The Water Cooler

12:14 AM

Decided to be a little harsher with my downvoting recently, with lots of new faces popping up its even more important that the answers we have are of a good high quality to set an example

jmac

1:11 AM

@RhysW Yeah, I'm racking up about -20 rep/day in downvotes it feels. And so many of them have a positive score because of the hot list. Like swimming through Jell-o.

jmort253

2:27 AM

0

Q: Can we make closed:0 and is:answer work together so only answers are returned on open questions?

I'm not sure whether this is a bug or was planned, but I created a filter to return posts that meet the following requirements: is:answer - The posts are answers only. hasnotice:1 - The posts have a post notice on them closed:0 - The questions are not closed. http://freelancing.stackexchange....

jmac

Input requested (based on our previous discussion with Shog @jmort):

0

Q: Improving the System for Dealing with Poor Answers

So it's no shock that we have a lot of poor answers here. We are having issues with understanding the current flagging, and problems with old questions with lots of bad answers. Kismet brought jmort, Shog9, and myself in to chat at the same time, where we had a discussion on the issue of poor an...

discussion feature-request answers flagging

@jmort253 Already listed as a duplicate, but also very close to a previous question I asked

Jim G.

3:50 AM

workplace.stackexchange.com/posts/19788/revisions

^^^ Great job, @jmac! You just swung my downvote to an upvote.

Jim G.

4:04 AM

-1

Q: Is it wrong to have sexual fantasies? Especially about my pastor's son?

Umm I'm not sure how this site works but my question is, is it bad to be having sexual fantasies about my pastor's son? I feel as if I'm creating a horrible sin every time I have one. I've been fighting it but they keep on coming back. I really like him and he and I are friends plus our parents a...

sexuality

^^^ This is a tough one.

jmac

4:16 AM

@JimG. Glad you like the edit. I think a lot of our questions can be helped with edits like this, and wish more of us would be more aggressive with our edits rather than with close votes.

gnat

6:17 AM

in The Whiteboard, 42 secs ago, by gnat

something that we would better have at Programmers, too. Frankly I'm friggin' tired of loosing 5-10 rep points daily for voting down meh crap that is not flaggable because oh friggin surprise Programmers use same way to evaluate answers as SO, as if a piece of code and whiteboard explanation are cut the same

gnat

7:45 AM

gee @Chad your yesterday remark about flagging opinion answers like triggered an avalanche! Three related meta questions in 6 hours, oh my. I also plan to play this card - preparing an answer to that "overrepresented" question at MSO...

11 hours ago, by gnat

44

Q: Prevent specific sites from being overrepresented in the hot questions list

Some sites appear far more often in the hot questions list than other sites. I don't have any hard data on that, as that kind of data is just not publicly available, but I'm pretty sure my subjective impression on that is reasonably accurate. Those sites don't appear more often because they are ...

discussion feature-request hot-questions

gnat

9:59 AM

►

Massive Attack! protectionist campaign! Vote down answer that goes against protection:

10

As Anna Lear points out in another question, proactively protecting questions is generally a bad idea. I generally keep an eye on Hacker News and other programmer sites for when our questions hit the front page. We as moderators try to keep an eye on these questions and actively moderate the bad...

Vote up comment that explains the downvote (special thanks to @jmac for raising a question that helped to explain it):

this reasoning is wrong. Anna ignores that goal of hot questions is to simply "entertain" (according to Shog) / "explicitly expose interesting questions" (as Jeff put it). With goal like this, I can't see any sensible arguments why questions should remain unprotected. Striptease dancers aren't thrown in the crowd, they make their show secured — gnat 2 hours ago

also, vote down similar answer (referred to from prior one):

10

A: Why can only moderators protect questions less than 1 day old?

I'm not so sure that "proactively" protecting questions is beneficial. You could be missing out on good answers from people who aren't already established on your site before you even run into any problems. Not every popular question will attract spam and crappy answers from new users and not ev...

and up respective comment:

reasoning based on "missing out on good answers" looks wrong in the face of recently discussed goal of the hot questions: this is explained in more details in another answer that refers your to back it up — gnat 51 secs ago

"You could be missing out on good answers from people who aren't already established on your site before you even run into any problems." - time to drop this crap now that it is officially admitted that goal of the hot questions is to entertain

CMW

@gnat I can't downvote sadface

gnat

@CMW be happy that you at least can upvote opposing comments and answers. Or maybe not so happy after all but anyway...

23

Q: The association bonus should not enable users to vote on every site

The number of upvotes for a question is a flawed measure of question quality, one particular issue is that the amount of exposure a question gets matters a lot. Questions that were linked in the hot questions list tend to get an enormous amount of votes, much more than any questions gets organica...

feature-request voting hot-questions bonus-reputation

ass-bonus helps to damage hot questions :)

CMW

I find it more interesting that for other metas my rep from the main site counts but for mso it doesn't

gnat

@CMW MSO is the only meta with own rep system

CMW

10:14 AM

yep, still an interesting/odd fact :) but given the user base and rep distribution on SO, it's probably for the better

gnat

10:42 AM

this is going to change, when MSO and MSE split. MSO will be SO-only, using derived rep like other sites, while MSE will maintain separate rep...

266

Q: The future of meta.stackoverflow and meta.stackexchange

Historically this site, meta.stackoverflow, has been the place to ask questions about not just Stack Overflow, but the functioning of the entire Stack Exchange (2.0) network, including Area 51 and stackexchange.com and careers. (Yes, there was a meta.stackexchange, but that dealt with the old le...

discussion meta meta-stack-exchange mso-mse-split

238

Q: Stack Overflow is getting a place of its own

We've grown considerably as a network since the days of the original trilogy, when the prospect of growing into a network of over 100 thriving Q&A sites was a distant glimmer in a cloudy night sky. Today, Stack Overflow continues to graciously host discussions about the entire network on its extr...

discussion stackoverflow meta mso-mse-split

CMW

Ah, cool. That's an important change

Jim G.

12:21 PM

@jmac Totally agree. But don't underestimate or forget the impact that you and jmort253 have made to the site with your edits. Before you guys started editing, things were much worse. People were even more close happy. The culture was toxic.

Hugo Rocha

1:51 PM

Morning!

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