I just realised that my newest bounty could push someone from the level where they receive "Welcome to Writing.SE!" comments to the "You should know the rules of the site when manning the Close/ Reopen Review Queues!" level. We need higher reputation levels...

@Secespitus I just saw your question (must have missed it when you first asked it). I hope the bounty succeeds in attracting a good answer. It feels like the information must be out there somewhere -- publishers would presumably know that, for example. (I tweeted the question, for what that's worth.)

@MonicaCellio Thanks! Let's see whether the bounty works.

I still think it's weird that one such bounty can push someone to close / reopen privilege...

@Secespitus so do I. Low thresholds for privileges make sense on young sites -- and on young sites, you'll almost never see 500-point bounties.

I hope we can keep up our current QPD rate (with quality, of course) and that this persuades SE to act soon.

@MonicaCellio Yeah, on young sites that would be an incredible amount of reputation that needs a whole lot of time even more for the very active users. But right now this is an amount of a couple active days depending on the questions that I can find.

Most of the time I can keep 3 bounties active with 100 to 200 reputation each and stay roughly at the same level.

The contest will be over in a couple of days so in a few weeks we should have a look again to see if the activity stays on the same level.

Another thing I've noticed is that meta has a lot more activity compared to half a year ago. That's pretty good, too.

@Secespitus I've been noticing your bounties -- thank you for this promotional help. My casual impression is that they're helping to attract good answers; since you're obviously paying more attention, what's your impression of the effect they're having?

@Secespitus yes, I'm very glad to see the increased interest in meta.

I'm hoping that all of this keeps up after the contest ends -- that the contest will have been a catalyst and not the only cause. I think that's true; we'll know soon enough.

We have several users who are either newish or newly more engaged, and that's very exciting.

@MonicaCellio The trend from before I went away for half a year continues - 50 reputation bounties are basically useless, 100 is okay for average-difficulty but not-so-interesting questions, 200 will normally help to attract an answer if you have a more "obscure" question or something that just not many people on the site are interested in. The higher the bounty the more people tend to be interested in the question.

And once you place a bounty of at least 100 reputation you can expect a good answer and not just an acceptable answer. But there is still someone out there that sometimes jumps in and copy-pastes random articles, writes a comment about "This answers your question and I expect to be awarded a bounty of xyz reputation within <time left for the bounty>." before deleting his account. Weird guy...

@Secespitus yeah, that user (I assume it was one person) was puzzling. We do sometimes get junk answers (as does every site). I think we're slow to downvote them sometimes; if it's a new, sincere, but misguided user we want to help and encourage, but then we don't always downvote the junk. Downvoting is important to enable community deletion.

Writing.SE tends to be more forgiving with these things and slower to use the downvote/ delete privileges than other sites I've witnessed. On the one hand great for the occasionally confused new user (today there was someone who quickly changed their question to something like "sorry, I asked for a critique" - but they hadn't received a single downvote when I found the question) but on the other hand also great for spammers because it takes a bit longer till stuff gets deleted.

But we are still fast enough I think and I think this is a better default than what you see on MSE for example where it takes five minutes to get half a dozen downvotes and a single canned comment about trying SO for the confused sort of new users.

Oh, on MSE or SO, stuff can be downvoted to oblivion and then deleted inside of five minutes. I don't want that here. I think there's important signal in "-1" as opposed to "0" and we could maybe do a little better there. "-1" says to me "there's a problem here but you can probably fix it", while "-many" says something very different.

At least as long as there really is something to fix. The patterns that seem to have stopped now were quite weird and didn't seem to help anyone.

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean the random downvoting we were seeing. That's disruptive; I'm not trying to encourage that. I haven't heard back yet on my request for further investigation, by the way.

Okay, thank you for asking by the way. And I think it's kind of funny how the corresponding meta question and two of the three answers have received unexplained downvotes... Every post except the one posted by a mod. Feels a bit weird.

It kind of feels like the user just realised that they should let grass grow over it and be more careful not to get caught. But at least it got better.

The contest question has received two downvotes. Talk about weird.

@Secespitus I hope it stays better rather than being due to a temporary vacation or something.

@MonicaCellio That is weird in my opinion, but then again there were some negative reactions to that and some upvotes on that answers (the account of which got deleted within minutes of posting the answer).

@MonicaCellio I hope so, too.

@Secespitus oh, somebody thought we were just doing it to boost a statistic, right. That would explain the downvotes. (That's not why we're doing it; we're doing it to increase participation. Yes, participation inceases QPD and that might speed up graduation, but it's really the participation I'm looking for.)

It's weird that people delete their accounts right after posting like that sometimes. I understand why spammers do it, but I don't understand why regular people who seem to be participating do it.

They probably fear some "backlash" like my comment under that or something along those lines. After all the answer basically said "What you are doing is doomed to fail". Though I think the conclusion is valid - we have to see whether the activity remains roughly on the same level after the contest ends.

By the way: what do you think about this answer? I waited half an hour to see if the user comes back to edit their post, but in its current state it looks like spam to me, especially because of the "I recommend you to use and enjoy it." part.

It doesn't have the usual activity though. Only one answer, no accounts on other sites where the same answer is posted, no username that looks like the developers, the app doesn't seem to be paid and is a real app...

It doesn't smell like our usual spam. I wouldn't be surprised if it's an honest recommendation, but yeah, the answer needs some expansion to be useful.

Yeah, thanks. I'll just leave it and hope the OP returns to expand a bit. It doesn't seem to be anything malicious they are linking to so it could, in theory, be helpful to others.