BTW guys, to be frank, I'm here to counter with any possible misunderstandings Arrowfar could've caused regarding his mess on ELL's chatrooms yesterday. But I see you've been buckling things up well!
@ElendilTheTall - thanks! You just gave me my "word of the day" ( a polymath is a retired math teacher from the sixties with an oldfashioned outfit, right?)
@Jay Nope. I'm Italian with a little bit of mutt mixed in. I just found this UN was rarely taken and stuck with it. It's pretty much the Russian version of my real name, Catherine... with the j having a ya sound.
@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M We're actually wondering what happened? Nobody is giving any details, but it sounded like a nuclear reactor went haywire in ELL. Shades of Cherbonyl.
If you use the reply function in chat, it currently does two things.
It links your message to an earlier message.
It pings the person who wrote the message you are linking to.
In some cases, it can be useful to decouple these two. Specifically, one might want to link to someone elses message ...
@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M The average person doesn't know four languages... The average person in my neck of the woods knows one. :P But maybe that's just because I'm an American and we don't teach foreign languages.
@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Anyway, I'm at least wondering what happened. Since Arrowfar seems like an amiable bloke. And there are plenty of difficult people on SE chat. I'm one myself.
> Will Bowen “Hurt people hurt people. We are not being judgmental by separating ourselves from such people. But we should do so with compassion. Compassion is defined as a "keen awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a desire to see it relieved." People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain. Avoid the reactive response of believeing they are bad; they already think so and are acting that way. They aren't bad; they are damaged and they deserve compassion. Note that compassion is an internal process, an understanding of the painful and troubled road trod by a…
So, to follow up on that question/ feature request, it just suggests that being able to reply to someone without pinging them is useful. Which seems hardly controversial.
@FaheemMitha Essentially, he was bothering one user in the ELL chat room that the user decided to make a gallery chat room so that he could chat without drama. He specifically requests that people only talk about language structures there and not bring any "dramatic" topics in because he doesn't want to deal with it. Since it's a gallery room and Arrowfar isn't on the list of allowed users, arrowfar uses the main ELL chat room to complain that he is left out of the conversation...
@FaheemMitha I don't know, but how does it look when you reply to something I said, controverting me, and I ignore you? It may look as though you had won, or as though I were a coward not to reply. Or you could gossip about me that way and I'd never know.
@Cerberus Hmm. But in the midst of a conversation, you'll probably know someone is addressing you, but you don't want to be constantly pinged by the context.
If you use the reply function in chat, it currently does two things.
It links your message to an earlier message.
It pings the person who wrote the message you are linking to.
In some cases, it can be useful to decouple these two. Specifically, one might want to link to someone elses message ...
Maybe you could make it optional for users to receives notifications from comment replies in their inboxes. But the choice should be up to the recipient.
Though, with that kind of backlog, it's probably an academic issue. Maybe SE will get aroung to considering it in 2050 or so. And that might be too late.
I would like to see my reputation changes in the StackExchange inbox as notifications. I have several accounts on different StackExchange sub-portals and it annous me to watch time by time if the reputation has changed at any of them.
I have to admit that I am little bit addicted to see my reput...
@FaheemMitha Occasionally, even people that eat meta three meals a day get confused in The Tavern since they have no idea how something is going to be dealt with, or implemented.
@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Well, small betas is a problem. I mentioned earlier (i think here) that the Sexuality beta got closed, which is surprising to me. Hard to imagine a topic more popular than sex.
@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M While obviously it's fine for there to be non-cooking chat in here, I'd rather keep it welcoming for cooking folks and not let other sites' chat drama spill over into here. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with anything in particular, it's just that if there's something that needs sorting out, I'd appreciate it if you'd sort it out on the appropriate site's chat or meta.
@Jefromi I'm truly sorry. The other conversation topic suddenly stopped and people kept talking about that drama. If I spoiled anyone's mood, I apologize. I'm tired of him stalking and flagging every message I post, really. No one would be as happy as me to stop talking about it. And since it's pointless and he won't cooperate, I won't and don't want to continue this discussion.
Two months ago, my 4.5 year old daughter had an illness that caused her to be constipated. At that time, it hurt to go poo. She has recovered from the illness, but has been afraid of pooping ever since. I have tried all sorts of things: rewards, removal of treats, not talking about it, talking a...
@Jay It's possible. You might be mad for Willow, or Anya, or Tara. Or have the hots for one of the male leads. Or just like the story without feeling compelled to worship at the altar of SMG.
@Jay We spiked at around 50-60 questions/day during the beginning of public beta, fell off to 20ish after a couple weeks then more gradually fell down to ~8 by graduation, and we've hovered in that general area most of the site's history I think.
@Jefromi oh yea? I guess it just seemed like more since i was so much more active with the actual site(as oppose to just the chat) when the competition was going on
@Jay Yeah, I think it got people excited but not too large a fraction of people actually asked questions? It's a little hard to tell exactly how big a deal it was since things are noisy and there's seasonal variation too, and I'm lazy.
Yeah, our long-term average traffic is probably at least 80% more than theirs in the beginning of beta when it should be booming, so... not a great sign.
@FaheemMitha I wasn't looking at it so I don't know about the quality/community type issues, but I know that 3 years ago when they shut the previous one down the lack of question volume on its own was enough reason.
So with the new one presumably even if things did settle down and get constructive, they'd still be facing that problem, and it's not necessarily worth putting everyone (especially moderators) through that.
@Jefromi question volume can also change, as more people get to know about it. U&L gets lots of traffic from new people. Granted, most of it is not of high quality.
But these sites do go through an evolutionary process.
And there are some sites that get almost no traffic and are still around.
@FaheemMitha Certainly, though I believe the vast majority of sites have had an initial rush followed by a decline then either gradual growth or stability. So if the initial rush doesn't look good...
But yes, SE has gotten substantially more willing to have lower-traffic sites, as long as things are going well.
Back in April of 2010, Joel shared our assumptions about the role of small sites in the newly minted Stack Exchange network:
If a site does not have enough activity at the end of 90 days, it will be closed down. Any existing Q&A will be archived and made available for download, but the site...
Last month's announcement about our updated criteria for graduation and site closure sparked some solid examination into the intended nature of public beta and graduation.
One thing these discussions showed us is that, contrary to what the Community Team had long believed, getting a custom desig...
@AnubianNoob StackExchange community team decides in the end, but it's a little complicated.
One of the big roadblocks is that it takes time/money to create designs for sites and sort through a lot of the graduation stuff, so the second post there is about trying to do the easy parts of graduation earlier, even without a design change.
So ideally in the past, if a site got enough traffic (blah blah details) it'd graduate, but there were a lot of delays, so the biggest ones got priority, and some smaller sites that probably should've graduated didn't.
At this point codereview.stackexchange.com is a pretty good example of a large site that has managed somehow to still be in beta.
So in the future once all this gets hammered out, you'll still have to be doing well in some sense ("enough" traffic, things are stable, no glaring community issues, etc), but you probably won't need quite the scale of traffic you used to? But who knows, they're obviously not done figuring it all out yet.
@AnubianNoob Right, that's the point of the second post there - they want to decouple them (and so does the community) and it's just details to sort out.