The Water Cooler

12:10 AM

Hey guys, for your reference, if we get slammed by hot questions again in the future and start racking up bad answers, Shog has enabled question protection by trusted users without having to wait 24 hours just for TWP. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility, so don't abuse it or he'll revoke it.

2

jmac

12:56 AM

Lots of bad answers that should be voted down on this question:

23

Q: How do I keep the passion and energy up after 17 years of writing software?

I'm in my mid-forties (wife, mortgage, kid in private school, etc.) and I'm feeling a little burned out on web application programming. It's my main marketable skill (and also my biggest hobby) so I don't think I'm going to choose a new career yet. I've been programming for 17 years. I actuall...

career-development

(one more close vote would be nice too, if such is your desire)

jmac

1:07 AM

This one too:

11

Q: Cheating in a phone interview

I'm going to interview someone on the phone, I have been involved in a few in-person interviews before but this is my first phone interview so I have some concerns about the process. It's a technical interview for a software developer position. What if the interviewee had some notes with him dur...

professionalism interviewing software-industry phone

jmac

1:19 AM

So many of the answers on the above question are just miserable repeats of answers that already came, and the original question is unclear on what it's actually asking. It seems to have turned in to generic "how should you interview" advice which isn't what the question should be addressing.

jmac

1:34 AM

I've protected the first question on the list as it is picking up a lot of pretty bad repetitive answers...

gnat

6:21 AM

@jmac recently, I got a habit to vote up Stack Overflow questions and answers from the hot list, to "off-load" part of lemmings attention from smaller sites. With their moderation, these are hopefully less of a problem to them...

@djechlin the difficulty is that no other site is SO. No other site has the number of active moderators to protect questions quickly, 20k+ users to delete bad answers, and the shear volume of other posts to cover up some of the damage on the front page. On smaller sites, we may be lucky if there's a mod on at that time, or a 20k+ user (much less three) and the front page moves at a glacial pace compared to SO. What works for SO doesn't necessarily work for the other, smaller sites. — MichaelT Jan 10 at 17:28

jmac

7:44 AM

@gnat Shog disagrees with you unfortunately. He thinks that despite SO having a lot more users, it also has a lot more problems with spam and other miscellany balancing it out. I think moderation is affected by economies of scale, but I'm going to wait until there are a few more numbers.

gnat

8:38 AM

@jmac well frankly, Shog's disagreement here worries me least of all. Unlike me, he has tools and means to solve the problem at the roots (you know, that feature request:). As long as SE team doesn't give a shit, you know, I try to do what is possible for a regular user trying to protect sites I like...

11

Q: Reorder questions picked for hot list based on adjusted hotness score (discard some answers by voting evidence)

Executive Summary The 100 questions are selected for the "Hot Network Questions" list displayed in the sidebar of each site. These questions are designed to showcase other sites in the Stack Exchange network. Those questions should act as ambassadors from that site to the Stack Exchange Network...

feature-request voting hot-questions answer-quality

jmac

9:58 AM

@gnat Yeah, I disagree with him too, but his feeling is that it can be handled by site mods, or by finding someone with the power to moderate across the network. Which it can be. Once the next data dump to the explorer comes out, I'll do some digging in to the impact of high-volume questions on site moderation burden to at least try to point out that it is a problem.

gnat

@jmac if it can be handled that way, I would be more than happy - i wouldn't even bother with these dead end MSO feature requests. Thing is though, we tried it at Programmers for at least a year (maybe more, I seem to be not the first to notice issues with hot questions there) - and it doesn't work...

17

Q: Answers quality in hot questions

For few recent months, I've got a habit of downvoting answers which quality doesn't look OK to me. These probably can be generally described as low effort and/or these lacking relevance to question asked. Opinionated slogans, claims that are not backed up by appropriate references or by ...

discussion answer-quality hot-questions

What is especially depressing is that regular ways to deal with this kind of issues just don't work. It's typically not difficult to edit the question to repel garbage answers, I can easily name a handful of active regulars who can and do just that.

Thing is though, it takes some time to figure how to clean up ambiguous wording while preserving the essence of original. In regular questions this works like a charm, but when editing a hot one, I often find out that when I'm done with edit, someone already posted an answer that invalidates my edit. And answer that exploits another minor ambig…

jmac

I think the general way it should work is:
1) Hot Question Detected
2) Question Auto-Protected
3) 2 Trusted Users (or 1 Mod) can Unprotect

4) Visit volume compared against average
5) If Visit Volume (or post volume) is increased by over some fixed amount, community managers are informed (through a notification on the mod thingie, or by e-mail, or by a ping to their normal inbox, whatever)
6) They pop in to chat and say, *"What can we do for you?"*

How did this get an upvote...?

0

Q: What should be the title of "Thank you" email?

How should I title my "thank you" e-mail after technical phone interview? Is just "thank you" itself enough? Is there some accepted practice?

interviewing hiring-process job-search email

Hugo Rocha

11:21 AM

Good morning folks.

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