Welcome ELL!

woohoo!

so do we have to copy-paste the questions from area 51?

argh! I'm too exited I don't know which questions to ask

giggles like a schoolgirl

privatebetaprivatebetaprivatebeta

I don't recognize any of the active users from ELU

yup

It's alive!

yay!

@MattЭллен I would say no. Questions should be actual problems that you face.

I asked a crap question. I've destroyed the whole thing.

The first questions set the tone for the site. If you ask high quality, expert-level questions, you'll build a site that attracts the experts and pros who will make it really successful. But if you ask beginner questions, survey questions, or social-conversation questions, experts and pros will not be interested.

The private beta gives you the opportunity to get the site off to a great start with expert questions and answers. When we open to the public, new users will look at your questions to get an idea of what they should ask. So come help us get this site off to a great start!

Really interesting bit of advice from the e-mail I received.

it's on the site too. I figure the questions on area 51 are what we should be asking because that's why we formed the site.

@MετάEd I should note that that advice is boilerplate and standard for all new sites. Doesn't mean it isn't true, but at the same time, ELL is a bit unique when it comes to an SE site.

@waiwai933 Agreed.

The really annoying thing: I don't have editing powers. I don't mind not having mod powers, but not having editing powers is just irritating.

I wonder why I'm allowed in here when I didn't commit in time so I can't go to the private beta itself? I guess y'all have to deal with me being the ignorant peanut gallery for a few more days...

in the chat? chat is open to all

Chat is separate from the main sites.

@aediaλ Do you want access? Anyone in the private beta can extend a private beta invitation.

@waiwai933 Ooh, really? Yes please!

Oh, they did that? Cool.

I didn't know that. Or if I did, I forgot.

@aediaλ Ok, I just need your permission to get your email from your profile.

@waiwai933 Go ahead.

@aediaλ Ok. Invitation has been sent to your email; may take a few minutes to arrive, but let me know if you don't get it.

I'm off. Later, peoples!

I have entered most of the Big Seven questions at meta.

What I have not asked is "1. Are questions about [subject] on or off topic?" and "3. How should we tag questions about {subject}?".

Hi :-)

hello!

@LiamW Howdy.

@waiwai933 I'm in! Thank you.

@waiwai933 How can they do that?

@LiamW Sidebar on the right hand side.

@aediaλ No problem. :)

@waiwai933 Oh, I'm blind ;-)

I wish this started afternoon my time, instead of just before the start of work!

I have a question I want to ask, but it'd require visiting lang-8.com, and doing that on my work computer is not a good idea!

It came during my workday, I've tried to kick off a few meta questions and do a little work on the main site but I can't go full time on it.

Nobody can ... that's what a community is for.

Its bed time for me here in England :-( At least it is for a 15 year old.

I'm heading out. Don't go getting all the ELL reps without me!

I'm a bed too. toodles!

G'night! Don't let the bedbugs bite!

I can't @ people because characters in your usernames aren't on my keyboard :-(

@LiamW Try tab-completing the usernames: Type the @ and the first character or two of the username, then press the tab key.

@aedia Unfortunately, I am using my Nexus 7, so that doesn't work,

@LiamW You can also reply to a specific line... oh, you probably know that, and you're just on your tablet, huh.

@LiamW Can't imagine who you mean :D

Right, sleep for me I think. Not a bad opening this though :-)

@MετάEd: Not sure why you're editing quotes, but please stick to straight quotes in titles - they get converted during rendering anyway

@Shog9 I can surely do that, but I have also been advised otherwise on the titles. I think the issue is that they do get converted during rendering but not in other contexts such as syndication.

@MετάEd Correct - they're rendered as ordinary quotes in most contexts

@Shog9 That's what I thought. That was the rationale for changing them to inverted commas. I'm curious, then, what's the opposing rationale for leaving them as ASCII quotation marks?

@MετάEd Avoids unnecessary use of characters that can't be converted to ASCII in the titles

@Shog9 In what circumstances does downconversion to ASCII take place?

@MετάEd Who knows? There's no short supply of buggy client software out there.

What possible advantage is there to adding them?

@Shog9 Ask hundreds of years of publishers in print and now online. This is only my opinion (though I know others who would agree): there should be a very clear problem before we should consider banning certain characters from titles or anywhere else just because they are not ASCII. Considering that this site is for ELL, we are quite likely to get questions which require non-ASCII characters to pose anyway, so that bird has flown.

But if we are going to ban non-ASCII characters from titles, I think we should put that in the FAQ pretty quick. There are a number of people who use non-ASCII in titles who are involving themselves as volunteers here.

@MετάEd I'm not banning anything.

Not to mention that there are probably thousands of EL&U questions with what you might call unnecessary non-ASCII characters in titles.

@Shog9 Or even discourage.

I have to say, if there is a real problem I am the first to agree to what you are saying. Unicode is great but not at the cost of making the site useless.

It's an edit that can only benefit clients we can't fix if they're broken.

So why make it? You accomplish nothing on the site itself. Is there a specific, external context where you feel it improves the output?

@Shog9 Syndication.

@MετάEd Which client do you use?

And of course reuse under license.

Google Reader.

Oops, gotta go. Thank you for clarifying!

To be perfectly honest, a lot of my unease wrt typographic quotes comes from years of dealing with broken text due to MS-Word's codepage braindamage.

In this day and age, there should be fewer problems

But believing that requires me to trust programmers to think of non-ASCII punctuation, and that's slightly more difficult than buying into the existence of yeti