hey! we have a chat room!! OMG!!

Must admit, I'm highly amused by the description.

yes, but what happens when someone posts a \end{chat}?

I'm quite amused by the synergy between english.SE and tex.SE....although no-one over there seems to care about that question anymore....

The "double spacing at end of sentence" question is pushing up our "answers per question" ratio quite alot...

@seamus: LOL

I'm actually torn about whether answers/question is a good metric....

when I visit questions with 5 pages of answers.....well, lets just say that I definitely do not read every answer....not even those with non-negative score.

Yeah I agree. If a question only gets one answer, but that answer solves the problem, and does it well, then that's valuable.

which is why that metric doesn't really measure anything interesting.

@YossiFarjoun uhh, probably the world will end..

But it is at least an objective measure that is easy to implement...

@Martin: its that easy? hmmm. don't tell anyone.

Do you think "average upvotes for accepted answer" would be a better metric?

@Seamus: yeeeesssss....not the most positive praise I've heard about something...

Seamus: not really. That's more a function of the number of users than anything else.

@Seamus that would only promote vote inflation..

why? we get presents when we have high metrics?

We get to receive a shiny new design.. and that's about it.

well, for that no-one is going to change any metrics...and I don't think that there is any doubt TeX will launch...is there?

shrug

@YossiFarjoun I think not -- we do tend to have an exceptional high quality questions, very rarely something unsuitable slips in.. But the real question is when it will launch officially, with the new policy it could linger in beta longer than GMail..

heh

so what? do we have a candidate design waiting to be launched? the site is functional (as you said) and people seem to be using it as it is. what real difference does it make if it launches in a week or 3 months?

We get new mods?

Well if it does linger seemingly forever, SE guys might decide that it's stagnant, and get rid of it,

But we're kinda in the middle of the pack, so I think we should be safe.

It doesn't really seem like something worth worrying about.

Even if the site does get shut down, that's not a massive problem: we'd all just migrate back to StackOverflow...

We'd lose all our juicy points, but oh well...

oh no! I was planing on buying a trip around the world with rep points!

This place is kinda fun, but I'm not sure it's really the best place to get help. The lag between question and answer is too variable.

At least for the people who need immediate help.

this place? you mean chat or the parent site?

The parent site.

actually, that makes me think of a much more important metric...I wonder if we can use the spiffy SQL engine to make a plot of that: average time until first answer.

or average time until first upvote on an answer.

That could be interesting.

But again, probably just a function of active users.

well...that's also important...

how do you measure active users?

Hmm, probably doesn't take so much time for somebody to upvote a sane question, but I've seen ones that have been waiting for answers for half a day

how active are they?

Especially the voting. I vote a lot (I might have had the most votes), but some people will seemingly vote up every question. Even the truly terrible ones.

Yeah I asked a question about biblatex that's gone days without an answer...

ok...so here is a more complicated metric: average time until the answer that eventually gets accepted, is posted.

heh

I want to see the plots!!!

I think you can design increasingly complicated metrics, but it's not clear exactly what they'll tell you.

I have no idea how to do it though...

On a related note.. Can we get some sort of statistic about the geographical distribution of users? I'd guesstimate that most of us are from Europe, but still could be interesting to see.

true...

Why Europe?

by the activity, I woudl actually say that most are from the usa...I always feel that in my afternoon everyone wakes up....

anyhow...going out for a beer. good to chat with you guys.

later

@TH dunno, just an impression

Right. I'm just curious what that impression is based on.

Well, from checking out user's profiles, and also on names (last is not a good metric, but usually gives a good idea)

But of course I could be wrong.

Ah, okay.

I'm a bit confused why (at least the first few) answers to the double space question keep guessing at how much space it is. Just look at the \sfcode for a period and find out!

TBH, I am actually surprised that this turned into such a debate -- for me, it's like an argument what's the right size of a full-stop in cmr10.

And given that the space is variable if the text is justified, it's pretty meaningless...

Not meaningless. The space expands as a function of the sfcode.

The bigger the sfcode, the bigger the space relative to other spaces in the line.

Well, as a function of the spacefactor, really.

Ah I see. So there is still a question of whether it should be relatively bigger...

Yeah.

Well, that was really too much text to have written on the subject.