@iKlsR Tickling is a case where I don't feel confident to judge the size of the community. Sure, I think it's pretty small, but I'm not a part of that community so I don't really know. That's why I'd rather Area51 users not close proposals like that. If they're too niche to have a community, then they won't make it through the process, so there's no need to close it prematurely.
@iKlsR Yes, but unless you're on the inside of the community you really have no way to judge how large it is. I certainly couldn't think of a single question related to Blender, but that doesn't mean that there's no community of Blender users.
@LoganM I know you were coming with something like that but seriously.. tickling?
Blender is a popular software, there has to be a community, not because you don't use it doesn't stand here. The entire idea of a SE site dedicated to Tickling is just ridiculous.
Proposed Q&A site for people to share knowledge concerning brewing appliances, modifications, methods, techniques, coffee blends, roasting and grinding. Everything related to the coffee world. Coffee is a science!
The other day when there was a misunderstanding in the heap and some dude made a comment that went 'Anime.SE huh.. I guess you don't know what's on SE nowadays' It was irritating.. so..
I think that's the point. Everyone is biased towards thinking that things they've never heard of must not be very large communities. However, in reality, you can't really judge it. That's why IMO using NAVP close votes to close proposals because you think a community is small isn't really fair. Better to let the proposal die slowly if it doesn't have support.
Tell me this isn't happening... The Astronomy and Astrophysics site is in the commitment phase at 65%. That site is going to bring fragmentation and general loss of quality to the Physics site. Just have a look at some of the Top Example Questions:
What happens if two black holes collide? (this...
TL;DR: Everyone at physics thinks this is a bad idea (including the astronomers) but there's nothing we can do to stop it. SE isn't willing to close it as a duplicate.
I think it's really stupid. Physics is already sort of in trouble. There are rarely any interesting posts on the site. Most of the posts are low-level popsci stuff. As a result, we don't have many experts either. So when a good question does get asked, it gets a mediocre answer and nothing else. Astronomy.SE will have that problem far worse than we do already, and fragmenting the sites will guarantee that lots of questions go unanswered.
As for Github, I don't even know what it is. Some kind of version control software or something, but I'm unlikely to ever use it. So I don't care one way or the other.
Something I would like to know is, who are all these people who make proposals on Area51 but don't have accounts anywhere on SE? I see at least a few a week, and it doesn't make sense to me how anyone would even find Area51 without participating on SE sites.
Sometimes the proposer makes the proposal, but leaves before it's finished. That's not uncommon since most proposals will take at least a year to finish.
A lot of the time the proposer is just making the proposal for Area51 rep. That's why I made Etiquette. It's unlikely I'll participate a lot in the final site.
@iKlsR Usually the person making the proposal has some interest in the site, but they aren't always an expert. Not to mention, the final site may go in a different direction from what they intended.
Generally, the longer the site takes to make it through Area51, the more important the community is and the less important the individual who proposed it. There are some exceptions, like Culture and Life in Japan (the proposer for that one is still very active despite the proposal being near 2 years old and rather unlikely to make it to beta this time around). However, it's rather difficult to maintain any semblance of control over a proposal with more than 20-30 followers.
I completed Agarest: Generations of War Zero, and now going to start playing Agarest: Generations of War before playing Agarest: Generations of War 2. However, I'm wondering if the sequel carries on from the true end or the normal end.
I ask this, as when I played Atelier Meruru there was a spoi...
In Bleach, whilst watching the final fight bewtween Ichigo and Grimmjow i noticed that Grimmjow's body did not vanish when he was defeated as the other espadas did (in the aftermath when Nnoitra appeared). There is no mention of Grimmjow after this. Confused i turned to the manga, in 286 i could ...
I wouldn't say that I'm a Pi fanatic. Most people have no idea that I give approximately zero fucks about Pi. It's in the algorithms and the programming that I'm interested in.
Here is a piece of C++ code that shows some very peculiar performance. For some strange reason, sorting the data miraculously speeds up the code by almost 6x:
#include <algorithm>
#include <ctime>
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
// Generate data
const unsigned arraySize = 32768;
in...
@Eric No idea, but they did shut down Library & Info Science. That one had roughly the same number of questions, but even lower traffic.
I get the feeling that SE may be shutting down more beta sites in the near future, so I'm paying attention to the meta sites for all the betas that look like they're in trouble.
As for their avid user count, I don't remember very well, but IIRC they had only one 3k user, and one more 2k user. They didn't even have a full page worth of avid users.
@Eric Nah, we're fine in terms of being shut down. There's no chance we'll get shut down unless our stats start dropping a lot (or SE drastically changes their policy towards beta sites).
@Eric I don't believe that entirely. They may get easier to make it to beta, but I don't think they're likely to get more lenient for sites which are in beta.
@Eric Yes, that's the trouble. We're at the point where if even one of our 1k users decided to leave, it would have a noticeable impact on the community.
@Eric I don't think Q/A ratio is a great measure of expertise here. I have lots more questions than answers, but most of those are seeding questions (as are probably a majority of all questions on the site).
@LoganM That's somewhat true, but it is still somewhat representative. It's not as good as on other sites (namely graduated ones) but works for most intended purposes.
@Eric I think overall number of answers may be a better measure of expertise. That's typically what I look at even on graduated sites. If a user has 1000 questions and 1000 answers, I view them roughly equivalently to one with 1000 answers but no questions.
@Eric I know a lot of stuff about series which are very niche. I don't think that makes me significantly better for the purposes of this site. I don't really consider myself an expert in anything popular, which is what we mostly need experts for.
@LoganM I'm pretty sure you could answer most things about popular series, not counting Bleach, Naruto, One Piece kind of things. Some of the more popular series which have ended, you definitely have expertise in.
You also have a great deal of expertise on anime in general.
@Eric Nah, I've just seen a lot of anime, and I have pretty good memory. But I'm not the kind of person who reads interviews with creators, twitter feeds, fan books, etc. For 95% of the series I've seen, I'm no better than anyone else at answering, and significantly worse than the real experts.
@Eric A good memory only helps with the easy questions, though. For hard questions, the answer is typically in some sort of supplementary material that I've probably never even heard of.
@LoganM I'd say that it helps 7 to 8 out of 10 times. It's not a silver bullet, but it's an important factor.
Also knowing where to look is part of that. When you see a question about X in-universe, you know that's in episode Y or arc Z and you can quickly dig it up.
I looked at the poll for which upcoming series we could ask questions about.
This left me with a question about Gatchaman Crowds - will it take place in the same universe as the original Gatchaman series? Googling did not answer it, and I think this will not be answerable until the series starts...
I read about the upcoming Gatchaman Crowds anime.
According to this source, the series is about
"Gatchaman" — warriors who fight in special reinforced suits powered
by "NOTE," the manifestation of special spiritual powers in living
beings.
This surprised me - the original Gatchaman ser...
I don't know what's up with the antagonistic answers recently. I've flagged two answers in the last couple days where the person responding was being a total dick.
@Krazer So long as you don't refresh the page, flags don't disappear even if they get cleared. Also, if you go to chat.stackexchange.com, the flags stay around for a while (I still see them), but when I try to see what they are for it tells me that there's no new flags to display.
Anyway since there aren't any more it was either a troll or just someone who said something inappropriate. If it were an actual interesting argument we'd have seen more than that.
Also, the 4 is probably just the number before they got cleared. It's very likely that someone added a 5th flag, resulting in the message getting deleted and a chat suspension for the user.