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A problem has been festering in SFF's chatroom for some time now. And in spite of the best efforts of your moderators and room owners, it doesn't seem to be going away. I've observed the activity in SFF chat for some time now, and I've come to believe that the problem boils down to a fundamental lack of respect for each other by some of the most active ...
56
First of all, allow me to be clear - Richard is an active and well-respected member of the community. His contributions and participation as a user are not in question. However, over the course of the last few weeks we have become convinced that he is not as well suited to being a moderator. I will do my best to explain how and why, although out of respect ...
42
You could get a piece of paper approximately three inches wide and use masking tape to attach it to the side of your monitor.
Artist's Impression.
38
While different StackExchange sites have different standards and norms, they still share a lot of similar traits. If you know how one site works (how to write a good question, how to give a good answer, the mechanics of up/downvoting, etc), you already have a good head start in fitting into any other StackExchange site.
Due to that, if you have more than ...
35
What is Movie Night?
A movie is chosen, either via a meta question or simply by royal decree.
How is it supposed to work?
At the agreed time, we all gather in the main site chatroom and press start at the same time on our respective copies of the chosen movie. Generally for an hour or so before the event, there's discussion about places where you can buy/...
33
The problem with questions like this is that it's basically a live hand grenade waiting for some imbecile to throw themselves upon it.
While it seems reasonably clear and common sense that grimble and gromble are not appropriate personal pronouns and that this person is a troll, anyone who dares to say such a thing is likely to be flagged and/or openly ...
26
Quite frankly, you brought this on yourself. You were unnecessarily obtuse when people tried to fix your question, insisting on keeping it in a state that turned a reasonable (on-topic) question into an off-topic one. You were given numerous chances to fix it, and others even tried to help you get it into a good state, but you went so far as to roll back the ...
26
A new FAQ regarding the updated CoC is due out shortly. I've seen a draft of it but until it is public it is not official, and until official guidance is due out I don't think it makes any sense for any elected moderators -- whether on strike or not -- to handle such issues. After all, SE has already summarily removed a respected moderator before the CoC was ...
24
You were suspended for posting inappropriate content by a mod who has been entrusted by the powers that be (read: the community team) to make that judgment.
In my opinion, it was merited. And for your sake, I really don't think you want to discuss the specifics publicly.
Wait 12 hours, come back to chat, and try to be nicer in the future.
23
ArtOfCode put it very well, but I'm chiming in here for the sake of clarity.
SFF's main chatroom is in an unusual place right now in that it's being guided back to the Be Nice standards of the rest of the Stack Exchange network so that the community here can continue to enjoy it. As such, tolerance for things which fall into gray areas is unusually low ...
22
First of all, go to the search box in the left-hand side of the topbar:
You can type any word or collection of words into there to get a list of all posts on the SFF site containing all of those words. Putting - before a word will exclude posts containing that word, so e.g. voldemort -dumbledore will give you all posts that mention Voldemort but not ...
22
I've forked "Most Downvoted Answers" to show the most downvoted questions.
The top 5 (at the last edit)
1) What is “DON'T PANIC” a reference to on the dashboard of Elon Musk's car? (71 downvotes)
2) Is Captain America gay? (48 downvotes)
3) Has George R. R. Martin described the color of Daenerys' pubic hair in any book? (40 downvotes)
4) What is JK ...
22
Basically, it's luck of the draw.
There are a number of factors which can go into how many views a question gets. The most important ones I can think of are as follows, in (IMO) decreasing order of significance.
Hot Network Questions.
Search engine results.
Promotion elsewhere.
Hot Network Questions
This is a list of questions from all across the network,...
21
I intended to stay out of this whole mess, since I'm not entirely objective, but feel like I should defend @Keen here (not that he needs it), because he clearly did nothing wrong. Specifically, I want to make sure everyone gets the sequence of actions here, and why the "older" question got closed as a dupe of my "newer" one.
Sometime ...
21
Probably because deleting duplicate questions is discouraged here.
We have a very clear meta consensus, and it's even tagged faq. To quote from the question:
If I post a question after searching and determining it hasn't been asked. And later find out, on my own or by a fellow user that the question is a possible duplicate. Is it encouraged to delete the ...
21
I can't see anything in that answer that would qualify for deletion. It's not spam, it's clearly an answer to the question being asked, and there's nothing rude or offensive in it.
I've vote to undelete and so have enough others -- it's been undeleted.
If people want to critique the quality, that's what comments and downvotes are for.
For the rest of the ...
21
The new Code of Conduct doesn't give you room to do anything about it.
Neo-pronouns are not clearly defined, there is no authoritative list of them, they're rarely used, and they don't follow common English grammatical principles.
Any other set of words that would fit that criteria would be edited or corrected to fit modern English convention, but the new ...
20
Please report these sites to the Stack Exchange powers that be:
A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What do I do?
Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the form on the contact us page, linked at the bottom of every page.
Use the "Other" reason on the form (fortunately, we don't get enough of these reports to justify making ...
19
No, edits intentionally always bump the question; it's part of the peer-review process that keeps the network well-groomed. As a matter of fact, there have been a number of pushes to get moderators that ability, and even they have been declined.
It's fine to bump questions with properly substantive edits, just try to rate-limit yourself so no more than ~4 ...
18
What I do largely depends on the media in question.
Books
I have all of my main books in (full-text searchable) e-book format:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, etc.
All seven Harry Potter books, plus the Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts published scripts and the three Pottermore e-books
Most of the canon Star Wars books and novelizations, and ...
18
This text is called the alternative text or "alt text." Users with impaired or no vision, poor internet connections, or other difficulty with loading and viewing images will see or hear this text instead of the image. Alt text should not be confused with "title text" (tooltips), captions, or other text that accompanies an image. In most cases, if the user ...
18
I'm very sorry to hear that you're not having a good time on your first day with us. Let's have a quick review of your actions so far;
Q. "Genetics and Origins of Mutants/Inhumans" - Rather too vague and immediately identified as a duplicate of one of the site's most viewed questions. I'm pretty sure it came up on your "suggested" questions list when ...
18
I marked your answer for deletion because you seem to be trying to make some sort of ham-fisted political point about Hitler and the British Empire rather than making a serious effort to answer the question asked.
You've offered no evidence that the wizarding world view the British Empire in this way and are basically using the question as a vehicle to ...
17
Stars are commonly used to denote favorites
It’s not merely Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange that uses a star to denote favorites. The other stacks do, too. Here are the “favorite” icons for Worldbuilding, Meta Stack Exchange, and Physics:
Note that the physics icon is even in a circle.
They’re commonly used for this purpose in other contexts, ...
17
There is an answer buried in that wall of text:
So back to question, why would a Jedi serve a corrupt democracy? well why are our leaders doing the same thing in real life? because generations of subtle changes and eventually you will see the integrity of our system rot from the inside out like it is.
The post suggests the answer is that the Republic ...
17
For commenting anywhere, you need 50 reputation points. (This equates to 5 upvotes on answers or questions, so you should be able to pick up those points fairly quickly if you have good content to contribute.)
For commenting on your own posts, or on answers to your own questions, there's no reputation requirement - you should be able to do this. If this is ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible