The Whiteboard

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MikeNakis

13:52

Yannis Rizos !?

1 hour later…

Yannis Rizos

15:00

@MikeNakis hey, don't forget the @ if you want to summon me :)

MikeNakis

well, you were not here, so it did not really matter.

@YannisRizos I wanted to ask you about that recalculation page that you linked to.

Yannis Rizos

@MikeNakis reputation is kind of fluid... when posts are deleted, gain/loss goes away with them...

MikeNakis

Does it really? Because there have been cases where I already had a couple of upvotes on an answer, and then I decided to delete it, and yet the reputation stayed with me.

Yannis Rizos

sometimes (extremely rare) there might be massive deletes (backlog cleanup), and that might result in a few users lossing a lot of rep. Even more rarely there is a site wide rep recalc...

Did you do a recalc?

MikeNakis

Oh, I see. So this is something that may happen anyway.

No, not yet. I think that if I do, it will end up with fewer points. But I might, just for the heck of it.

Yannis Rizos

15:04

yeap... recalc will tell you your true rep, what you are seeing in the top bar doesn't take into account deletes and some other stuff

MikeNakis

Right. So, I have 2961, and recalc says 2952. So, if I trigger reputation recalc, I will lose 9 points, right? But that may happen automatically at some point, right?

Yannis Rizos

Yes it may happen automatically, once a year or so

MikeNakis

Well then, let's do it! .... tadaaaa....

Yannis Rizos

for such small differences there is no point to trigger a recalc really..

MikeNakis

Just for the fun of it.

Yannis Rizos

15:07

automatic recalcs are also triggered if you are caught doing something bad, like using a sockpuppet

MikeNakis

I have hit rep cap on the last 6 days on programmers, that's such a bummer.

Yannis Rizos

I lost about 400 rep in a day, because one of my students thought he was doing me a favour and massively upvoted my posts

MikeNakis

Sockpuppet? What's that? People upvoting themselves or something?

Oh, I see. Aw darn!

Yannis Rizos

yeap, secondary account

the rep cap is good, keep hitting it and you'll get the most elusive badge there is: Legendary

no one here has it yet, you might be the first

MikeNakis

Wow! the stuff legends are made of!

No, thank you. I have to spend my entire day on SO and Progs to hit rep cap on both. I have been doing it for the last few days, but I have other things to do, and I better put my act together.

Yannis Rizos

15:10

:) Did my recalc, gained 4 points... someone deleted a post I downvoted...

you are atop the monthly league don't give up now...

MikeNakis

C-:= I know... but it will be short-lived. It must be short lived. I must drag myself out of SO... aaaaarghhhh....

Yannis Rizos

it's a good month to be on top, because by default you are also on top of the yearly league...

MikeNakis

how do we move to a private room?

Rachel

16:16

lol wow this is a bizzarre: http://www.senior2senior.org/rightfoottest.html
My boss sent it to me and we were both trying it out (afterall, what else are you supposed to do on quiet days at the office!?)

Rachel

16:34

@AnnaLear I flagged a deleted question for moderator attention. Would be able to review it and let me know what you think? If you feel it should be deleted then that's fine, however I liked the question and the answers, and feel Mark is sometimes too heavy-handed with his close/delete hammer.

Anna Lear

Let me take a look.

I agree with Mark here. It was an interesting question to ask, but ultimately not the kind of question that fits well on Stack Exchange. It's pretty much textbook "not constructive". You can read the question and its answers still (and those with 10k rep can, too), but I really don't think it should be undeleted.

Rachel

@AnnaLear Alright, thank you :)

Anna Lear

No problem. :)

2 hours later…

Stack Exchange

18:27

Stack Overflow Blog: Hot Topics: A Contest Formula that Works

Posted by Lauren Gundrum on January 5th, 2012

CHAOS has been searching for the perfect way to promote activity on our sites for a while now. After all, before you can try to recruit new users, you need to engage your existing community. Since we’re a network of Q&A websites, a natural place to start is having question-asking contests. Some of our contests have been more successful than others, but it seems like we’ve finally found one that works:

What: Hot Topic of the Week

How it works: Pick a topic of the week, and enter everyone who asks a question related to that topic into a random drawing to win a prize. The number of entries a person gets is equal to the number of questions they ask about the topic of the week. …

user2334

19:01

@Rachel The question was closed by Jeff Atwood himself. We reviewed and deleted it as part of normal, ongoing cleanup. If you have thoughts on how cleanups should go—particularly on specific questions—*please*, please contribute on meta. We've been posting about cleanups since July with very little contribution from the community.

Rachel

19:32

@MarkTrapp Thanks for the explanation. I have no problem with it being closed - I actually agree that it was a bad question for the site, and had many poor answers. I just thought that it contained some interesting information and I enjoyed reading the answers, so was wondering if it could be one of those Closed-But-Not-Deleted questions that stuck around

user2334

@Rachel In some cases, that'll work, although in the end that's just a bandaid. Most of the highly-upvoted questions are stuck in that limbo state. That specific question has been a constant source of flags due to the number of sexist and misogynistic comments and answers, and adding that the top-voted answer is an Xkcd comic, we concluded it was completely unsaveable

user2334

But if you do see something there that's on-topic, or even just in general with questions that are locked or closed or deleted, even if to get to it we need to burn 90% of it with fire, we can and should do it. We just need to come up with a plan of action

user2334

That's pretty much the end game on the locked/closed highly-popular questions: heroic cleanup or deletion. There's just so much other stuff to take care of before we get to them though