I've closed the question on BH because to be on-topic there a question has to start from the text of the Bible rather than an idea or other source (in this case an article).
It could probably be edited into an on-topic question fairly easily and if that happens I'll reopen it - but I'm letting you know in case you wondered about the migration reversal
feel free to ping me in here or TL if you want to discuss for any reason.
I don't think that was the goal. My goal was to make it easier to shut-down the bad questions when they did occur (without losing a potential contributor), rather than prevent them in the first place.
Direct requests in comments requesting references and the like used to result in a small number of people getting into a huff. My perception is that this is much less common since introducing a "Welcome to Skeptics" line in the comments.
It is also easier to write a comment when all the verbiage about how "I really do respect you as a human being and I don't mean to suggest that your opinion is anything but highly-regarded, pithy adage that children should study at school" can be dealt with in a carefully-written way once, and let you can focus on the particular issue.
We did get one person get stroppy, because they felt the "Welcome" message was patronising. No pleasing some people.
We also get the occasional "Thanks for your advice. I will leave this answer alone and try to follow next time." message, rather than "Thanks for your advice. I nuked my own answer." which I would hope for.
@Oddthinking Ok thanks. I'd really like to try and get something like that implemented on Programmers, but the mods say they're skeptical about such a thing being useful for the site
I mostly like the "new user? click here" at the top of the faq. I was really happy to see that when I first came to your site, and don't think I would understand your site very well if I hadn't read that first
Its nice to read something shorter thats directly aimed at new users, then to figure out whats important and whats not in the faq
@Rachel It has been extremely useful to reduce the aggro. Basically, we don't have to defend ourselves when asking for references anymore, and sometimes the users do appreciate having it (according to their own comments). @Oddthinking did an outstanding job of centering the correct tone in the post.
We had a different experiment before that (just with comments) and people complained about us being too patronising. Go figure.
