@G.Moylan I'd be interested in comparing your de-novo idea to my prior implementations.

@Rubiksmoose I think that is left over from when "too localized" was still a close reason.

Looks like that newly accepted (unsupported) answer on the dance-off question has 2 delete votes already

would that be a "not an answer" or "low quality" flag?

delete votes are not flags

they don't have to have a specified reason

right but flags at least bring attention to it

@G.Moylan A low quality flag may get mod attention to place a "support your answer" banner

sorry, I misunderstood you I think

@G.Moylan If you are asking what flag would be appropriate I believe mxy at least said NaA in the latest meta on this.

A Modest Proposal for answers that aren't backed up

can an answer be deleted after it's been accepted?

@G.Moylan It can actually.

We don't do it often at all, but it has happened at least once before that I remember

@Rubiksmoose Do you have a link to that question? I'd be interested in it.

@GcL Yeah let me see if I can dig it up

Sweet. Thanks!

@GcL rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/122197/…

It reached an impressive -20 during the course of that.

I wish I could see it :(

An accepted answer that accrued 20 down votes. I'm entertained. That is informative.

It was the first answer to a question by a new user; no surprises here.

New users tend to accept answers very quickly.

@Rubiksmoose that's an interesting timeline

I feel better about that situation. I think I would find a highly upvoted and accepted answer being deleted less palatable.

@GcL Sure, even with that question there was a bit of drama. OP requested the mods to undelete it (which they did) then the community nuked it again.

a wrong answer can sit at the bottom of the question without notice. An accepted wrong answer will rile up the community

@Rubiksmoose That seems fine.

I'm fairly certain the answer would not have reached -20 if it had not been accepted. But after accepting I think the community wanted to send a strong signal that the answer was not correct.

(if I had to guess)

@Rubiksmoose That's my interpretation of downvotes as well.

> ...voting down a post signals the opposite: that the post contains wrong information, is poorly researched, or fails to communicate information.

@JohnP Your interpretation of downvotes does not include "answer was not correct" ?

at least RPG runs into very few of the "gems" that inhabit fitness and medsci.

@GcL That's straight from the help pages. And I would interpret "post contains wrong information" as "not correct".

@Rubiksmoose Just to be super-clear, he's advocating delete-voting and leaving a comment that explains your delete-vote there. Not flagging as NaA. (I mention that because I understand the NaA bar to be rather higher; see also meta.stackexchange.com/q/225370/311001)

@nitsua60 ah! Sorry for that. I saw the language "not an answer" and (perhaps understandably) linked the two. I did think it was a bit odd for a recommendation.

Thanks for the correction :)

@GcL He was providing a supporting quote from the Help Center from what I can tell

@nitsua60 Is there a maintained aggregation or index for these meta posts that are policy?

@DavidCoffron Gotcha. Now I am left wondering, is that one of the help pages with content that is actively discouraged?

@GcL There is a meta tag for policy that would be a good place to start.

@nitsua60 so if I flagged as NaA should I revoke it then? I don't want a bad flag mark

@G.Moylan you should unflag if you have come to believe you flagged it wrong, but you shouldn't worry about declined flags, they do not mean anything

@Rubiksmoose That's kinda what I'm looking for, but not really on the money. It doesn't include some of the "policy" posts that get cited.

The tag wouldn't have gotten me to when is an answer not an answer.

@Carcer thank you

@GcL Correct. It certainly doesn't catch everything. There is no centralised place for all policy-related Metas.

@Rubiksmoose NaA is one of the hidden tricky spots around our tools/guidelines, I think.

@G.Moylan IIRC the wording around the NaA flag is not that the answer is wrong or has inaccuracies, but that it doesn't even appear to address the question. SPAM, gibberish, a string of expletives, &c. are all NaA.

So I'd not validate an NaA flag on something that's even in the ballpark of addressing the question posed.

(VLQ may be a better flag--put it in front of other delete-voters' eyes.)

And a special application: when a question answers for a completely different system that is being asked about.

@Rubiksmoose Good catch.

@Rubiksmoose It would be hella useful if there was. What's the mechanism for putting a post on "featured on meta" ?

@GcL That is a diamond privilege. Normally done when something on meta is hot, new, and broadly applicable to the functioning of the site. Basically only for the things we need tons of eyes on the most.

@Rubiksmoose Hot on meta appears to be a different category. The commandments policies seem like they would be broadly applicable that everyone should have had eyes on. I wonder if a moderator maintained list of posts of current policy would be a good fit for permanently featured.

@GcL I'm not actually sure if such a thing is realistically feasible. My initial thought is that it would 1) be a pretty massive amount of questions which makes an index much less useful than just searching for the question of interest 2) would require a lot of judgement calls on what is "policy" and what is "guidance" which could get messy.

@Rubiksmoose Also messy to maintain as policy and guidance change over time.

@GcL Ah yeah. That was poor word choice on my part. I mean hot in the figurative sense not as it is used on the site. Sorry about that!

@Rubiksmoose That sounds bad. Asserting policy, but not having a concrete list of policies to point to seem... odd at the least. A nebulous set of policies buried in a set of related looking things seems like a suboptimal solution.

Like finding out about secret laws by breaking them.

@GcL Well we don't always sit down to make a policy. Like on mainsite we often work from a specific problem and figure out how to solve it. Then if that problem comes up again we go back to that and see if it helps. That's what happens a lot of the time.

@Rubiksmoose Sure. Then asserting there exists a policy, but users have no way of finding out what is a policy before running afoul of it.

@GcL Well using the site is always a bit of a learning process. Most of our "policies" don't really come with punishments and are generally correctable.

It's especially confusing if the help section of the site is not authoritative and has some actively discouraged sections.

There are almost 0 new users that are going to sit down and read hundreds of Meta posts before acting on the site, and honestly, they don't and shouldn't need to.

@Rubiksmoose Having questions closed, being hounded by comments, and getting multiple revisions without understanding why can seem like punishment to some posters.

@GcL Indeed it can. And a lot of that is mostly beyond our control because it is ingrained into the base mechanics of the site.

wait we have a twitter account?

@GcL the problem you're running into though is that the philosophy of the great stack overlords is that the site is supposed to actively discourage new users who can't deal with all that stuff and don't actively conform themselves to the site's expectations

we can talk a lot about wanting the new user experience to be better but fundamentally what that means is that we politely explain why we're closing their questions and downvoting their posts

@G.Moylan That's what got me to this site in the first place! (saw a Tweet about this question)

However, that is where other users come in and pick up the slack. I consider one of my jobs is to help educate users and help them, new and old, to learn how to smoothly navigate the site. And I know a lot of other users do this as well.

@Rubiksmoose It would be useful for even long time users. Getting a nasty-gram about some policy or another may seem like being side swiped when it seems impossible to have known about the policy prior to the comment.

@Carcer ^

@GcL What I'm saying though is I don't think that it would be that useful honestly.

@Rubiksmoose It would at least provide something resembling transparency. Instead of some inscrutable collection of posts that only those in-the-know can dig up and poke you with.

Are you going to read through 700 (random number) Meta Q&As all with multiple answers and long histories before doing something? No. If anything the thing you'll do is search meta to find the topic you are interested in: a feature that is already built in. Right?

@DavidCoffron I love silly questions and answers like that

@Rubiksmoose That's a good point. Are there 700? are there 10? are there 100? Is it currently knowable how many there are that are touted as policy?

@GcL I don't have an estimate.

@Rubiksmoose When posting a question or answer, they'd have to know about the issue that they're going to be prodded with before searching for it on meta. There's no collection of the issues that should be considered and are going to be addressed by mods or other users.

Honestly though, our FAQ covers that large majority of issues in my experience.

@Rubiksmoose Neither do I. I thought the policy tag of 41 seems reasonable, but it didn't have some of the posts that get cited as policy... so maybe more?

@Rubiksmoose That looks like a promising tag

Here's the bottom line, for new users, we're not going to design a system that gives them every bit of policy we have on the site. That's simply not useful. Most new users likely don't even know Meta exists. And almost all of them aren't going to bother to read anything there to begin with anyways.

The way we flow things is that we handle problems as people come up against them and we try to do so in a friendly accommodating way (often fighting the systems in the site itself).

@Rubiksmoose Yeah. That would have been hella useful to me to have stickied. Here's the list of things that you can be poked about.

@Rubiksmoose It's still nice to have been able to read the rules before breaking them, even if one doesn't choose to do so.

or guidelines before ignoring them.

or policies before flouting them.

or lines before crossing them.

The opacity of policy in the Stack Exchange is by design, as a gatekeeping tool to weed out people who the developers consider insufficiently dedicated to the Cause. Although they're trying to backpedal on it recently, it's baked into the infrastructure.

@GcL that not all-inclusive though. Don't forget about all the stuff in the Help Center.

@BESW Seems like a "feature" that could be worked around locally.

@Rubiksmoose I found out it's not authoritative and has guidance that is considered bad.

^ Because the questions that "survive" are supposed to be equally as curated as their answers - because the goal isnt always just "answer the persons immediate question" but to create a reusable Q+A that can be directed to or discovered by anyone who needs that info

that Up arrow should point at BESWs message but i typed too slow

@GcL We do our best, or try to at least. But in the end we are working within a system that is sometimes working against us and sometimes doesn't allow us to do what we want to to help.

@Rubiksmoose That faq list seems to be a really good start if not nearly comprehensive answer. There seems to be a way to sticky it so that it's very visible.

@GcL It is a very good place to start.

@Rubiksmoose Yeah, I was mostly pointing it out as "this could have been a good answer... but unfortunately the user deleted it instead of improving it". (I don't know what other comments might have been there requesting they support it before, as I only saw one by a diamond mod asking them to support it by adding citations.)

@GcL it's definitely a solid resource

@V2Blast Yeah I picked up on that intent and appreciated it. :)

Just a quick note since we've had like a billion questions today: I think this question can be opened. I'm honestly not sure why it was closed. Take a look if you have a minute.

I'd assume at least one or two close votes were before the edition was clarified. (OP also misunderstands how infusing an item works, but I assume that's the sort of thing that should be clarified in an answer instead)

Yeah the core Q is valid: "what happens?" - all the in combat stuff is secondary

@V2Blast I suspect you are right.

@SirCinnamon Except that very few users bother with Meta. But I like the analogy you are proposing.

@Carcer I liked the question, and was tickled pink by David's answer. I suppose someone will now cite "gorilla versus shark" as the reason that the question receives down votes.

@G.Moylan What do we do? Shoot a horse. (Film called "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" about dance competition that I recall from the days of my youth)

@nitsua60 I check VLQ a lot at Aviation.SE and Christianity.SE as I wander through the review cues. Those two topics attract a lot of tripe.

@KorvinStarmast I can see how the letter does, but what kind of "tripe" does Aviation get?

Word challenge time!

@Someone_Evil haven't you heard of flying fish?

The Sadness of a Sultan

The Melancholy of a Monarch

now go!

The Tears of a Tyrant

the Trepidation of a Tyrant?

@Someone_Evil Because (per a discussion on meta) they chose not to be an expert site, but a site full of enthusiasts, and because flying interests people, a lot of ignorant crap with no research or clue shows up. I hit the review q about every other day. I flag the VLQ a lot. I significantly reduced my participation there once I got a feel for what they were or were not willing to accept. I still drop by and am now and again able to provide something useful.

@G.Moylan ooh. I like

do you accept Despot? because there are many great D combinations

The Sorrow of a Sovereign

@G.Moylan of course xD

Despondency of a Despot

also Dejection of a Despot, or Dolefulness of a Despot

The Dejection of a Despot

Cheerlessness of a Caliph

@DavidCoffron per G. Molan ^

@Someone_Evil The reason I care is that my first career was aviation, and misinformation in that area of endeavor can kill people.

The Dolefulness of a Dictator

@DavidCoffron The Quietus of the Queen

@KorvinStarmast I'd sort of hope that anyone who has managed to be in charge of a plane isn't relying on stack exchange for flight tips

@G.Moylan I prefer:

The Calamity of a Caliph

oo that's a good one

and then Cheerlessness is nice with Chancellor (that we it is consonant sounds too)

@Carcer Hope is not a method, and yet I concur with that sentiment. But I put no upper limit on bad judgment.

Misery of a Marquis

@G.Moylan nice!

The Woe of a Warlord

The Despair of a Duke

The Pity of a Pope

I'm trying to find one for Funk but I'm not finding many F titles

@G.Moylan well, "Fuhrer" is the obvious one...

lol true there's that

The Fugue of the Feudalist?

Not sure if that tracks or not.

The Heartache of a High-Born

His Highness's Hernia

The Zenith of the Zealot

The Hemorrhoids of the Heirarch

@KorvinStarmast VLQ, I'll admit, often leaves me flummoxed. (Even before modship, and especially now.) It's not clear what anyone wants me to do with the knowledge that a flagger thinks a post is VLQ. Pile on a downvote?

Elicit delete votes?

@Xirema We should definitely do a whole alphabet of this.

Scrub? Until one has delete vote privileges, I think one can VLQ to get others to start deleting? Let me check priviliges page ...

The Antipathy of the Autarch

headed home have a good one o/

@nitsua60 You can't delete until 10 K, but one gets into review queues at 3k. I suspect the VLQ is a trigger for getting people to drop a delete vote if they notice the q or a is that bad.

@KorvinStarmast Yeah. The line between "low quality but downvotes and letting it sit out there as (negative) signal" and "such low quality it should be deleted" has never been at all clear to me.

Wow, I just when to Christianity.SE and there were no things in the queue. That's a first in almost a year.

(Frankly, I'm not sure why we need to delete answers that are low quality. Downvotes don't do enough? NaA, sure. But honest--and bad--answers?)

@nitsua60 OK, I guess there isn't a hard line and it is left up to judgment.

@nitsua60 well it's SNR innit

@nitsua60 Janitorial functions include garbage removal. ;)

Core value: high signal to noise ratio for main site questions.

just deleting answers the community agrees are very bad improves the general quality of the content that is seen

Blues of a Bishop

The Nemesis of the Nun ...

Keening of a King

Jarring of a jarl

@Carcer So does downvoting, though. Answers past the first couple are rarely seen, especially if downvoted.

@nitsua60 but we can still see them

doesn't just knowing that they're there make you feel dirty?

I'm all for SNR. "Here (up top) be signal and thar (belowdecks) be noise" seems as useful to me as "here there be signal, and no little noise will be suffered to live." In terms of SNR.

what about if we characterise it as a service to the users whose answers we delete

we're saving them from the prospect of bad rep and downvotes forever and they can learn and try again free of that historical burden

Psychopathy of a Psychopomp?

Myself, I see not deleting answers that are just low quality as a kind of buffer against the flaws in the wisdom of the crowd.

By voting it to the bottom of the page but leaving it visible, the crowd gets to opine but the individual gets to judge.

gameinformer.com/e3-2019/2019/06/06/…

(It's basically a Honey Heist drift, but instead of being a bear crashing a honey convention... you're a sword trying to escape wherever you're being held.)

@BESW I think this is basically where I am.

In this micro version of Blades in the Dark, the players are pitched against an overwhelming Darkness. The Lords of the Palid Sun have risen and with them, the legions of the dim Carcosa. Can you and your rag tag band of Sellswords venture into the eldritch realms and defy death itself?