fast-days has 41 questions; fasting has three. The three don't seem fundamentally different; they are not, for example, about tips for overcoming the physical difficulties of a fast. (There's one of those in fast-days, by the way.)
Is there any reason these tags shouldn't be merged?
CHAOS has been searching for the perfect way to promote activity on our sites for a while now. After all, before you can try to recruit new users, you need to engage your existing community. Since we’re a network of Q&A websites, a natural place to start is having question-asking contests. Some of our contests have been more successful than others, but it seems like we’ve finally found one that works:
What: Hot Topic of the Week
How it works: Pick a topic of the week, and enter everyone who asks a question related to that topic into a random drawing to win a prize. The number of entries a person gets is equal to the number of questions they ask about the topic of the week. …
@StackExchange Very interesting. Conceptually, our topic challenge could be adapted to this sort of contest simply by adding the drawing and prize. Should we ask for that? I'm a little apprehensive about an extrinsic motivation to ask more questions prompting more low-quality questions.
Implementation note: On Literature and Philosophy, but not on Android, they seem to be administering this by repeatedly editing one meta post. I don't think I like that strategy, since it doesn't allow for archiving lists of questions, etc.
@Menachem The apostrophe is to make the term "bad things" possessive (genitive). That's because "happening" is the gerund. The page I linked to explains the use of the possessive before a gerund.
@IsaacMoses Indeed. I had read it but not its metadata (authorship).
@msh210 I'm particularly interested in your opinion, as current topic challenge administrator, of whether we should ask for prizes for ours. It seems to me like the annual expense would come to ~$1-2K. I don't know if they'd grant us dedicated funds for that or divert the budget that's been offered for advertising, etc.
@IsaacMoses One issue is labor: someone will have to start and end the contest at set times (instead of at loosely set times like now) and count posts. Incidentally, I think only questions with a net vote count >0 should count.
@msh210 Yup. It seems to me that Lauren of CHAOS is running the other contests herself. >0 does sound like a good standard; it's what's used to determine if a question is "answered." I might even recommend giving one entry per net score to really incentivize quality.
An advantage of having SE Staff run the contest (besides labor) is that local mods can then participate without appearance of impropriety. A disadvantage is that then, topics should probably either be chosen arbitrarily or based on a strict formula (e.g. oldest, highest-voted unused), taking away the ability to make, e.g. calendar-based special picks.
@msh210 b) If we recuse ourselves from participation, I don't see why we couldn't choose topics based on our own ideas of which would be most useful to the community when.
@msh210 I suppose tallying is objective as well, but I think it'd still look weird to administer a contest you're in. It'd be like having a political candidate be in charge of counting the ballots - someone else can always recount, but it just looks wrong. The random draw, however, is not objective.
@lauren The conversation we're amid here, about weekly topic contests, may be of interest to you. I mean, never mind possible implementation on our site: some of the ideas we've mentioned may be good for other sites and thus of interest to you.
@msh210 If the public has access to the random draw mechanism, it's objective. Otherwise, it's effectively subjective. And yes, if I won a draw that I drew myself when no one was looking, people would naturally suspect that I just chose to win.
@IsaacMoses DJIA is easy. Putting the questions in order, less so. And there are several other new steps (counting timely votes, etc.). So the end result is, since you asked for my view as current topic guy, I don't think I will do it myself, though I'd be glad to see it done and to do part of it.
(Reflecting on the fourth comment to the blog post): Both Literature and Philosophy have many fewer questions and visits per day than we do. Android has many more.
We're #3 for new meta posts (per 100 days, it looks like)!
@IsaacMoses Yes: 89 ago from now (#656) was #567, Dec. 22.
@IsaacMoses We're too meta-y? Maybe so. Apples to apples, though: compare to others in public beta. (Even that is not quite apples to apples, as most sites didn't start as 1.0)
@Lauren My impression -- unsupported by statistics, which I haven't looked at -- is that it got more good, new questions when we were advertising it with a site banner. (Something of a sore point here. ;-))
@msh210 Not quite enough weeks to tell yet. The first post-banner week, the topic was Chanuka, which got lots of entries because it was seasonal. The next couple did have many fewer than in some previous weeks.
We only recently introduced the community promotion ad for this.
I noticed that some members of CHAOS are now parading around the network without "pitchforks" in their display names:
What happened? Did they get demoted?
anyway i'm reading the discussion about how to rework the contest and you all have some interesting points
like playing with how many entries a question gets based on votes
we purposely didn't want to involve votes because of reasons I've already mentioned, but if it's not a one to one ratio of votes to entries it might be interesting to try
@Lauren If the contests aren't causing quality problems, as you've indicated in your blog comment response, then the added complication of counting votes seems unnecessary. I do like the idea of requiring a positive score (rather than non-negative, as you're currently doing), as an indication that someone found the question valuable.
i think the rationale for using non-negative is that the first couple sites we ran it on don''t have very much activity, so it might take a while for someone to vote questions up
but on sites that have more visits each day that woudl probably be fine
@HodofHod That page is an advertisement for a book. Do you mean that the book gives halachic reasons not to trim a beard?
Oh, I do see that that page mentions "The Response of the Minchas Elozor [of Munkatch] zt’l concerning a Rov who challenged the opinion of the Tzemach Tzedek zt’l regarding The Halachic Prohibition Of Cutting The Beard With A Scissors".
I noticed that some members of CHAOS are now parading around the network without "pitchforks" in their display names:
What happened? Did they get demoted?
