What on Earth?

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1:14 AM

@uhoh I find it astonishing how many of your questions end up on the hot list of SE

@uhoh very often I find something on the hot list that looks interesting, and before scrolling all the way down I can guess it's an "uhoh" question

uhoh

1:34 AM

@Gimelist I don't quite understand it, but I guess after asking ~1800 SE questions I've finally figured how how to write them.

A: How do I find out how hot I am? Is there an easy-to-see user's total HNQ (total hotness) counter?

We do not have any sort of counter for this anywhere on the network, not on a per-site or network wide basis... though that's not because it's not potentially interesting information. We didn't track whether a question was on the HNQ list until February 2019, so creating a feature like this wasn'...

Gimelist

@uhoh lol

I guess it's kind of unusual well researched questions

much better than "IS THIS QUARTZ WITH GOLD???" or showing a piece of chert and saying "IS THIS A METEORITE???"

uhoh

I know what you mean. It would be great if the UI displayed a "how to ask IDENTIFICATION questions" box as soon as people started typing word that suggest this is where the question is going.

A problem is that when there are frequent quickly-closed questions, some people can start getting used to writing less-than-welcoming comments.

When we start composing questions, the UI checks our words and starts suggesting similar question even before tagging or posting, so the functionality exists.

It might not be so hard to use the existing functionality to pop open the "how to ask IDENTIFICATION questions" box quickly.

Gimelist

@uhoh I don't know about you, but something like this earthscience.stackexchange.com/q/16669/725 deserves a bit of unwelcoming comments

On the other hand, this earthscience.stackexchange.com/q/16664/725 should not be closed because it's not strictly a rock-id question. It is a legitimate question (although asked in an awful way)

1 hour later…

uhoh

2:54 AM

@Gimelist Except for extreme cases of abuse, new users should always be welcomed to a Stack Exchange site.

A new user who comes to this site is not presented with any particularly visible cues how to ask a question. It's there, but you have to know where to look.

Best way to address these kinds of questions is to improve the UI to help new users by making a "how to ask" more visible. This has been discussed in the main meta and so far there hasn't been any substantial change.

So as long as the SE UI lets people ask without helping them know how to ask, we must be welcoming and helpful to then when they don't ask the way that it turns out they should have.

4 hours later…

Gimelist

7:24 AM

A person who asks "I have a green rock, what it is" without even doing the minimum of showing a picture, is not going to read your guide. Trust me, I've been here for long enough to know how these things work.
But yea, in general I agree that rock-id questions for we should do the thing you suggested in the message I just starred

even though IMHO rock-id questions should simply not be allowed on this website. If you have a rock and you would like to ask about some aspect of it e.g. "I have this granite, what is the green mineral?"

Otherwise questions along the lines of "I found this on the street what is this", should be deleted immediately

2 hours later…

Universal_learner

9:06 AM

I totaly agree what is my green rock with no picture means I will be here for two minutes

once we have the warning I am thinking we need to post for rocks "put a picture with an augmentation glass of a fresh-cut" isn't it what I always did on my degree?

let's see if this one wants to collaborate and we, for one time, identified something wich is supossed to be the tag purpose

Q: Id request: Unusual shape, gritty texture hard rock

What are these rocks? We are importing dirt from local pool companies digging in the area. We live denton, tx (north texas). One company dumped about 4 loads of very red sandy loamy dirt and 3 loads of fine brown sand with some unusual shapes rocks. I was putting the sand in my garden bed beca...