24
Kill it with fire!
The General Reference closure has caused nothing but contention here, and its current implementation has accomplished far more harm than good.
I recently asked about whether google is a valid resource for determining if a question is General Reference. Despite 19 votes between 3 answers (one now deleted), there is, as of now, no clear ...
24
Nuke the entire tag from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
24
I don't see us ever taking away the ability to report issues in chat or on our sites.
If you want a free-for-all chat where anything and everything goes, Stack Exchange chat is not the proverbial droids you're looking for.
24
Mainly, no
Comments are not for discussion. That’s why we can flag comments as, for example, “too chatty.”
You can respond to questions and statements that users make about the question itself, but even then, if a conversation gets too long, it should be moved to chat. The fact that banned users won’t be able to follow you there may be a bit inconvenient, ...
22
No. Whatever our personal feelings may be on the matter, the site should remain apolitical on an official level. Update your personal userpics if you wish.
21
The Powers That Be are trying to make it easier to manage all of the various SE sites. As part of this effort, we are temporarily left with a design that is stupid, boring, and soul-less.
15
I'm strongly in agreement with Beofett's answer here, particularly this:
Why is it not sufficient to say "if a question is trivial, boring, and demonstrates little to no research, downvote it"? Note that the hover-text for downvoting states quite clearly that a question or answer should be downvoted when it "does not show any research effort" or "it is ...
14
The point of badges is to reward behavior we want to encourage. Giving badges for getting a precise rep display for a bit doesn't really reward anything, it just gives people with 667 rep a reason to downvote a random post.
Just take a screenshot of your milestones.
13
There are three major problems with your proposal:
First, and most importantly, you're making a broad assumption that such questions are welcome here by the community. As near as I can tell, that is not the case. The target audience (13+ users) is inclusive because that's what we want, not because we can't figure out how to target a different audience. As @...
13
Because flagging does have real uses. If someone is coming in and legitimately name-calling, insulting users, and being disruptive, that's what flags are for. There is no perfect system, no way to prevent abuses of any system. But flagging is the system we have in place to prevent abuses of the chat room itself. Of course there will be those who want to ...
13
To get an updated answer
There's a bounty reason for that:
To get the OP to review acceptance
There's no certain or by-design way of doing this. Just ping them in a comment (assuming they're still an active user and likely to see your ping, which in this case the OP is).
Alternatively, if there's already an accepted answer and not a new answer reflecting ...
12
I think the implication of the caveat against "what if x happened?" questions is that they should only be asked if they're supportable (e.g. that there are sufficient in-universe reasons to think that something would have happened had something else not happened or if there are good reason to presume that there will be out-of-universe sources to draw on such ...
12
No.
The second most frequently used tag is Harry Potter - currently with 2099 questions.
In fact, of the top five tags, two are science-fiction (Star Trek, Star Wars), and two are Fantasy (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). Totaling up their questions, the Science Fiction and Fantasy camps are neck and neck.
There is no reason to change the name.
12
Alas, no. One of the key policies on SE is that your voting is private and confidential. If you received a notification of which of your answers had been upvoted, shortly after a user had deleted themselves (or been deleted), that would obviously breach the policy.
The last time this was asked on the main meta site, it was closed as status-bydesign, e.g. "...
12
Right now it takes 3,000 reputation to cast a re-open or a close vote. We don't want "casual users" voting to close or open questions, we want users who are invested in the site and making it a better place all around. I know that some people have, in the past, suggested making account-age a substitute for reputation requirements, but it's always been shot ...
12
I created a UserScript which does just this – you specify a list of tags, and it will unhide spoilers on any question that uses those tags.
I developed and tested it with TamperMonkey in Chrome 47 on OS X, although I see no reason why it shouldn’t work in other browsers – this is just vanilla JavaScript.
Here’s the code for the script:
// ==UserScript==
//...
11
No
I really like the idea of having a custom close reason for this, but I am strongly opposed to having a custom off-topic close reason for this policy.
Questions closed under the future-works policy are not off-topic. They're perfectly desirable questions1 that were just asked X days/weeks/months/years too early for our liking. Using the same hammer for ...
11
These tags don't have icons "just because"; they are sponsored tags. See this main meta post, for example.
This is a sponsored tag - in other words, a company has decided to pay money to put an icon and to put links on the tag page. Moderators cannot edit these; they are only added as a result of a tag sponsorship.
The tag sponsorship program is ...
10
This Data Explorer query, when run on Movies&TV, gives us a list of incoming migrations. It's not filtered only on migrations from SciFi, but 99% of them are, so I won't bother forking the query to allow filtering.
Results: From the beginning of 2014 there have been 14 migrations from here to M&TV. None of them have been rejected by the M&TV ...
10
There are a few problems with requiring people who vote to close to post a reason:
People won't do it, and bad questions will stay open.
On other SE sites where there's lots of voting to close, you rarely see the custom off-topic close reason used because it takes more time than it's worth to type out a more specific explanation.
It's a waste of people's ...
answered Jul 25 '14 at 5:24
Ward - Reinstate Monica
8,8981 gold badge16 silver badges26 bronze badges
10
The problem with keeping top comments around simply because they're top comments is because a lot of them are simply humorous or joking comments, or replies to previous comments. Taken without the other comments, they won't make sense. Or, if they are simply standalone funny comments, they are cute and all but add no permanent value, so there's no reason to ...
10
Since no one has formally answered, let me just point out the two major issues with this proposal (so you don't feel ignored :) )
You're asking in the wrong place. This kind of change to the site would require changing the software, which is not something the site-specific moderators can do. This kind of feature request needs to be asked on the meta-meta ...
10
Just don't use it.
The ability to renounce a specific type of badge isn't something SE are going to implement on a site-by-site basis, so the place to request this would be main meta. IMO, they're unlikely to want to implement this at all, but if you can convince them to abolish discussion dupehammer powers (or, more likely, all dupehammer powers on meta ...
10
Yes
We should point to the new chat room.
Maybe
Perhaps the best option would be to create a clean, canonical question-answer pair on meta, tag it with faq, and then point to that.
9
After reviewing Gilles' data and talking about this internally for a while, I agree that for a site like SciFi where there are no allowable classes of tags that apply to most questions, this culling isn't helping.
Disabled.
Please keep a sharp eye on https://scifi.stackexchange.com/tags?tab=new for crap tags.
9
I think there are a couple of ways to respond to this suggestion.
First, the most practical and immediately relevant: this is something you would have to take up with the Stack Exchange developers, and would likely need to be a code change, and would likely impact the entire Stack Exchange network. All to deal with a single, subjectively-assigned category ...
9
While Jason Baker already gives quite an exhaustive rundown of the motivations for a multi-user review process, I'd like to approach your notion of a "ridiculous double standard" a little more from a mere conceptual viewpoint.
There is very well a difference between making that edit yourself and just giving someone else doing it your Ok. An actual edit ...
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