The Water Cooler

7:51 AM

@ChrisE close view is generally considered one of the very important ones on any SE site, as it forces out the bad stuff and has a direct impact on site quality

Yes, you need to make sure people know what to downvote, but that is relatively easy

Nofel

Morning

Snow

@RoryAlsop out of the 47 questions currently on the front page, only 12 aren't closed and don't have close votes. Although you could tell people that the closed questions "need improvement", in reality, close votes mean "your question isn't good enough, it doesn't deserve to be here". Closing questions never "forces out bad stuff" - never has, never will.

Good morning Nofel. After what you said yesterday, I took special note of road stud colours. There's four that I counted.

Nofel

8:13 AM

@Snow I did noticed And tested myself. They r hard to remember but informative if u know meaning. Yes there are four. Red, green, white and flourasent

Pardon my spellings

Snow

I always though the other colour was amber.

Nofel

And just reading the highway book code. Puffin is with figures which switch red or green and pelican is where there are no figures and while pressed it will be red until the signal is green and then it turn green for u to pass. Just FYI @motosubatsu @Snow

Yea amber @Snow. Good one

It’s hard to remember

Snow

Green = Go (you can cross) Red = Stop (you may not cross) White = lane borders Amber = right side of carriageway

White can also be at the centre of a single lane carriageway.

Nofel

8:44 AM

R u talking about lights or studs

Snow

studs. the ones on the road surface.

Nofel

Green r sign of carriage way to slip road, Red r sign of hard shoulder to carriageway. white r in between lines. amber r physical barrier between roads

I hope I am right

Snow

Yes, that's correct. you also get red studs on the hatched portions of slipways to stop you from entering the main carriageway too early or too late.

Nofel

Still have to understand what are hatched portions. broken lines etc

I love this channel youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

Nofel

9:09 AM

@Snow my coffee lover friend

tell me a new insant way of making coffee

right now, I take one heaped tsp of instant coffee and 1 sweetex put boiling water

and bit on milk

1/4 milk

motosubatsu

@DarkCygnus Fingers crossed for you.. that's one pint I will happily buy!

Snow

At work, I just put my mug in the machine and press a button.

motosubatsu

@Nofel sweetner?? blasphemy!

Snow

Yes. Black coffee for me.

motosubatsu

@JoeStrazzere I have to agree that people are far too trigger happy when it comes to closing questions around here

Snow

9:12 AM

75% of the questions on the front page are either closed or have close votes on them.

motosubatsu

@Nofel rule of thumb is that broken lines can be crossed and solid ones can't

Nofel

@motosubatsu @Snow only black coffee it is is filtered

instant r screws up

Snow

This close ratio, to me, indicates "low tolerance" rather than "high quality".

Nofel

@motosubatsu @motosubatsu thnx

Rory Alsop

@Snow having grown a number of sites from private beta to full site, and moderated many, I can categorically state it absolutely does get rid of bad stuff. It is the single best way to start that process. Then you need to grow a community happy to edit closed posts for reopening. It's all been proven many times.

motosubatsu

9:19 AM

@Snow I concur.. there's no denying that we have our fair share of low quality posts and that understanding what is "on-topic" here is a bit more difficult than some other big SE sites but I don't think those factors alone are sufficient to account for the number of closes

Rory Alsop

It works very well

Possibly more of a challenge on subjective sites, but one of mine, Parenting, has seen dramatic improvement since we moved to a policy of putting on hold quickly until problems are fixed

motosubatsu

@RoryAlsop the problem we seem to have here is that transition to people being more proactive about editing for improvements, all too often it's clsoe and move on

Rory Alsop

@motosubatsu that I agree with - and that is a site maturity measure, as far as I'm concerned

Once you have a large enough core that fully support the aims of the site and have the energy and time to do it, edits happen

And the system flows

motosubatsu

@RoryAlsop yep.. I do what I can with questions I think can be saved but as just one user out of thousands it feels like pissing in the wind sometimes

Nofel

I been on SE long enough to post my problem and I can confirm, ppl r trigger happy to close then to edit it

those who edit are the ones who can answer it efficiently

Snow

9:23 AM

Workplace is over 5 years old. In my books, that's what I'd call "mature". But still we have a 25% acceptance rate and a predilection towards closing rather than proactively helping questions maintain a good quality. Whatever worked on another stack to improve things clearly hasn't happened here.

Rory Alsop

@Nofel some sites do it amazingly well.

Snow

On the Health stack, there was a hard moderation style of closing any questions that weren't academic in nature and downvoting any answer that wasn't citated sufficiently. The site is now effectively dead.

Rory Alsop

@Snow no. It is reasonably old. But in the approach to questions, and the makeup of the community, I would definitely not class it as mature. There is a small core of people who approach things in a way I'd class as ut you have the challenge of a high number of one-visit folks, the high subjectivity of the site, the perception of many visitors that their view must be right etc

@Snow it has major problems that aren't the voting issue

Nofel

@Snow I am victim of health stack

I think there is a pts system to closing, and ppl violate it.

Rory Alsop

As a counter example, look at Skeptics. The hardest rules on SE - incredibly successful, but vast numbers of questions are closed instantly, and then reopened when fixed

@Nofel what is pts?

Nofel

9:27 AM

points/badges

Rory Alsop

How - how do you get points from closing something?

If I look at the questions on the front page here, many are closed because they are just badly written, and a bunch of off topic or opinion based ones. The badly written ones could be edited (and you'd get badges and rep for that @nofel) and the opinion based ones could be re-written to fit, although that is more work.

Snow

@RoryAlsop I guess you and I have different perspectives here. I'm interested in helping the users more than the stack - I don't think that many people on this stack search for answers before asking something. Other stacks are more knowledge based, WP is more subjective.

Rory Alsop

People just need to do it - I've not been great at it here, as I have to put most effort into the sites I moderate, obviously, but it needs more people like @motosubatsu who are willing to edit.

@Snow yeah - people need to be encouraged to search first. Help vampires tend to plague subjective sites more than strict ones

@Snow WPS is by no means the most subjective. But it is in the top 5 I reckon

IPS and Parenting are probably most subjective

motosubatsu

@RoryAlsop agreed

Rory Alsop

The problems wps has now, we had on Parenting a couple of years back. So we got much stricter at closing fast and editing, so no answers until the question was fixed.

That really helped with quality of questions and answers

There's a really good SeDE query showing editors - worth looking at it. Good game I have used elsewhere - see if you can move up 10 places in the editors league :-)

Encourage everyone to make improvements - folks with low rep can get a lot of points for doing this!

Nofel

9:35 AM

I remember the time when I had msg from mod and I had to tell her that before closing question if ppl can edit it or recommend me as I am no good in english

overtime I saw that change

Rory Alsop

9:46 AM

@Nofel most sites (not all) are pretty good at helping folks who don't have English as their first language. But again, this needs a good sized core of people who are willing to edit.

Nofel

yea

NotThatGuy

10:36 AM

If I mentioned company A's offer deadline to company B, would it make sense to ask for time to think about company B's offer that goes past A's deadline (hoping to get an offer from company C in that time)? Or would that make it seem like I just used A's offer to speed up B's process?

motosubatsu

@NotThatGuy yeah.. if you're stating to B that you need them to speed up so you can make a decision due to A's deadline asking for time beyond that isn't going to go down well

Nofel

11:25 AM

I need to start a blog for timeless errors and what I did to fix them

turns out, the company I am in now, was suppressing errors by hiding them in a blank htm

motosubatsu

@Nofel if nobody sees an error message..did the error really happen? :P

Nofel

@motosubatsu the google crawler see's it

they were doing blackhat SEO

any layman would do that to get it out of way.

motosubatsu

@Nofel I was being flippant - referencing the old thought experiment about trees falling in woods

so just a poor attempt at humor

Nofel

11:40 AM

oh

no it is me

who didn't get it

motosubatsu

more seriously.. obviously I don't know the full circumstances of what they were suppressing but there are legitimate reasons for suppressing the details of error messages on public-facing websites (not suppressing that an error has occurred at all though), primarily it's a security measure

Nofel

@motosubatsu that error was simplying saying "u didn't close the closing tag which was remarkably hidden so ppl don't see it but it all came down while I give facelift in my final days

coz I am too good at RWD

according to my office

my colleague told me yesterday that he had to leave the company right after he get his IRL

and hoping I would stay here

and said don't share my plans to leave company as he won't get IRL

@motosubatsu @Snow whats the best place to apply for loan with bad credit rating

I might need coz on probation they don't give u new house coz of job uncertainity

so only way is to get 6x months advance

Snow

12:00 PM

Sorry, Nofel. I have no advice regarding loans.

motosubatsu

@Nofel I don't really have any advice as to where to go for such a loan - but what I would say is if you can avoid doing it in any way then do so, loans when you have poor credit and/or job "uncertainty" tend to be astronomically expensive

if the alternative is a slightly crappy commute for 6 months while you work your way through the probation period I'd pick that every time

Nofel

12:19 PM

The house I live in has been turning hazardous to us

fungus, spiders, snails

and I m tried of me mrs hovering 3-5 times a day

even hoover r busted

and she got type 1 and now shoulder degenration due to type 1

motosubatsu

12:48 PM

@Nofel not good :( can see why you might want to get out sooner rather than later

Nofel

yes, I can travel. Had been doing it since 2.5 yrs

bt dont wanna put them through hell

the other day, we woke up for prayer around:5ish and after praying came down while sitting in longue my mrs saw a huge spider

had it our son, he wouldn't have notice (hell I didn't even) as it was too camo in the carpet

The Snark Knight

1:43 PM

Coming in late to the game, but I agree. We are a bit too close-happy here, esp for duplicates.

Nofel

hello @TheSnarkKnight

Snow

Hodor

Mister Positive

Dilly Dilly

Nofel

that is new @MisterPositive Dilly Dilly

The Snark Knight

Greetings, program

Mister Positive

1:48 PM

Hello Dave.

Snow

main(){printf("Hello World");}

There was a snail who wanted to be faster, so he took his shell off. It didn't work - it only made him more sluggish.

Mister Positive

@Snow And left him defenseless

Nofel

var d = new Date();
var n = d.getDay();

if(n === 4){
alert("Hello World")
}

that will keep u busy

:P

Mister Positive

@Nofel That is lame...

;-}

Nofel

I know

I had to go to jsbin to create one

didnt wanted it to fail

:P

Snow

2:02 PM

I have reached 1 million people. I hope I haven't proved too disappointing to them.

Mister Positive

@Snow Congrats!

Snow

It's YAMM....

Wow, that last time I was this bored was 12 minutes ago....

Mister Positive

2:24 PM

sometimes I just want to rage quit......

but then I don't

Nofel

Have a cookie

Makes it easy

motosubatsu

2:38 PM

@Snow I was actually bored enough today that I bothered to provide backing to a common sense answer on a common sense question, even though it's been put on hold.

I need more hobbies

Nofel

drones

Snow

Drones are more trouble than they're worth. You can't fly one without justifying yourself any more.

The Snark Knight

@Snow yes, the FAA has decided it owns everything more than an inch off the ground

Nofel

I want to fly coz I want to

Snow

Here in the UK there's so much legislation and people who will object. you have to get permission from the FAA, the land owner, anyone within (or without) visible range. You have to have a certificate, a florescent jacket, a portable fenced off area to take off and land the thing, someone to supervise you, you need to be insured. yada yada yada.....

Nofel

2:48 PM

for drone?

Snow

Yep.

The Snark Knight

@Snow OMG wow. Talk about government micromanagement of daily life!

Mister Positive

the drone thing is tricky

Snow

Like anything in life, there's always someone to offend, there's always someone who might get injured, there's always someone who might get sued.

Mister Positive

I don't want some asshole hovering a drone outside my window.

Snow

2:50 PM

Sorry, that was me.

Mister Positive

I knew it!

Nofel

@MisterPositive I know u mix weed in cookie

The Snark Knight

@Snow that's what I loved about where I lived in Colorado. It was so far off the map, nobody bothered you. A few times the state tried to bother us, we ignored them.

Nofel

and don't wan't to show it

or get caught

Snow

@TheSnarkKnight You're a survivalist?

Mister Positive

2:52 PM

isn't everyone?

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