The Assembly - 2012-03-05

« first day next day → last day (4434 days later) »

2:18 AM

Good idea.

This room that is.

2 hours later…

4:07 AM

morning

4:33 AM

Does that disclaimer apply to normal users as well? :P

@Purmou which?

@Sathya "Please note that anything you say is this room can and will be used against you in any Meta discussion"

goes both ways I suppose

5:42 AM

Has it been common practice for another user to post an answer on behalf of an OP and mark the answer as a wiki?

(Usually as a result of the OP not being able to post a self-answer so he edits the answer into the question instead.)

(And I presume the answer is posted as a wiki to waive all rep gain from votes on it.)

user2334

5:59 AM

@BoltClock Fairly common, usually as a last resort after prodding the user to do it themselves. Although Jeff used to be on record saying if someone posts a legit answer in a comment, it's fair game to anyone who wants the rep.

@MarkTrapp Well, that's for comments, not edits...

@BoltClock I've done it on occasion when the OP has abandoned it

user2334

@BoltClock Don't see the functional difference between the two: the person placed the answer in the wrong place and ostensibly refuses or is unable to move it.

@MarkTrapp True

-1

A: Using database_cleaner, mongoid and active_admin causes specs to fail with ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished

[moved from question] It appears that database_cleaner attempts to autodetect the ORMs available to it in its initialization method This can be pre-empted by changing the spec/support/database_cleaner.rb file like so: RSpec.configure do |config| config.before(:suite) do DatabaseCleaner[:...

Here's an example. Not wikied. Leave it alone?

user2334

I'd leave it: the guy even gave permission after being asked to do it himself

6:07 AM

@MarkTrapp Thanks

3 hours later…

8:43 AM

@BoltClock I support Sathya's way of doing it, the main use case where I do this is to sort out the unanswered tab where an actual answer is in the question/comment. I usually CW just to get rid of the people that nag me for benefiting from reputation, above 20k I don't care much (except for racing with others) about the reputation anyway...

@TomWijsman Though now that everyone can edit, even anonymously, why would a post need to be CW?

@IvoFlipse Re-read my message, cutting out the relevant parts: "... CW ... to get rid of ... benefiting from reputation, ...". But I just wanted to share "the unanswered tab" as a place where I use this as common practice, not make a case for whether to CW it. Just that, don't want to discuss this and waste more chat messages to it in this formal room... It's awkward to leave a message here. :)

@TomWijsman While very noble, I would just ignore such people and happily continue answering

You're free to do otherwise, but it shouldn't have to be necessary

Well I think it might be time to cull our unanswered tab a little bit, surely there's stuff in our backlog from 2 years ago that's abandoned by now

I've been actively been doing that in the past, but haven't done it over the latest months due to exams. And I do believe this is a forming problem, and not just on Super User... But well, unanswered questions will always be there on the other hand. But we can indeed at least try to filter out those that will never get an answer.

since we're all being so "does this make the internet better", if you would stumble onto a 2 year old post that only get answers that should have comments, asking for clarification, you will not be happy. If someone new has that problem, I'd rather see them ask it again, in their wording and having someone active own the question

@TomWijsman But its probably better not to have you go around and flag a bunch of questions, because it would probably drown out all the current/relevant flags. But we can use chat or Meta, like we did with that last clean up

Besides, I wonder if downvoting would trigger the algorithm that cleans them up automatically

24

A: Auto-deleting old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year?

Just to formally document the exact policies we have in place to remove old abandoned / dead questions: If the question is more than 30 days old, and ... has -1 or lower score has no answers is not locked ... it will be automatically deleted. If the question is more than 365 days old, and ....

8:54 AM

@IvoFlipse I'm thinking that a separate flag queue under the form of a separate site I can give you login to (so only moderator can remove flags from my personal queue) would help. Fairly easy to implement in a few minutes...

Hmm that's fairly strict, especially the no answers. I hope that means no upvoted answers

superuser.com/search?q=answers%3A0

Auch that doesn't look pretty

@IvoFlipse The hard thing there is deciding whether those that are merged or duplicate are useful or not, I wonder how much it would be without those types but I don't feel like Data.SEing right now...

@IvoFlipse Actually, search can do what I just mentioned: answers:0 closed:0 migrated:0 hasnotice:0

5 hours later…

2:00 PM

Afternoon :)

1 hour later…

3:23 PM

Yall a bunch of power hungry monkey nazis!

user image

3:57 PM

@Will Reaches for suspend button... oh, it's Will!

4 hours later…

7:43 PM

@TomWijsman perhaps it would be better to use data.SE to find questions

data.stackexchange.com/superuser/query/36927/…

8:03 PM

@IvoFlipse: I find the unanswered query a bit bogus in that one. So I hope you really only delete the ones that come out negatively. But yeah, we can use these kinds of queries...

I've been tinkering myself, thank you db-class :D

How do I exclude questions that are merged?

@IvoFlipse You need to check whether it has been merged using a JOIN with the PostHistory table (here are its types) on ID 17.

Ok, I suck :P I have no idea how to do so

@IvoFlipse: Actually, I meant ID 18. But you can build something from this query which uses a separate query instead of a JOIN, which works as well.

Hmm it says invalid column name :S

Woops, wrong table obviously

8:21 PM

1

Q: Users have more rep for the week of the 2012-03-04 than for the month of March

Month Rep: Week Rep: The Week tool tip indicate "2012-03-04 to today" and the Month tool tip indicate "2012-03-01 to today" For the one who cannot read it, Tango has 920 for the month and 1798 for the week.

bug reputation users-page

^^^^ seen this anywhere else?

already on MSO?

@Gilles: Isn't that just a result due to the reputation system changes?

I haven't, normally some of our SU users would be on top of this

@TomWijsman I don't see how

I think what's happening is that the tooltip says this ongoing week but the rep figure in the week tab includes last week

Its not happening on SU AFAIK

@Gilles Compare against stackexchange.com/leagues/82/week/scifi and stackexchange.com/leagues/82/month/scifi. I think that on SciFi, it's calculating the last week instead of only today. Perhaps the next reputation recalculation will fix that? Could have been that the recalculation triggered on the moment the day was switching such that it is showing a cached view...

8:31 PM

@TomWijsman it's normal for the /users page to show data including last week at the very beginning of the week, until there's enough new stuff from this week. I remember when the new user lists were introduced someone complained that on a Sunday morning the week page was a big bunch of 0's and so on, so now the rollover is delayed.

I don't remember the rules for delaying. It seems the tooltip rolled over but not the figures. I don't know which one is right.

@Gilles: productivity.stackexchange.com/… and productivity.stackexchange.com/… show the same behavior. :)

@TomWijsman thanks

8:52 PM

heya

hi @Sklivvz, how are things on Skeptics?

Quiet. Waiting for graduation... :-)

@Sklivvz Remind me to wander over and peek at the design. I'm intrigued as to what skeptics will look like :)

At the moment we are on round two and its.... yellow.

BUT, we get Darwin with gears in his head as well, which is awesome

11

Q: Skeptics Brand Concept and Site design - Revised Design

Thanks for your great feedback and input. I wanted to start a fresh post, and share the changes with you. Major changes No conspiracy theory looking stuff Images are of actual scientific docs, readouts etc. all available for review... Cleaner style More modern No mono-spaced courier type More...

discussion featured design

6

Q: Welcome to New Users

This post is written for news users of the Skeptics - Stack Exchange (or Skeptics.SE, for short) - especially those who have just asked or answered their first question, and have been surprised by the feedback. First, welcome! We hope you find Skeptics.SE enjoyable, interesting and fun…...

discussion featured proposed-faq

9:06 PM

@Sklivvz That looks really cool.

6

Q: Fitness Site & Brand proposed design

My name is Sean and I'm the Art Director here at Stack Exchange. I've been awarded the Fitness and Nutrition identity and communications development. I'm happy to meet everyone and look forward to launching the site and supporting this community. :) This design is meant to convey energy, and ...

discussion design

However, I think some things have to change before we would graduate (if ever)

Wow. @Jin must have a lot of fun :)

lovely colours. very techie. /me likes

First there's this little issue that should be resolved:

12

Q: Sports.SE and F&N.SE should be merged

Since its inception Sports.SE has been almost completely redundant with F&N.SE. A huge number of questions that have been asked on Sports.SE are on topic either on F&N or on another stack. Because of this redundancy the expertise of the community is split and we either have to stay conten...

discussion merger fitness.se

@IvoFlipse Fun fun. Hopefully it works out in the end in a nice way :)

9:12 PM

Merging us like @waxeagle suggests would go along way, but if that were to happen, I believe the team would prefer to start with a clean slate

I could only encourage that, if only to clean up the house, but hopefully we can 'manually' migrate or salvage some of the good questions

I know far too little about it to really comment, unfortunately. I find I struggle to participate across all the stacks there are that I'm interested in, much as I'd love to.

There are what, 80 sites? It's impossible

@Sklivvz Yep. I find SO, Security, modding crypto and occasionally looking in on french/maths my limit.

@Will did I mention I won my MFC battle from last Friday?

I find modding Skeptics has taken all my spare time. Would like to try and get a second diamond on a less intense site, though.

@Sklivvz Imagine how the SO mods feel, what with their standard of duty and all?

9:19 PM

I actually have no clue :-) Burnt out?

@Sklivvz I reckon so.

Out of interest, do any sites maintain off site resources for, say, books for their community?

I'm still thinking about the book list "problem" on crypto and wondering if anyone's solved it creatively off site? We tried a chat event, but it seems not many people came :(

Our previous chat events were a bit more successful.

I don't know, our scope is so wide that it's impossible to even have a book list :-)

@Ninefingers If only you guys had a blog ;)

But you could instead put it in a tag wiki, even if its a bolted on solution

Besides, if you had a book question where the answers were peer reviewed reviews of the top 5 important books in the field, people would complain a lot less

@IvoFlipse Yeah. Maybe. Need more meta participation etc, too.

@Ninefingers Our Meta is a dead place, even our chatroom has more activity

9:30 PM

@IvoFlipse We've not had too many complaints... our users are amazingly polite :) But I feel like it's a problem I'd like to fix.

Somehow.

Improving the quality of the answers goes a long way :)

25

Q: What can I use to monitor my running workout?

After a period of inactivity I recently started running again and want know what gadgets or tools I use to monitor my workout. Some requirements: It should offer workout programs (based on my level or goal) It should graphically show my progress over time It should be mobile, so I can take it ...

running workout

I edited the top two answers, to make them into something useful, rather than just a link to the product

@IvoFlipse Yeah, I can see that. I'm tempted to talk with the other mods about one book question, strict quality-or-deletion requirements on answers, and heavy maintenance.

I'm tempted to even delete anything that's not up to some arbitrary standard, if only to force users to put in some effort or not post at all

@pauloebermann @thomaspornin what do you think to the above idea? ^^^

934

Q: The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List

This question attempts to collect the few pearls among the dozens of bad C++ books that are released every year. Unlike many other programming languages, which are often picked up on the go from tutorials found on the Internet, few are able to quickly pick up C++ without studying a good C++ book...

c++ books c++-faq

How much I oppose this format, at least I think it should be a review like this, preferably the list would be shorter

Obviously the asker often doesn't know his question is too broad, but that's what moderators and comments are for: to make the question more focused

Because clearly, asking for ALL C++ books is just overkill, focusing on a beginner book would make the scope a lot narrower

9:36 PM

@IvoFlipse what is a good site for "scientific nutrition", e.g. something that tells me what I should be eating based on science?

@Sklivvz Honestly, I don't think it exists or at least I haven't encountered it

which is also my biggest beef with nutrition on Fitness.SE, there's often so little information we can trust or that doesn't conflict with other studies

Yeah, we have quite a lot nutrition questions on skeptics as well

I started reading Wheat Belly this weekend, after seeing it mentioned in one of Fitness's questions, quite interesting and the author quotes/cites a lot of research, but I bet if I would investigate it, I would find just as much information that says the opposite

I guess there's too much 'sponsored' research in nutrition, which clouds any objectivity, if only by ignoring certain topics

is it about gluten?

Yeah, though he's against wheat (or at least modern wheat) as a whole and suggests banning carbs as much as possible

Given that my GF has a gluten allergy, I have no trouble giving his diet a shot, we already have to skip 70% of the stuff he bans anyway :P

Lol, Google+ just got a game that adds Guitar Hero to any youtube video

9:48 PM

Dunno, historically athletes have been eating a lot of carbs -- surely it can't be that bad :-)

Like pasta (at least where i come from)

@Sklivvz Well I could reiterate his arguments against wheat, but I have no idea whether I can trust them or not

Sure, it would probably make for a good question on Skeptics too (if you could narrow down the claims to something sensible)

1

Q: Unconstructive Book Questions

There are a few questions regarding books (actual books, not answers that could stand on its own as a book) which are either closed as "not constructive" or still up for debate (and might possibly be closed). The close description for "not constructive" is as follows: This question is not a ...

discussion closing-questions

Ah the user who asked about the book posted it on his blog instead, what a sensible user! Here's a link to his blog post

I love it when no "admins" even need to intervene... community moderation at its finest.

user image

Friday I believe

10:01 PM

so

to what extent can i participate in this room?

@Purmou however much is reasonable I guess? I mean if you have a question or some sort of input on something, it's fine to speak up.

@Sklivvz Here's another interesting post: wheatbellyblog.com/2012/02/what-if

@IvoFlipse "Big Food" OMG. they are out to get us with their modified wheat.

> Although these arguments often lack the "smoking gun" that would satisfy a skeptical scientist,

That's from a review of his book, I'd thought you'd appreciate the mention ;)

@IvoFlipse A skeptic would be satisfied with any scientific proof :-)

10:12 PM

@Sklivvz Only if you can trust the proof

well trust is not black and white. based on the amount of information disclosed, the methodology and the number of independent confirmations, you go from no confidence to very high confidence. :-)

Well as a 'real' scientist, I'll simply test it myself, on myself ;-) Worst case, I have converted my veggie GF into a meat eater :P

do you think there's still room for fun on SE?

@Purmou That depends on your definition of fun, I've enjoyed myself greatly researching my answer for a lot of questions. But I have an inkling feeling you're alluding to the kind of fun that's more digestible, like one-liners or comics

it's the latter

10:22 PM

@Purmou Have you seen the Eric Lippert explanation of pointers on SO? He described it with a hotels analogy. It's a very fun read - and there's always room for that kind of creative, helpful explanation.

Why do you believe we need it on SE, you can get a healthy dose of fun on Reddit

At least, I think it was Eric.

it was

I hear a lot about Eric Lippert.

oh actually yes, I have seen that

where you forget to turn in your key so you can go back any time and grab your book, right?

The issue I have with "fun" questions is that they are really only fun for the asker - especially if people post "proper" answers because they didn't realise the question was joke. That can really annoy people.

10:24 PM

@Purmou That's the one. So yes - I think you can do fun in the right way.

14

A: What do we have to do as a community to reconnect with our past?

I'll share my view and personal opinion. Stack Overflow grew up. Literally. I wasn't around when it started but I do have experience in small cozy forums where it's fun to hang around and come to know each other in the inner circle of active members. I guess Stack Overflow was like that in the b...

i was going through my comments on this answer and thought i'd ask you guys, since there are a few mods somewhere at once

@Purmou There's always blog posts, which is why I think SO should get a community blog, if only as an archive for the fun memories

you know, that's one good thing about this room besides publicizing mod discussions--users can come here for opinions from a few different mods

2

this is all in all an excellent idea

4

Glad to hear you like talking to mods :-)

I'll print those two lines and hang them above my desk

hah

i like talking to mods that listen

10:30 PM

Sorry to change the topic, but does anyone have any horror stories from merging SE-sites? I'm wondering what mistakes we should prevent in order to get Fitness and Sports merged

@matthewread care to share your experiences with merging Guitars into Music?

@Purmou The SO mods do listen - they're just very busy people (they handle hundreds of flags every day) with many conflicting views and demands to balance.

@Ninefingers and I understand that--really though, there a few in mind that spend a lot of time closing questions, posting answers, and leaving witty remarks and comments that could be spent on more productive things for the site

@Purmou True of 10k+ users too, sometimes. Everyone needs to remember the be nice rule and we'd all be fine.

@Ninefingers indeed. but either way, this isn't the place for me to vent my anger at some mods, it's so we can actually get things discussed

@Purmou Sounds good to me :)

I'm also interested in hearing about site merges, not that I've had to go through one.

10:36 PM

0

Q: A Proposal to Merge Sports Stack Exchange and Fitness & Nutrition Stack Exchange

The Fitness & Nutrition Stack Exchange and Sports Stack Exchange are two separate child sites that both exist on the Stack Exchange network. Each site’s purpose is to provide high-quality information to audiences in the form of a question-and-answer to attract members and create a community w...

discussion scope

Well I just went ahead and posted a proposal

10:59 PM

Hey.

Mass-retagging was a bit of a pain, though the community stepped up and it went pretty smoothly.

There was a mass of disgruntled Guitars users convinced that their site had had no problems, and dedicated to their shopping questions ... it took quite a while for them to adjust, and most have left now.

Dealing with links was pretty bad, some we just had to remove when we couldn't figure out where they went anymore. Converting old site links to new site links should be automated, IMO.

Guitars had a site-specific rendering plugin that we didn't have initially, so some posts looked stu…

2

Yeah, I believe most of these problems wouldn't occur in this case, plus the volume is relatively small

But with old links, I reckon questions linking to other questions, which were effectively dead links now?

@IvoFlipse Yep. Oh, and lots of dead users of course. Many users came over at least initially, but we had to delete a bunch of answers that should have been comments (cos you can't convert anon-answers to comments). There were some account association issues as well.

Auch... That kind of problems sound more complicated

@IvoFlipse Doesn't sound insurmountable, though, provided it's handled carefully.

@Ninefingers True, but I regularly encounter association problems on SU, when questions get migrated to us from SO or SF. Then the user starts posting answers as comments, because he's no longer the owner of the question. Nasty stuff

11:10 PM

can't an account automatically be created for a user when their question is migrated

@Purmou If they log in on the site, they should be associated with their account, including all their old questions.

I've regularly pinged users about it between sec.se and crypto.

That said, if they go ahead and create a new account... problems occur.

@Purmou Not if they weren't registered on the site it was originally asked, which probably is a reason to stop doing that

i know--a question i answered once got migrated to webmasters and my answer was shown as "anonymous" until i actually logged in

Does that ^^^ not happen for SU, @Ivo?

Apparently not, the user turned out to be unregistered on SF AFAIK

0

Q: What are "Toxins?"

As I've been using this site, I tend to see a lot of answers that will cite "toxins" as causing the problem in question and recommending a cleanse to promote better health. In almost every other context that I've encountered this claim, it was for some product that would remove those toxins, and ...

Gosh... What the heck should I do with this question...

Anonymous

11:15 PM

@Purmou Auto-creating the accounts owning migrated questions was declined here. Generally proposals to automatically create profiles have been declined because it's seen as misrepresenting the user by implying they chose to participate in that particular site.

makes sense

What's the markdown for strike through?

~~stikre~~

~~strike~~ ---strike---

Triple dash in chat. Is it the same in a post?

11:20 PM

Guess not :S

`---the rules of a sport--- doesn't work

Just use <s> in a post then.

The full word works too - <strike>stuff</strike> in a post.

Thanks for the suggestions, the html tag works

@freiheit thanks for the answer, I added a proposal for our new FAQ

@IvoFlipse good luck! :)

I do have a hard time seeing useful questions coming from 'the history of Sports', that's almost a definition of trivia

11:26 PM

@IvoFlipse Are those currently included in Sports list of appropriate questions? (Not sure if its in Beta yet even)

Geeh they have a grand total of 7 history questions

@SimonSheehan included in which list? Its in beta at the moment

@IvoFlipse Well are "history/trivia" type questions on-topic over there?

I believe they are, perhaps @MichaelMyers knows it better, either way, there are 7 questions tagged history at the moment. Although only the question about the scoring in tennis would qualify and even that doesn't have to be called history

I only find 2 questions for [history]

Oh right, I searched, rather than used the tag

11:32 PM

@IvoFlipse Yeah, now that you mention it, "history" is fuzzy

6

Q: Why the limit on manager mound visits?

I recall that Don Mattingly was forced to remove his pitcher due to two mound meetings in an inning. I've read articles that indicate that a limit was placed on manager-led mound meetings to speed up the game. The MLB rule reference (8.06): 8.06 A professional league shall adopt the followin...

5

Q: Do traded players get their names on the Stanley Cup if previous team wins?

So, I would assume the answer to this question is "No", but I can't actually verify it anywhere. The criteria for getting your name on the cup is to play at least 41 regular season games for the cup winning team. But if a player is traded after that 41 games, is his name still engraved on the C...

Scanning around i see a lot of stuff on Sports that's history-related without actually saying "history" in it

@freiheit Btw I removed technique from the line, because that was already on-topic for us and removed history, I'm sure we'll deal with them in some way

Just because somethings not on the list doesn't mean we immediately have to close every last one of them

@IvoFlipse I think a lot of people will see a "sports technique" as different than an "exercise technique".

Then perhaps I should just make it Sports technique for everyone

You know, how to safely lift a really heavy thing vs how to best hit the tennis ball into the left corner

(totally like the same underlying concept, of course, but still...)

> improving your sports performance or technique

I mean, exercise was just meant to be general. Now we just replace it with a popular general term :)

11:37 PM

make it "athletic"

that's a bit more vaguely in between sports and exercise

Well perhaps a bit too vague, if only because athletics is also a branch of sports where people like to jump over hurdles and stuff

almost all forms of exercise are also some form of sport, unless its something like walking up the stairs (that's exercise for some!)

Does anybody do competitive elliptical machine stuff?

Someone, somewhere...

@freiheit elliptical machine? Is that a type of Turing machine that always terminates?

Elliptical trainer

An elliptical trainer or cross-trainer is a stationary exercise machine used to simulate stair climbing, walking, or running without causing excessive pressure to the joints, hence decreasing the risk of impact injuries. For this reason, people with some injuries are able to use an elliptical to stay fit, as the low impact affects them little. Elliptical trainers offer a non-impact cardiovascular workout that can vary from light to high intensity based on the speed of the exercise and the resistance preference set by the user. Elliptical trainers first entered the market in the 1990s...

11:41 PM

Hmm it seems I left trivia and statistics out, I wonder how I should include those

Around here various versions are common in gyms. Some people prefer them over a treadmill or stationary bike

(back when I had a membership in the on-campus gym I tried all 3 and hated the elliptical.)

With the recent reputation changes and deletions and all that, look at the spike on QuantCast for Meta.SO.

Well if we want MSO to gain more traffic, I guess I should get back to deleting...

I tried to bring up SU's unanswered count, until I realized with 110k questions, I'd need to delete over 1k questions...

@IvoFlipse Maybe if I delete more stuff on Bicycles we'd get more meta traffic

Wish Meta.SU got more views..

11:46 PM

I bet nobody is going to see my merge proposal

@SimonSheehan Who do you think should view MSU?

@IvoFlipse Well, not just meta.SU, but I suppose EVERY per-site meta. Clearly, as you just pointed out, they're all a bit low except MSO.

Just makes me feel we need to get more users involved in their own sites (primary sites)

Gaming get's almost as much as SU

@IvoFlipse But you still get more traffic than meta.bikes

/me goes on a closing spree

You definitely need more controversy

2

@IvoFlipse Well....ow. 6 a day is.... bad

That means that 0.2% of Fitness.SE visitors actually go to to Meta

11:52 PM

@Purmou That whole question is just rant / whining with no backed up statements whatsoever, just kept them on the same line in the hope that it comes to their mind that what they are trying to achieve doesn't make sense and it's just this small group of people affected by the changes against the active meta community. Kind of said that he accepted the downvoted answer; but well, glad that topic is done... :)

Although On SU its like 0.004%...

@SimonSheehan Good thing only 7% doesn't come from Google, so from that its like 10% :P

I went to bikes meta once. Once.

@nhinkle Got scared and ran away? :P

@SimonSheehan more like bored.

11:53 PM

2

Q: Let's talk about list question cleanup

After some discussion on chat, we're realized the site has several list questions with many answers, mostly from the early days of the site. Let's post candidate questions as community wiki answers to this thread, like this: Question Problems Suggested cleanup actions: Deletion, ...

discussion cleanup

If you want scary, check out MSO these days.

3

quantcast.com/meta.stackoverflow.com

HOOOOOOOOOLY

Bicycles has a nice theme at least!

I went ahead and closed or deleted the questions per the recommendations in those answers. Left the "edit to fix" things along because I'm lazy

@nhinkle Guess there's no good fights when all they can argue about is.... actually there isn't much to argue about

11:55 PM

The problem is that all these new sites don't easily get their traffic; I mean, look at Personal Productivity or any other site that shows the questions of the last two/three days on your screen. I think that some kind of discovery system where you get interesting questions from random sites based on what you already asked/answered might help drive traffic from existing users to it...

2

Or, if they just put some of the titles in bold so that people would see them with more emphasis, you know? :P

Apart from Stack Exchange itself, the sites pop-out and some advertisements at the site there is no really drive towards the other site. You'd actually have to go and look for them. In that aspect other sites like Quora show you other topics which drives people around the site rather than staying within a section...

@TomWijsman I tried bothering Jeff about it on MSO, but I guess the Hot Question list was the best they could come up with

Put otherwise: There might be a percentage of people that would actively visit those sister Stack Exchange sites if they would know they existed, but they might not know their existance.

12

Q: Should all sites have a more equal chance in the Stack Exchange Hot Questions list?

Looking at the Hot Questions list on StackExchange.com I have a feeling that its favoring the bigger sites. Because their 'hot questions' get more time in the spotlight, they in turn get hotter and keep others out of the spotlight. To me it looks like Programmers, Super User and Stack Overflow a...

discussion stackexchange.com hot-questions

@TomWijsman That's why the Inbox is linked to the Hot Questions

Sadly the Hot Questions are heavily biased towards sites that vote differently compared to all the other sites

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