@AliceD & @BryanKrause yeah i'm always bummed when good answers get few votes :(. This makes me remember: I saw an answer a few weeks back with a bounty from Community...what's that all about? (perhaps a way to reward good answers that receive little attention???)
@fileunderwater I think fedora is as good as Arch when it comes to latest versions of packages and I've hardly had any problems (once I had an issue with bumblebee when I upgraded from 17->19). OS upgrade is quite smooth (done 6 times). I hate GNOME3 interface and prefer XFCE (lightweight + good looking). It is not as "stable" as CentOS but there are some obvious advantages too. Although I want to try Arch, I am quite comfortable with fedora. The fedora community is also quite huge.
I have been using fedora since 2012. Luckily for me ubuntu was not not getting installed and I stochastically chose fedora, next.
Both my laptop and my (ex) workstations have fedora. I routinely use my laptop for simulations and intensive computational work like sequencing analysis and there has been no issue till now.
@theforestecologist If you see spam postings please do not only flag them for the mods, also flag them as spam. This speeds up the process of removing this posts, when no mods is around at this moment.
@Chris Ok. Is there somewhere that mentions best practices for flagging? I've always kind of winged it, but was never sure if I was being optimally helpful or more annoying...
@theforestecologist Spam flags are special. First, if at least 5 people flag as spam, the post is deleted by the system and a penalty applied to the poster. Also, the spam flags help train SE's spam detection algorithms. Second, and far less important, they jump to the top of the mod flag queue and sort of yell for attention.
As for general guidelines, you could have a look at the meta.se FAQ on spam flagging:
When flagging, there are two special case options: spam and rude or abusive.
What is spam, and when should I flag content as such?
What is considered offensive, rude or abusive content?
How does the spam flag differ from the rude or abusive flag?
What is the effect of these special flags?
When ...
The following are some guidelines for flagging on Ask Ubuntu. These guidelines are derived from existing policies set out in the help center, Ask Ubuntu Meta and Meta SE, and were further refined by a discussion between the current mods.
First, a few general points about flagging:
As a general...
@theforestecologist ^^
By the way, I suggest you look into this sort of thing closely since it's a large chunk of what mods are supposed to do ;)
And of course! Part of the reason I'm asking is to get a better feel for some of the nuances of moderation that I'm still learning :).
@Remi.b (regarding this comment) Yeah I wasn't sure how we were handling those instances.
It makes sense to me that the older post be made the duplicate of your more visited/more highly voted question. However, the result of this question indicates to me that we're not consistently doing that? So I added the comment to yours just to properly link the two in case others thought that was the more appropriate route...
(Notice though that I did not cast a close vote on yours because I think the better question/answer (i.e., yours) should be the one that is not closed).
@theforestecologist It's ok to put a mod flag on such postings, since we can delete it immediately. But you can also put a spam flag on it, if 5 people do this, it will be deleted without any further mod intervention. Plus the person who gets flagged receives -100 reputation (this is why this shouldn't be done to easy, but this case was very clear) and the IP gets blocked by the system.
@terdon Looks great. I keep this as a pointer :-)
@theforestecologist Simply ask if you have questions. This is what the mods also do. Or they do not decide immediately but let another mod have a look as well.
@terdon This looks fine for me at a short look, I will deal with it later...
The following are some guidelines for flagging on Ask Ubuntu. These guidelines are derived from existing policies set out in the help center, Ask Ubuntu Meta and Meta SE, and were further refined by a discussion between the current mods.
First, a few general points about flagging:
As a general...
