Matthew Haugen

@Ryan Hey--just reading over all this and your meta posts.

@Noctrine Well, indeed.

@SMSvonderTann No, copyrights, trademarks, and licensing questions are not within our scope. You can check out Startups or Law for those, though--they're better resources for most questions about that type of IP.

And sorry for the delayed response, I just started a new job yesterday so things have been a tad hectic.

I'm happy to reopen that question, but we need to establish through some reasonably quantifiable means (as much as anything of this sort can be quantified) where we draw that line.

@blunders I definitely see your point. And I thought a lot about that question ever since it was first posted. But I guess here's the question: where do we draw the line? Maybe I was wrong, and the line should be further out than that, and I can live with that. But the area is very fuzzy, and we have to think long and hard about where that is. Business is a uniquely wide-reaching topic, so it's not always obvious whether the scope of our site should encompass a specific question or not.

@blunders Oh strange, I thought I clicked delete. Can you tell I deal with computers for a living? Yeah. Anyway, I've deleted my comment as well now. Sorry about that.

@blunders Just seeing this, but yes, that comment was phrased poorly. Sorry. I've removed it.

@blunders Moderation has been pretty quiet lately, even compared to before--everyone seems to be behaving, as far as I've noticed. We haven't been talking much lately, and we definitely haven't moved anything there. I know I've just been super busy with work, so I haven't spent a bunch of time in here.

@blunders "Important" is a subjective and relative term--I think a strong community is an important aspect to the site, and I think community is built by communication, but I wouldn't directly say that to be successful, a chat room must be active. If that makes any sense. I'd love to have more people talking in here, but if people don't feel like it, I have no interest in forcing them to.

@blunders Done.

@blunders Huh, that is interesting. Definitely bordering between legal advice and illegal activities. I have no issue with it personally, though.

@blunders This is turning into a very busy week for me (unrelated to Stack Exchange), but I'm still thinking about that.

@blunders I can think about writing a meta post about them, but that might be difficult since I don't think that genre has been well-defined yet. Probably the best I could do would be something of a reiteration of the blog post Good Subjective, Bad Subjective. But I can think about it. I definitely feel your concern, but I tend to think that risk pays off in the sorts of answers we get.

I think we just really need to work out our view on tool requests. I've already expressed on multiple occasions what I feel on the matter, but it's very clear (unsurprisingly, I'll add) that that doesn't cover every case.

Wait, just kidding. I just saw your comment.

But yes, in this particular case, may I ask which question we're talking about?

@blunders That's why I said I was speaking more broadly than you--there are a lot of times when I see users write comments about "I'm not sure if this is on-topic here" or when there are questions that are very blatantly out of our scope, with no votes or flags on them. I work on the (questionably correct) assumption that maybe other people read these chats, so I like to put that in from time to time.

I don't know whether you in particular tend to avoid that or not, but speaking to a bigger audience, be careful with close votes, but not too careful. If something deserves to be closed, it should be. That's how we keep our site's quality high. It sometimes feels icky, especially if we feel like we can help the person, but that's when I like to point them here to chat.

But in general, as a plain-ol' user of the site, I do think there are some questions (I don't have any examples) that I probably would have voted to close that never got there. Of course, as a moderator with a binding vote, I have to be more careful with those cases. My point here is, if you feel like something should be closed and other users aren't doing it, voting for it isn't a bad option.

@blunders Asking about particular questions ("Does the community feel like this question is still a list question, even after its latest edit?") is, while not necessarily as all-encompassing as a canonical source, still an important part of meta. If you're concerned or curious about a particular question, you're certainly free to ask about it.

@blunders I know you got a notification for this, but for anyone else reading along, I just posted an answer about what I feel to be the big part I'd like to see us work on. I don't know how attainable my goal is, and we aren't in such a bad spot independently of that, but that's been my view.

@blunders You might have to start the ball rolling on that one. I have a few things I could say, but nothing all that important, and I'd like to hear members of the community first.

@blunders Speaking of things to discuss, though, I would love to hear some people's input on your meta post:

Obviously, and I hope we all know this, but I should say it anyway, in any cases where there's evidence that someone might be of danger to themselves or others, a flag should be used so that a moderator may bring it to the attention of a staff member. That's not directly relevant here, but I definitely don't want anyone taking what I'm saying so seriously that they're afraid to flag in such a situation. When in doubt, flag.

Again, citing the example of a Stack Overflow question about writing a key logger, I'd hate to have a legitimate question like that deleted just because someone felt that it was probably going to be used to break the law.

@blunders I don't really know. I mean, you know how I feel about them--unless there's something obviously illegal actually being asked about ("How can I keep authorities away from my underage pornographic website?"), in which case a flag is appropriate, it's really up to users what they want to disclose publicly on edge-cases. Warnings in comments like "this might not be a good thing to post publicly" are fine, but I don't think active intervention is really our place.

True, true.

@Nero I was kind of hoping someone without a diamond (but with 1,000 rep, to edit freely) would handle it, but perhaps we aren't quite there yet as a community.

That said, if there are any questions that anyone has about it that need an employee's expertise, I'd be more than happy to ping a Community Manager and ask for input.

@blunders Yeah, it's really up to us how seriously we want to take it, and beyond that, how much we really care about the metrics that it looks for. It's important to consider the results, and the process for that matter, but it's really a community matter, so Stack Exchange employees leave it up to us.

@Nero If it makes you feel any better (or worse), that user happens to be the one that actually proposed Startups on Area 51. But no, there are review bans occasionally given out, but ultimately there's a reason that review actions aren't binding--some people take it more seriously than others.

@blunders Community will post the results when it's done. That said, it's not super uncommon for users to post answers to that question with their thoughts, so if you'd like to do that, all the power to you. The automated process, of course, knows only which one of the three options you've selected, and it doesn't know why you've selected it.

If someone wants to take a stab at reducing my verbosity, be my guest.

@Esq Fair enough, not a bad idea. I guess it doesn't hurt anyone to have, so I undeleted it.

I could edit it down to be a bit more manageable, but I don't have that much time right now so I figured I'd let other people answer, and maybe undelete later, depending.

@Esq The valid point was made that it was probably too long to be helpful.

@Nero ^^

@blunders I agree with Nero's edit, but I also agree with your point. My solution was to leave a comment, informing the user of our standards and welcoming her to the site. This way, the comment can be deleted eventually, and the post isn't cluttered with non-question material, but users looking for the link will still be easily able to find it in the revision history if they'd like.

> Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Startups as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe your problem or need and the steps, if any, you've taken to solve it.

@Nero Software Recommendations might be a match for it, but they'd probably need more information to go on, and I don't know whether they're good with APIs and white-label things. I just put it on hold using our "off-site resource" reason.

And if you miss things, reviewers will improve the edits. That's not such a bad thing. As long as you're trying your best and not actively hurting content, it should work out. And if you are hurting content by the community's standard and don't understand why your edits are being rejected, that's what Startups Meta is for.

@Nero The "too minor" rule was always a mess. Don't worry about that. Worry about fixing the post. Some posts only need a few typos fixed, and if that's the case, go for it. If you think they need more than that, then do more. That's the theory, at least. It doesn't play out quite as well on Stack Overflow, just because it's a bigger community with more, let's say "inertia," but here on Startups, I'm sure your edits will be appreciated as long as they fix everything you feel needs fixing.

@Nero Yeah, that's always a frustrating predicament. The standard response to that is typically "make suggested edits!" I've seen some users get several hundred rep points from those. There's almost always something that can be fixed in posts, and it's great to improve the site like that, but it can get tiring, and you want to make sure your edits are meaningful and complete.

But you're almost half-way to being able to see and cast close-votes here on Startups, so you'll experience that soon enough, I'm sure.

But yeah, flags are an interesting matter. There are a lot of special cases in how they're formed and handled, but in general it would be difficult to display them to users without some privacy concerns, and once you hit 3000 rep, there's not much use in seeing them since close-votes are more serious indicators, since they'll lead to actions.

@Nero Ah, yes, the result is a flag, as I understand it. I thought you meant the reasons posts show up there.

Although in the specific case of the Triage queue, I think that's mostly the result of automated processes. Flags are a pretty small part of it.

@Nero Yeah, that makes sense. The thing is that flags are really meant as a private correspondence--one of the only ones on the site--so even our moderator agreement specifies that we aren't allowed to talk about them. It's less of a big deal in practice for things like off-topic, but the principle carries over.