The general consensus seems to be that sites decline until they find a natural bottom, and then they begin to grow again, as the high-quality content (and the engine) draws natural growth.

I'm also feeling pretty sick :(

Sorry you are down. Hope it improves.

@BenI. What does your brother do? Another geek?

Yeah, right now he's working as a programmer, though he previously completed much of a doctorate in CS with a focus in biology.

IIRC, he was interested in pursuing protein folding.

@heather has returned. Welcome back.

She came back?

Answered a question

Yes, she did :)

@heather Welcome back! :)

Hey Buffy, did you see our fan?

This fella: cseducators.stackexchange.com/a/4022/27. Makes me proud to be hella stupid :)

@BenI. No. Missed it. He has an interesting username. Sort of sums up his attitude, perhaps.

Is the post a violation of "be nice"?

@Buffy Yep

Consequences?

Not from me. Conflict of interest. Peter or thesecretmaster have to mod that one.

I agree. Good call.

I assume all mods are pinged on a flag, not just one at random or some such.

But @thesecretmaster is watching.

Some rooms have lots of mods, of course.

I agree with both of those calls.

What does "locked by Community" imply. Just the post?

Or are there implications for the user as well?

Just the post. it means it cannot be edited

I also just reset the username on the user, because the previous username violated be nice.

The earlier post is now greyed out. Is that just a consequence of the name change?

One of the bad effects of a HNQ is that we then attract some unsavory characters. Too much testosterone with their morning coffee.

Like Apocalypse Now: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

Grey means it got DVed a ton.

Ah. TY

I worry that the Oracle question's answers are too focused on debugging, rather than more general. I don't know how to address that, though, to get better answers. This is a case where "narrow" isn't helpful. I'm not sure the OP really said debugging in any case, but it is easy to see why the inference.

The actual problem arises in many situations, of course.

I added an edit to my own answer. Maybe it will be noticed.

@Buffy It's a good point, he really asked about hints.

Though in my experience, most questions from students that I want to encourage independence about are debugging questions.

I guess, reflecting now, if a student asked me about how to structure an if-else, I would be delighted, because that's about program structure.

@thesecretmaster Does it mean anything that this profile exists?cseducators.stackexchange.com/users/3703/wtfker

I'm curious about that, too.,

@thesecretmaster What do you mean that you "reset the username"? I can't find any such option. (And the username is still the same)