That domain was registered relatively recently (01/Feb/2017). So I guess what happened there was someone came across those questions via search engine, and thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if I made an online tool for this?". He made the tool and then posted the links on a couple of questions to advertise his new site. However, I don't feel any inclination to believe there is anything "wrong" about it.
@MonicaCellio Just for the sake of completeness: Community does not count as a moderator in the context of post deletion, because of this change. (As you noticed, the lock was what prevented undeletion.)
@MaskedMan I think the most that can be done is to carefully inject "sexual" in title of the question if it involves sex. That would be similar to how Math.SE folks put dollar signs around numbers in the titles when they want to drop question from HNQ (dollar signs make it MathJax which is blocked in HNQ titles). Irrelevant title edits are totally impractical because any 2K user can (and will) rollback these and question will return to HNQ
@gnat Oh, no worries. I can understand the moderators' stance. While they secretly admire me for my unconventional ideas (one moderator has admitted that such an idea has never been proposed before), they cannot admit it publicly. As a community elected moderator with a diamond next to their username, their posts have to conform to the guidelines. Much like how celebrities have to measure their statements all the time. So no hard feelings there against them.
How about I phrase my question this way: "should we employ swear words if close votes are incapable of doing the job?"
@MaskedMan (cc @MonicaCellio) currently there is a perfect way to get them off the HNQ, and one that meets all rules: VTC - it works perfectly. Just use your vote to close. If you vandalise a post with swear words you are definitely doing more harm than good and will get rejections, flags for offensiveness and probably end up with a suspension
2
@MaskedMan the idea has not been proposed before because it is offensive. It would damage the site and cause more annoyance than the already annoying HNQ
@gnat that is also not useful. Just get the community to agree to VTC
@RoryAlsop getting community to agree to VtC, why? only because question hit HNQ? If it's close-worthy I will of course try to get community close it but this is totally tangential to HNQ isn't it
@gnat editing a question in a ... manner that's quite similar to, and not entirely unlike vandalism to get it off the HNQ sounds likely to land the person who did it in some degree of trouble.
Especially if it involves things that could result in SE sites being filtered out in workplaces.
@gnat if it's bad and got on HNQ - sorry. I'm only talking about those exceptions that require some urgent attention because they were unfortunately elevated by HNQ
@JourneymanGeek editing question in any inappropriate manner is first of all impractical, that was my point to MaskedMan. No matter if you want to drop it off HNQ or have some other reason it just won't work because 2K users will rollback. Adding sexual word to the title when it is appropriate is a different thing and I for one wouldn't mind doing this if it would help off HNQ. Luckily (or unluckily) on-topic Workplace questions typically don't involve sex so this would be merely theoretical trick
you typically don't have time to do sensible edits when it hits HNQ. 2-3 hours and it gets tons of answers that "lock" the content of the question. Not to mention that lemming upvotes totally motivate asker against edits "I've got so many repz = my question is perfect as is"
@gnat if you spot it before a mod, flag it so they can at least put it on hold. But if all mods are asleep, VTC - it does get stopped pretty quickly with a community pulling together. Then it can be fixed up
@RoryAlsop (cc @MonicaCellio) Ok, then how about these questions: "should we employ women if men are incapable of doing the job?", "should we employ black people if white people are incapable of doing the job?". A couple of centuries ago, people reacted to those questions exactly as you are doing it here: it is offensive, it does more harm than good, you will be rejected by the society, nobody has proposed it before, this decision-maker considers it offensive, etc.
Do you notice how my above question has the same structure as the two examples I posted above? What does that tell you? Any new idea is always criticised by the general public, but eventually those ideas get widespread acceptance and that process is called "progress". In other words, my idea is far ahead of your time, and that is okay, you don't need to feel bad about it.
Do we need a new theory of gravitation if Newtonian theory doesn't work in some situations?
@MaskedMan sorry, but no - the two are entirely unconnected issues. I'm afraid what you are doing here is trying to conflate a very simple and straightforward management issue of posts that get too much unwanted attention, and something else entirely.
@RoryAlsop that works only on close worthy questions. When legitimate one hits HNQ we don't have much options unfortunately. At Physics they've got an interesting approach, their moderators preemptively protect questions as soon as they hit or about to hit HNQ but I don't know other sites who do similar
@MaskedMan dude - if you come up with a question that is a) a question, b) of relevance and c) that I am interested in - I may try to answer it. But so far, I see you mentioning various non sequiturs that are, as I said, unconnected with the topic at hand :-)
@RoryAlsop They are totally related to the issue, you just don't want to see it because it challenges everything you thought you knew about SE. Most people cannot handle that kind of shock. Take your time, and think calmly about It.
you'll find after a while, that SE is no more or less than a well implemented question and answer site. I have no need to believe in anything to make it work. Much of it works, somethings are mildly annoying. But at the end of the day, it's a useful network of sites.well.
@enderland That is not my point here. If I could write a proof for P=NP on a random question, calling it "useful" is most certainly an understatement, so of course, it will get upvotes. But that does not mean anything about the value of the question.
Also the tooltip clearly suggests to upvote the answer if it is "useful", it doesn't say, upvote it if is useful and answers the question asked.
In other words, the site reduces to a forum. I am fine with that but it should be consistently applied. We cannot say, it is ok for HNQ questions to be a forum as long as it generates useful answers, but non-HNQ questions cannot be a forum.
People can doesn't mean that they do. That question took 20 hours to get closed. Even accounting for timezones and such, that is way too wrong. Rather than voting to close the question, users with close vote privileges were engaging in a conversation with the OP.
I would have expected users to ask "what is your question here?" instead of asking what is the duration of the internship, whether the internship is paid or unpaid, and a bunch of other things. All of those questions are perfectly acceptable when seeking additional clarification to improve the question, but not when there is not even a question to begin with.
Note in particular, that the users have mercilessly closed other questions, which had only a little lack of clarity (for example, questions from a non-US user that included an acronym that US users had not heard of).
At smaller sites (up to 50-100 questions a day average) closing a question takes hours or even days.
As an example, this SO question has got 5 close votes in 15 minutes, while its twin at Software Engineering (previously known as Programmers) has been struggling to get 3rd vote for over 10 hour...
@MaskedMan ^^^ there you go, Stack Exchange overlords know that off-topic (rant, trolling etc) questions tend to attract attention, entertainment and views, and they keep them hanging as long as possible in order to entertain lemmings
@gnat I totally enjoy it when a moderator candidate, who supposedly has a lot of moderation "experience", calls a user a "troll" simply for criticizing a broken feature.
But I guess I can't expect any better when a so-called Community Manager whose job is supposedly to "help out" shrugs off the problem saying, "if bad questions make it to HNQ, your site sucks, it is not our problem".
@MaskedMan one thing that even I find myself doing is internally pulling the meaning of a question out of it, without it actually being explicitly written
@enderland I just asked a simple question, why should an idea be rejected because it sounds scandalous in our time, when there are plenty of examples in history of ideas being rejected initially getting widespread acceptance later on? I am not saying that my idea is correct or even good, but my objection is only to the method of rejecting it simply because "it is not even worth considering, we already have a rule for that".
Do you notice how my above question has the same structure as the two examples I posted above? What does that tell you? Any new idea is always criticised by the general public, but eventually those ideas get widespread acceptance and that process is called "progress". In other words, my idea is far ahead of your time, and that is okay, you don't need to feel bad about it.
@RoryAlsop They are totally related to the issue, you just don't want to see it because it challenges everything you thought you knew about SE. Most people cannot handle that kind of shock. Take your time, and think calmly about It.
It's possible that is all said with good intentions - and I suspect it probably was - but it really comes across as... while perhaps not trolling, very, very troll-like
@enderland Hmm, you probably have a good reason to make that claim. It certainly wasn't meant to be trolling. If people had answered my question instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks, I may have responded differently. However, I do accept that the overreaction was avoidable.
Anyway, in summary, my request to everyone is don't reject ideas simply based on "we have a rule for that already". If the old rule has a problem, make a new rule. Progress doesn't happen when people keep following rules, but when people challenge the rules and change them.
@MaskedMan It's generally beneficial to assume good intentions when all you have is text, because we normally add our emotion into everything even if we perfectly understand the text
@MaskedMan I think the bigger question that underlies the HNQ/Workplace issue is whether that's enough of a problem to actually make SE changes regarding
it's also been an ongoing issue here as long as I can remember, with a lot of discussion around the subject
if you search back in the transcript, I remember jmac, shog, and myself (probably with others) having discussions on this subject years ago
man, that makes me feel like I've been here a long time
My personal issue with the HNQ is my mediocre answers get a high number of votes, while my good answers get a measly 4 or 5 votes.
For example, my top voted answer is something about an email and timezone, that I wrote hastily while I was bored standing in a queue or something like this. (I have "promised" to edit that answer to improve it and I know what I want to add there, but I dont find the motivation.) My more well-thought out answers are at the bottom of the pile. If I choose to advertise my profile some day in real life, I don't want to show this.
@enderland It has been time well spent I would believe.
@enderland this doesn't seem specific only to Workplace, why do you think Physics mods preemptively protect their questions? And Rory said at least two other sites do so. And there is Programmers and who knows how many other smaller sites are unhappy
I have found out recently, that contrary to popular belief, Workplace profile can be used to "assist" your job applications and such (at least in my location), especially when applying for roles with some management involved.
I wouldn't say "I'm in love" directly. Best case is you get a sympathetic laugh, worst case it will come across as.. weird.
What I would say instead is something like, "I'm excited about your company for reasons-here. Also I'd like to stay in my hometown to be closer to friends and family."
Th...
surprisingly only two comments deleted on that, both self-deleted too (used for the purpose of comments!?)
Oh rather strangely, that makes me realize, it is about time I started applying to a "real" management role. Going through some of my own "advice" answers written here and knowing the average People Manager here in the Indian IT workplace, I am sure a lot of companies would be eager to hire me. :)
I wouldn't think of it like that, but more... recognizing that other folks will perceive things potentially differently than you intended and adjusting accordingly
the best managers are able to do that, in how they interact with their employees, and adjust accordingly - as well as guide them in how/when they do things a bit awkwardly/harshly
Yeah, that is one of the themes I see in many of my answers here. I guess sometimes you need a dose of your own medicine. :|
But then, I also tend to have a different personality in real life than the one I have in chat. When I answer questions, it is usually my real life personality that does the job.
That's something I learned a long time ago, my online personality was ah, I'll call it "abrasive" to be nice ;) someone called me out on it and after reflection I realized I was absolutely abrasive in how I interacted with other folks
It's still my tendency, because I am fairly blunt/direct, but paying attention to that has helped immensely (I would never have gotten elected moderator anywhere had I not changed that, LOL)
I actually find it useful to keep online personality opposite to my real personality. It serves as a sort of "simulation mode". Seeing how people react when I behave in a certain way online, gives me all the more reason not to do it in real life. ;)
Years ago as part of that process I started to deliberately use more emoticons (it was IRC for a game, basically) which I then noticed how much that forced me to be more positive hah
I think that actually helped, though it also stopped me from using real punctuation and capitalization
The Water Cooler
The Water Cooler