and more friendly

So, getting the chat room more active (maybe with events) then encouraging people who've had their questions closed to engage with the community for help instead of trying to figure out what people meant by a close reason that might not have even been what every person voted for

It also sucks that new users can't post on Meta

@ColleenV This can be changed!

That would be the first step then - give them some place to ask why their question was closed/how to fix it

Then change the close reasons to explain that closure doesn't mean deleted

It doesn't actually need to be changed for that. If they follow the template, 1 rep users who have a link to their post can ask on meta

@Laurel I've been out of the loop for a while, so I didn't even know that was possible

It still says you need reputation in the help center, so the folks that do read the documentation get a worse experience than the people who don't lol

@ColleenV I have no idea how anyone would figure that out. I only know it because I know all the useless and occasionally useful stack exchange minutia

Yeah, the biggest problem is that the information about Stack Exchange is organized in such a way to make it impossible for new people

Not even many regulars know that tho

Sorry my husband came in and instead of completing my thought I hit return lol

impossible for new people to get started and hard for veterans to become aware of changes or how exceptions/rare situations work

There's just too much there to put it all in a document and expect everyone to keep up with it

Like people who work with the tax code have to take classes to keep up to date with it... you can't do that with a volunteer community

The information has to be presented in the context it's needed and that's hard

It's something that AI could totally do though... it's fine for "pull" activities like search, but it would really shine in "push" activities like the side bar for asking a question or composing an answer

If advertisers can serve my husband ads for creating custom fabrics 30 minutes after he set up his spoonflower account, by god, we should be able to provide users meaningful context-sensitive help

But in the real world all that takes money and resources and the company just doesn't value the communities enough. It's incredibly frustrating that the most valuable thing about SE is the one management ignores the hardest.

They certainly tried on SO (formatting assistant) but it was a disaster. It's probably a moot point tho since I doubt they'd do the dev work for this site yeah

Well the formatting assistant was done poorly

The closest thing we have to context sensitive help is tag warnings which are also underused

They just pooped out some functionality because the CEO set some things on fire

Too bad tag warnings don't help until it's too late

@Laurel On mobile, you can't even see the tag descriptions when choosing tags

I mean overall SE's interface is extremely inhumane

And those of us who suffered through it and have fond feelings for the place get defensive when new people correctly criticize it

and we don't have a lot of power to fix it

I think the easiest path forward is to give the community the tools they need to be a community

Move comments to a place that mods don't have to micromanage them and let people interact and talk to each other like people

Give users large flashing arrows pointing to where they can talk with other people in the community to get help

and do it for the small communities first

Then work on breaking SO into communities instead of a giant firehose

There's a reason why people are leaving for Discord - on Discord communities, you can talk to other people, not shout into the void and hope someone answers

@ColleenV The meta post on that was bountied on meta recently as a result of my actions lol

@Laurel That's probably why that was top of mind for me :) SE has some really good "bones" but the company leadership keeps missing the point these days

@ColleenV Before I got to this point, I was thinking, hm we could try discord as a second space to try to onboard or something

The problem with discord is it requires a separate account

There's a SE discord already, not sure if you're there

I'm aware, but I just can't be that engaged with SE anymore. I still haunt ELL and Meta but I need to keep some distance

Honestly, I find it very frustrating that they're talking about removing the rep for voting before removing the rep for chat

They are completely focused on symptoms and not causes

If there was a community, voting would solve itself

queues being overloaded would solve itself

new user on-boarding could be solved with some very basic feature improvements

@ColleenV Discussions on SO (available to 1 rep users) seems like it was supposed to be something along those lines but there are problems

SO is too big to be a community

Breaking it into "collectives" is a start, but I think the implementation has issues

Frankly, I think we need "guilds" like MMOs have

Where people with common interests band together, hang out in a chat room and help each other

@ColleenV I've been struggling with lack of activity on Writing. By comparison the English sites have no problem

Writing took a huge hit to community morale... it's hard to come back from that

There are already informal guilds on SE - some of the chat rooms have regulars in them etc

I think all the ELL people are in ELU chat so maybe chats not as dire as it looks

ELL used to have a chat that was oriented toward EFL folks - just browse the history back when Cowperkettle and Dam were still chatting in there

ELU chat is not the same community

even if there is overlap

I was part of a focus group for Blizzard and their conclusion was the most important factor for players sticking around was whether they had friends who played

and they found those friends by joining a guild most often

That's the same thing for these communities. If you get hooked into chat with other regular users, you're more engaged

When all your friends leave for another game, you tend to go with them

I think that's the whole Writing has to dig out of... too many of the regulars moved on and people who enjoyed their company became less engaged. Somehow you have to rebuild that core of enthusiastically engaged people, but the company keeps doing dumb stuff that damages the warm community environment needed to grow that core.

I wonder where we can find people to participate in chat for ELL. Probably we need a few people to commit to talking there before promoting it.

@ColleenV So far my attempts to revitalize Writing have failed :(

@Laurel It's not easy. When the site was new and growing there were a lot of ways to contribute. It's so much harder when it is established.

I've got to take off for a work meeting... this was a good talk :)

Maybe an event that requires folks to pop into chat

I was thinking "native speaker office hours" where someone would commit to being available at a certain time/day of the week

because for learners, that is the most valuable thing ELL has

and also, helping someone directly is very rewarding even if you don't get rep for it

@ColleenV This is a pretty good idea

Hope to see you again in chat btw, maybe even in the main ELL room lol