@YannisRizos Lol. "Poor example of a crap question." :P

Yeah, I'm not afraid of such questions. We can just point the asker to Yahoo Answers and be done with it.

But how do you justify to someone interested in Mormon mythology that questions about their flavour of christianity are off topic, but every other flavour of christianity is on topic?

Right now, my solution is this: Don't worry about it until at least a handful of actually crap questions appear. For all we know, they might never appear and we are all wasting our energy for nothing.

Also, it will be a lot easier to define our scope if we have actual examples to look at.

it should be relatively easy to deal with fiction/religion questions if only because there are loads of great SEs to migrate to; it almost doesn't matter where exactly we choose to draw the line

as long as we include folklore, which I don't think is on-topic anywhere else right now, I think it'll be fine

Yes. It would have been so much easier for Programmers to solidify its scope if The Workplace was around three years ago. We are lucky, the religious sites are not only around, but most of them are graduate sites.

and there's SciFi.SE for Cthulu and friends

@YannisRizos Actually, only two of six are graduated. Those two are Judaism and Christianity, and the other four are Biblical Hermeneutics, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Hm, I was under the impression Islam had graduated. Still, BH and Islam are mature enough.

Are any of them close to graduation (if anyone knows)?

@YannisRizos Thanks for your chat post earlier; I consider myself not so much smart as a good researcher. Therein lies the difference.

@YannisRizos Islam is still dealing with some problems, I think.

Eh?

I know that a couple months ago, they were still having issues with members proselytizing and soap-boxing.

Christianity had and still has that problem too, but we have a community that actively squashes such questions and answers. Islam doesn't have a large enough community that does the same.

@El'endiaStarman Ah. Same with Politics. <sigh>

@YannisRizos Yeah. I don't doubt that Islam will eventually graduate, but it's looking like it'll be a much longer and harder road. Same for BH.

@HDE226868 You remind me a lot of Doorknob actually, though you're a few years older

@El'endiaStarman I'm a little surprised that the sites about Indian religions don't have enough traffic to graduate. There certainly are enough people from that part of the world on StackOverflow

@durron597 They are much younger.

@El'endiaStarman Ah.

As in, their betas started a few months ago.

Islam and BH have been around for two or three years, I think.

Both are almost a year old. Islam is over three years old.

@YannisRizos Dang, my sense of time is off. :P

@YannisRizos Do you think my answer actually answered your Ra question? By the end of it I began to worry I was talking too much about the creation of the world and not about specifically Ra.

BH is over 3.5 years old.

Took me an hour to do all the research though. I could have copy-pasted wikipedia but I wanted to trace back all the sources (some of them were really terrible)

But yes, 1309 days for BH, 1050 days for Islam, 322 days for Buddhism, and 321 days for Hinduism.

In related news, there's some outrage that Network Engineering is going to get a site design while Code Review doesn't even have one... and Bicycles does.

it would be nice to know why Code Review still hasn't graduated

It's a good answer, and I've already upvote it. "None of the tales was more prominent that the others" may well turn out to be the only answer to it.

@Ixrec Makes no sense to me either. Code Review is #20 in traffic measured by badge count

@durron597 Thanks for taking the time to answer it. It shows that you put a lot of effort to it.

For comparison, Christianity is #40

there's no obvious deficiency in its Area51 stats either

Bicycles is #63 and has graduated.

and yes that Ra answer was good; I already upvoted it

Network Engineering is #97.

Code Review has actually generated some quite nice site designs from its own userbase!

CR and Code Golf were always considered experimental. When I asked about CR's graduation couple of years ago, a SE employee told me that it might never graduate (although it was clearly a very successful site even at the time). And that makes sense, it's not exactly a Q&A site.

Damn, SE went offline just before I was going to post an answer.

That said, announcing that the site graduated and then ignoring it for months is not cool.

Whoah, maintenance.

though why let the proposal make it to beta if they're never going to let it graduate?

@YannisRizos Total agreement.

@YannisRizos rolfl is quite put out.

@Ixrec Because code review/golf questions appeared in bulk on SO. There was clearly an audience for them.

So it's stuck in limbo, in a way?

that almost raises more questions than answers...

You can't just really shouldn't ignore a site that has almost twice as much traffic as Skeptics

Sort of. Also, the discussion I mention above was informal. I'm pretty sure Jeff Atwood left a comment about CR's experimental nature on Meta.CR but - of course - the sites are down right now and I can't find it.

Regardless, since they announced graduation, they should have graduated the site by now. Or at least post a follow up explaining the delay.

@durron597 To be fair, for a graduated site, Skeptics doesn't have a lot of traffic.

They do have a high crap-to-awesome-stuff ratio, as per the strict nature of the site.

@HDE226868 Hmm these badge statistics can't be right. Skeptics has more traffic than The Workplace?

Yes. Skeptics has a lot of traffic. It's their q/day which is quite low for a graduate site.

@YannisRizos Ah, I misunderstood.

@YannisRizos According to the badge statistics, The Workplace is the second smallest graduated site after Bicycles

come to think of it, Skeptics is also somewhat experimental

@durron597 What badge statistics?

@YannisRizos data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/199310/…

(which is, surprisingly, working right now)

@Ixrec It is. And their low q/day is easily explained by how amazingly difficult it is to ask a question there.

related: any idea if the puzzling and code golf sites have any hope of graduating?

@durron597 It's on a diff server than the sites. And so is chat (obviously).

That sounds ominous.

Did Jon Skeet's reputation finally break the system?

Obligatory Jon Skeet rep joke, btw.

all of SE going down for maintenance at once did seem a bit unlikely

@Ixrec It does happen every once in a while, generally just for routine stuff.

. . . that I never follow up on.

@HDE226868 I would think that most of the time it happening at this time of day would be not on purpose.

Maybe someone plugged the UPS into itself again

@durron597 That's a good point.

considering my company had one of the biggest outages in its history last month, seeing this makes me feel better

@HDE226868 Don't know about that, but ChrisF's fifth diamond did break the system. It was something extremely minor that I don't quite remember now, but still.

@YannisRizos The system can handle network-wide CMs, but not 5-site normal mods? Ironic, perhaps.

@YannisRizos We'll have to ask him if he ever takes a break from handling flags for long enough to go into a chatroom

dare I ask how anyone has the time to moderate five sites?

@durron597 He's actually in some rooms quite a bit.

@YannisRizos have you seen him in The Whiteboard in 2015?

@durron597 Eh, don't know. I find him in TL when I need him, don't care about looking for him in the whiteboard.

@YannisRizos Fair enough.

But I don't remember Chris ever being a regular in chat.

20m. This isn't a simple outage.

I wonder who broke what.

@YannisRizos Want to bet it's their hosting provider again?

@durron597 Expressionengine has Caucus badges and is smaller than Bicycles.

:(

Hmm, that's kinda weird

Aaaand it's up.

As is that answer of mine.

@HDE226868 Yay!

twitter.com/StackStatus/status/595712352827346944

[waits for details]

What? Off again?

@HDE226868 Looks that way

back up?

@Ixrec For now.

I would like to endorse durron597's answer:

We should avoid tags for works that are not sources of mythology.

@El'endiaStarman aaaaah, I knew there was something wrong with those tags but I couldn't put my finger on it before

+1 to that

@Ixrec durron597 actually says basically the same thing at the very end of his answer.

@PythonMaster You're making a bunch of really minor edits that aren't helping much.

And are screwing up the "active" tab.

finally thought of a question after ~3 days: mythology.stackexchange.com/questions/499/…