@KarlBielefeldt @balancedmama We have a standard comment that we've crafted for new users who post "non-answers". It saves the trouble of crafting a new one each time, and they're by far the most common type of moderator action that appears.
@Beofett Thanks. I remember that convo, but needed to favorite it so it was easy to find or learn to hot-key it or something. Hadn't gotten round to it yet - especially if activity is gonig to remain high, shortcuts will be important.
@KarlBielefeldt @balancedmama - you are going to develop a certain "feel" for this, on when to act alone and when to get four-eye approval. Also, for other topics, it's often useful to lean back for a few hours (or even days) before acting.
@balancedmama I've used a typing assistant to help me with standard phrases. It's a little piece of software that watches what I type. E.g. if I type .welcome then the assistant replaces that with the welcome blurb from the meta post (because I've set up my assistant to replace that hotword with that blurb). If you type a lot of standard phrases, such software could help you - or confuse you, if you don't like it.
@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun about attracting new people (a follow-up idea to meta.parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/617/…): how about we purposefully work on a question and answers to make sure the question gets on the hot-network list?
@Dariusz sounds like a good idea - it clearly works. The trick is: what do we have to do to a question to push it into that list of "hot network questions"? What are the actual metrics that are used? How can we make more questions meet those metrics to get them published?
What formula should be used to determine "hot" questions?
Based on my analysis of the above and the comments so far, here's the second version of what I have implemented so far. This might suck. I don't know:
(log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5) + sum(Ascores)
--------------------...
I believe that translates as: vote early, vote often, and post lots of answers as quickly as possible?
We recently had a question appear on the "Hot Network Questions" list, and it attracted a lot of attention to our site.
We are very grateful for the views, and the influx of new users (many of whom appear interested in sticking around, which is just fantastic for a beta site that needs more part...
Curious. I have never asked a question on SO, so I don't know how they work really despite answering hundreds. Do I get reminded at some point to accept an answer?
I have one I would be okay with accepting on my question here, but also would rather leave it open for a while
but will probably forget if there's no action on it for a long time, as I'm a forgetful type!
I suspect that the title of the previous "hot question" was part of the reason it drew so much attention. "parents undermining my relationship" seems to be more likely to push some buttons with a lot of people. Although I may be projecting there... we'll see shortly how my question does by comparison :)
That's possible, although yours is sufficiently a) hot buttony ("tattletale", "teacher being mean to kid", etc.) and b) likely to generate disagreement (it's easy to see several sides to the issue), that I think it'll move on up
Parenting really is a good site for the hot questions
Questions on math.se or whatever are interesting to view, but how many of us can actually answer them
More 'broad' sites, like parenting or cooking or whatnot, will have more relevance to 'everyone'
Very true. There was a hot question on math.se that I thought was very interesting (how do you fairly divide something into three parts using informal measuring), but I had nowhere near the background to answer, or even to find other content to participate in
@Joe Regarding downvoting answers advocating spanking... by way of example, I did not downvote this answer. But I DID downvote this one. They're both good examples of my view on the subject, I think.
Some food habits probably do originate in childhood, fwiw; in particular, feeding a wide spice palate as an infant causes children to be able to eat (and enjoy) a wider spice palate as they get older (India is a great example of this). By adulthood it's very possible to intentionally overcome this, but many people do not make the effort.
Not really the food habits relevant to the post though :)
I've made a few edits to clarify downvoting vs. not voting at all
@Joe I absolutely agree that exposing a child to a wide range of foods as an infant would seem beneficial to building a flexible palate as an adult. I really wanted to try baby led weaning with our son, but it was too much for my wife.
The issue I had with that part of the answer was the claim that young children who are picky eaters usually grow up to continue that trend as an adult.
Fortunately, we seem to be past the real resistance to "try just one bite". He'll still say "no thanks, I don't like x", but he'll give in almost immediately when we tell him he has to try a bite
What formula should be used to determine "hot" questions?
Based on my analysis of the above and the comments so far, here's the second version of what I have implemented so far. This might suck. I don't know:
(log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5) + sum(Ascores)
--------------------...
The Playground
The Playground