@gannex I've always used EDIC

@Zhe what's EDIC

@orthocresol Oops, I mean EDCI

Another reminder that our close reasons are stupid.

@pentavalentcarbon what do you think of making the HW close reason mod-only?

@LeakyNun Sad to know that :"(.

...

@LeakyNun Will you miss chemistry?

>_> wtf is this conversation

@LeakyNun lol, it was a serious question.

Won't you miss studying chemistry?

@orthocresol Well, there are multiple problems in that picture IMO. Making HW close mod-only goes against the result of the experiment and doesn't really solve anything, because (I assume) the mods don't want HW closed, you just want it to go away. The problem for this specific Q is there no generic "this isn't chemistry" reason, and it got hijacked by some nonsense reason.

Oh, to be honest, I was toying with the idea of insta-deleting HW. Naturally, that would be mod-only action. The HW close reason would simply be removed.

BTW, @orthocresol when I try to close as "belongs on another SE network" I can only select meta.chem.se

I'm assuming that's not WAI

@Zhe Yes. That's how it is for the average user. Mods have the ability to migrate to other sites.

So if you think something should be migrated, then flag for moderator attention (as you did, of course)

@orthocresol That makes a lot more sense, but then you have to play arbiter for the edge cases.

@orthocresol All right cool. Now that I know that that's the procedure, I will flag if I see anything.

@pentavalentcarbon Isn't that just the curse of being a mod?

@Zhe Depends on how you deal with it as a moderato. We actually interfere with very few things, as the community handes ~98% of it.

If the community thinks an edge case is HW, then it gets closed. The problem with that approach is that it's much easier to close something than to keep it open.

@orthocresol No, your curse should only be an obligation to crappost in chat.

and whine about your work

I did a Lindlar hydrogenation, got a nice yellowy oil, NMR'd it and found out that it got reduced all the way

-_-

That's when I learnt that I shouldn't slack off on TLCing it

I discovered a non-physical bug in my polarizability results, try to go back through history to find it, only to discover it comes from somewhere in a complicated-ass trunk merge with directory/external conflicts that has nothing to do with my library.

Go play with your yellow oil!

@pentavalentcarbon Anyway, I would lean towards simply ignoring the edge cases. This approach would already filter out a lot of the things that shouldn't be on front page.

I dumped the yellow oil. ._.

@orthocresol True. But doesn't this ignore the results of the no-CV experiment?

Yes. That would be me essentially saying, we know better than you guys and we're going to do it the way we want it to be.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here, I disagree with the CV proponents' opinions.

> The amount of abuse will be zero as those that do not believe homework questions deserve any of their time will not even see them.

bzzzzzzt wrong!

Anyway, what's the worst that could happen?

(not a rhetorical question)

regular users get disgruntled at not being able to utilise close votes, which leads to a huge schism and a new site chemistry.exchangestack.com being set up

also, we set a precedent for top-down action

They should call it queueexchange.com instead

Also, I've not run this past the other mods so I have no clue what they would think of it.

But that serious point is problematic

Yeah. I mean, a schism is bad, but I don't expect that sort of thing to happen.

Oh, I thought that was just a joke. I personally think that's a non-issue, I was talking about the precedent for top-down action.

Yeah, that's what I thought too. And that's why I never ran it past the mods.

It's just been kinda sitting in the back of my head for a while. I think it would solve two major problems at one go (1. misuse of close reason, 2. front page filled with HW), but I don't know if it's a good enough reason to actually do it.

I like the compromise as a better solution (remove the close reason, force people to vote).

Though, at this rate you could burn through your daily vote allotment just on HW. I've done it.

Force people to downvote, you mean?

hmmm..

Yes. Was that never made explicitly clear during the experiment?

Well, the problem is that we said that people could still custom-vote to close as HW...

So of course that's just what everybody did... especially when the HW policy was explicitly said to be still in place, so they were perfectly justified

Does stuff that's closed get vacuumed in the same way that -7 questions with no answers do?

Yes. Eventually they do. The difference though is that closed stuff hangs around on the front page. Downvoted stuff doesn't

Occasionally, I try to encourage people to use downvotes, but it doesn't really work; people seem to think that VTC is sufficient

So what you're telling me is that pro-closers are actually having the opposite effect of what they want.

Exactly

Why doesn't this surprise me...

Then I think the experiment should be re-done with these stricter rules, and there shouldn't be a vote on whether or not the experiment is done.

You set the precedent for forcibly trying something new/different, but if people don't like it, you go back to the old behavior.

Otherwise we debate until the heat death of the universe.

What if people don't like it?

Then you go back to the old way. It's still an experiment. It's just that you're forcing the experiment on them.

Yeah, but then we will be back to square 1.

Well, what does that mean then? They must be ok with the way things are now, so no one should complain. TBH, I haven't seen any complaints in a while from anyone else. No idea why.

Yeah. It's just a small bunch of people who care, really.

I guess I am, in a sense, "afraid" of the negative outcome. I don't want to go through another month long experiment and at the end of it have people say some rubbish like "can we just go back to the old system, that was easier".

It's semi-funny because it's actually easier to downvote than VTC. There are no legitimate benefits to the VTC path then.

I think there's one minor benefit, which is that it prevents things from getting an answer. Some people care about that. I personally don't give a crap.

Maybe the people who are pro-HW also don't understand that VTC doesn't benefit them either...like you say, they they can't actually get an answer except in a comment, but maybe they only want that anyway.

Well, you should probably bring this up with the mods, just to see what they say. Otherwise absolutely nothing will get done.

Probably some time in October. Been a bit of a tough time for me, flying back to UK and starting lab work and all that...

And combine it with more questions and self-answers from us...I think you're the only one who's tried that recently

Well, it does take a lot of time. I can understand why people don't really do that.

Formatting the references is awful...I should write a script that auto-generates the Markdown from my reference library

That's a secondary reason why I asked this, actually.

It probably takes like 10 mins to throw together a citation style in Mendeley that outputs the refs properly.

(10 mins for somebody who knows how the styles work. Probably 1 hour for me)

No, I bet it's super fast, I'll check

ah this is sort of gross, there's a "Copy as formatted citation", and I'm looking at the CSL file (how the citation style is defined in some HTML-looking markup language); if the auto-formatting can be tossed (it can), and adding fixed characters to the file (*,_,[],()) is possible (dunno), then this would work

It's definitely possible, as I've tweaked it before for personal use (modified the basic ACS style by inserting a DOI), and I don't think this would be all that different.

However, just inserting the DOI took me something like an hour to figure out.

I'll take a look at it over the weekend, perhaps. My current aim is to get through the week without dying or getting cancer. :)

I'm going to mess with it when I get back from vacation in a week. Transferring my ~2500 papers from Papers to biblatex...

ouch

good luck...I too need to get back to my equivalent of a yellow oil

good luck to you too

@ortho o/

heya

I'm off to bed... still have one day left and I must be awake or I might accidentally kill myself with TiCl4 :)