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Title shamelessly stolen from Arqade, body cribbed/stolen from same question

Some time ago, a proposal was announced on Meta Stack Exchange to address the growing workload of the CM team, and for them to actually start addressing community requests and feedback again: Our Commitment to Responding to Meta and Moderators.

Long story short, if something requires review by a CM, we should tag it and they will get to it when they can. This new system has already started.

I thought it might be a good idea for us to review some of our old bugs and feature-requests, to see if there's any that we should bring to SE's attention. Note this is not a guarantee that these bugs or requests will be approved, or handled in the way we want (in fact I'm pretty sure some below will be flatly denied) - but bringing them forward for CM input will at least provide a way to get some closure.

What we need from you:

Pick an existing question tagged with or . If you find a question that requires this tag, then please do add it to the post before submitting here.

One question per post please, votes on these answers will be used to decide what our priorities are. (Of course if the one you want addressed is already posted, upvote it instead). At the end of this process, we will pick the top 5 and add the status-review tag to them.

The Arqade meta post lists a bunch of good candidate questions, but I haven't been able to do so myself.

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    I'm going to add some additional answers to this now that are at least a couple of years old. Some are SE level changes but per SE rules any requests can be posted anywhere. Also I'm not entirely sure of the merit of all of them, some aren't great but we might as well let the community have some fresh eyes on some older posts that are at least somewhat worth revisiting. If the community doesn't like them I'm sure they'll be downvoted into oblivion.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 10:56
  • Just another note, I will be posting quite a few answers here, just make sure not to vote too quickly as it may trigger the reversal script.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 11:09

6 Answers 6

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What should the new background/theme look like?

The decision asking if we wanted a new theme after the update was pretty unanimous and we collected some feedback on potential ideas for a new one. Almost two years later I think it's time we get the ball rolling again on this one.

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    Note that we need to build up some kind of community consensus before tagging as status-review. In its current state the CMs would just look at it and say "so what do you want us to do?"
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Aug 20, 2020 at 11:26
  • @Randal'Thor I got the impression, and this is going off of my memory, that when talking to Catija at the time it was only for us to give ideas anyway. They might completely ignore them and do their own thing or build off of our ides or use all of our ideas etc.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Aug 20, 2020 at 11:32
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Can we have relevant icons on tags?

I'm well aware that tag icons are due to sponsorship, however, this older post asks about adding them outside of sponsorship. It would add a little flair to the site, a nice visual aide, on the tags to visually distinguish them better.

Alternatively, and more on a side if we don't just want them to look pretty, it could be possible for either us, or SE themselves, to actively reach out to various companies/people for sponsorship deals on our site. A big production company might not be fussed, but a small time author might be if it meant generating more content/interest about their works.

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  • I doubt this one will pass review since it would not only devalue the paid offering but also add confusion about which tags are sponsored.
    – TylerH
    Jan 13, 2021 at 16:18
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Can we add a way to allow tags to be marked as dependent upon other tags?

Our whole tagging system is a mess relies heavily on tag hierarchies. Other tags are dependant on each other and so if a question has tag 1 then it should also have tag 2 on it. This would require a major overhaul of the basics of how tags work, however, it would make the system a lot easier to use and save time for everyone else to fix things with it. It could also, depending on implementation, allow space for more tags.

To give a quick example it would mean a question tagged would automatically have the and tags added to it.

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  • I'd prefer they were suggested by the system, which I'm sure happens on SO all the time?
    – AncientSwordRage Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 11:23
  • @AncientSwordRage We could do something with the ask page overhaul I think, I mentioned it on the suggestion we went with but to be honest couldn't be bothered to get everything put together as it was a lot of work and I'm not sure it was worth the effort.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 11:26
  • Maybe I was overly optimistic, but I assumed the system on SO used heuristics to figure out 'hierarchies' but I could be wrong?
    – AncientSwordRage Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 11:27
  • @AncientSwordRage I don't know, I haven't been on SO for a long time. However, I would doubt it's done by a machine.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 11:29
  • It should be incredibly easy to do with a bit of SQL and a cron job.... But I can imagine that it could be done manually.
    – AncientSwordRage Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 11:35
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    @AncientSwordRage SO does suggest some top level tags depending on if you have another tag (e.g. if you ask a [sql] question or a [vba] question it will prompt you to add the flavor of SQL or the application you're using VBA in. However, this is an ad hoc feature for only a handful of tags, not a system-wide thing.
    – TylerH
    Jan 13, 2021 at 16:20
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    I would love to see this, but I think it would be a network-wide endeavor (and one they would have to, in turn, roll out on a site-by-site basis, since tags on each site are so topic-specific). Careful consideration would have to go into how to handle the 5-tag limit when you add a tag that 'auto adds' another tag, if you haven't already added it to the question.
    – TylerH
    Jan 13, 2021 at 16:21
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See: New Feature: Table Support

Add support for tables

This one seems like it would be quite useful and was popular. We also moved to CommonMark now and so it should be possible there. If not MathJax could be enabled for its usage (I believe it has tables but not entirely sure). Lastly, Arqade mentions support for tables also, so whilst this is a SE level change rather than SFF I think it fits fine within the scope.

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    What would we be using these tables for?
    – Valorum
    Aug 24, 2020 at 22:40
  • @Valorum Answers to a question like this one might benefit by including the tables.
    – Alex
    Aug 24, 2020 at 23:43
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Ignored tag still shows up in HNQ?

Spoilers, people don't like 'em. HNQ + spoilers, well we're just asking for trouble there. A request was made a while back to make it so ignored tags don't show up in the HNQ. This seems like a good middle ground between blocking the whole HNQ or putting up with spoilers. We're always going to have people complaining about them so it seems sensible to minimise their effects. People can already hide tags on the site itself so extending that to the HNQ just fits in nicely.

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  • This would probably be way too costly to implement. You'd have to run a check for the current user on all the sites to see if they have an account and if they do, do they have any ignored tags, and if they do, what are they, and what are all the tags on each of the questions on the HNQ list (if that's stored somewhere in DB or just pulled dynamically, which I think the latter is the case), and are there any matches. Every page load.
    – TylerH
    Jan 13, 2021 at 16:22
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Can we have a per-tag "Make Spoilers Visible" button?

Allowing users to opt in to automatically uncovering spoilers on posts which have a specific tag seems like it could be useful. If you're not bothered about spoilers on a particular work yourself, spoiler tags are only really a nuisance. Especially so when you get to a popular just released work and a question with lots of answers. This seems like it could be worthwhile and work hand in hand with the Watched/Ignored tags feature.

With the release of new post formatting spoilers are now no longer going to uncover on hover but require a click. This means the linked feature is likely to be more useful to ease frustration.

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