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Use of affiliate links on this site is NOT allowed. If you find them, edit themout. If it becomes repeated or persistent, 'flag' them as spam. If someone edited someone else's answer to add an affiliate link, flag the answer as “other” and explain the problem.
Affiliate links are fine in your own blog. But using them in this type of Q&A is completely ...
10
No - there should be no punishment for closing questions
Closing a question is a temporary state to let you know that something is wrong with your post. Once a question has been closed you should consider the following:
What was the reason it was closed with?
What feedback have you received in the comments on your question?
Is there anything you can do to ...
7
Of course, it would be possible to do something like this:
tick http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Dialog-accept.svg/16px-Dialog-accept.svg.png This is a great thing!
x http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Dialog-error-round.svg/16px-Dialog-error-round.svg.png This is a terrible thing!
Or, more like the OP has it:
...
7
Actually that is by design. We're currently in private beta, so uncommitted users wouldn't be able to see it.
Source: Sharing Links On Non-Public Beta Sites
7
Let's try something a bit more subtle first:
This'll appear to folks visiting /questions/ask regardless of their reputation.
6
SE keeps an eye on metas everywhere, and even if its a general request, its usually fine to leave it on the site meta. There's no practical reason to move it.
6
Fun fact: we had around 4 different versions of the same pages, so we just cleaned things up a little. No features are lost in doing this.
The content of these pages was literally identical (give or take a search box), so feel free to link users to the help center where before you'd link them to either of those routes.
My proposal is to both reinstate ...
6
You need 350 rep to be granted the access to the review queue.
For a private beta site, voting to close and reopen is a privilege granted to everyone. But this will quickly change once the site gets out into public beta. When you get 350 rep, you should be able to get the review link at the top bar.
5
Yes, they should be removed automatically if possible.
And we should remove them manually if impossible.
5
I posted a response to your question on mSO, as figured I'd leave it here too so that people here can inspect it.
I really don't know if we should do this. Sure, it'll get us a ton of
traffic. But do we want that traffic? By the very nature of the site
itself, we're not going to be starving of users.
Another thing to consider: SR isn't (and ...
5
When the site enters public beta and gets its own moderators, they will have the ability to migrate posts over to Meta Stack Overflow. In the long run, though, the need for migrating to Meta Stack Overflow is narrow. General Stack Exchange features are fine to ask on the per-site Meta instead of Meta Stack Overflow.
The point of having a per-site meta, ...
5
Our migration statistics (link requires 2k rep) for the past 3 months are: 3 questions migrated.
Even accounting for the fact that some questions would have been migrated if there had been a way to do it without involving mods (most questions manage to get closed without mod involvement), that's way too small to warrant creating migration paths.
In my ...
answered Jan 24 '16 at 12:41
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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5
Is there anything we can do so community members can add more details as to why they are flagging a specific post as spam?
They can/should be using custom moderator flags if it's not obvious the post is spam. However, since the custom flag option says "A problem not listed above that requires action by a moderator." it's understandable users choose the spam ...
4
Shog9 has added free and alternative back to the list of disallowed tags and also added free-software. free and free-software guide the user towards gratis and open-source.
It turns out that disallowed tag entries are culled automatically if they aren't triggered for 90 days. Our experience shows that this isn't ideal: our undesirable tags came back. Maybe ...
answered Mar 4 '15 at 13:10
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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4
As a community manager at Stack Exchange, it's not really my position to accept or reject individual feature-requests, but I can speak to why some of these features work the way they do.
When you think about the "reputation system" as a metaphor for "rewards and recognition", an author is primarily "compensated" for their post by the up-votes they receive ...
4
Right now, we have 865 posts using a pre block, out of 13362 total (that's about 6.5%). A very unscientific sample of those suggests that code here is often used for running things in the command line (which we probably don't want highlighted) or for other non-highlightables - think AutoHotKey *, input examples, theoretical config files, etc.
Again, this ...
4
I'd echo Michael Hampton's point - based on what we saw on SF, we concluded that an interstitial with a ton of info essentially tests one thing:
How badly do you want to post? Unfortunately, that appeared to have little correlation to how conscientiously you were likely to form a question.
It appeared that the page chased off some real percent of posters, ...
4
/about /tour (the two point to the same thing) is kind of the new /faq#on-topic, it's a lot more discoverable than /help/on-topic. Nevertheless you're right, we should update that. I've added content similar to our /about. Feedback welcome.
answered Feb 27 '14 at 0:14
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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4
Tagging and synonyms are created when questions are asked in actual practice. There doesn't seem to currently be anymore questions tagged [online], so we don't generally create synonyms before there is an actual problem or use case for the tag.
4
When I create a bad tag like that, I usually just edit it out and the tag will die on it's own (all tags with no questions go out of the system at 0300 UTC every day).
Then create the right tag and copy the wiki over (note that you might have to wait until the old tag is removed before you can add the new one if they have very similar names).
3
As it already is an issue on SO, as you write, I'd rather raise this concern on mSO (if that has not already been done). I know of many other sites having affiliate parts automatically removed from posts while they are "saved" (sometimes even replacing them with their own affiliation). So IMHO this would rather be a task for the devs to cover SE-wide.
3
For straight merging (renaming), only moderators can do this. The best way to request this is a post on Meta.
However, users can synonymize two tags, if:
You have the suggest tag synonyms privilege.
You have a cumulative score of at least 5 in all your posts in the tag being synonymized.
You can then click the synonym link on each tag page, and suggest a ...
3
Only moderators can rename a tag. You can ask for that in chat if it's obvious, or on meta if community discussion is needed.
In general, if a tag is misspelled on just one or a small number of questions, just edit it.
Once a tag is not present on any question, it will vanish from the list the next time the nightly cleanup job runs.
However, this is a ...
answered Feb 7 '14 at 21:57
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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3
This is automatic, as I believe Chrome titles the tab based on the HTML <title> tag. The engine automatically sticks what it thinks is the most popular tag on a question in that title tag, even though it's not present on the actual title at the top of the question. This is part of the SEO strategy we employed to help climb over the SEO scrapers.
You ...
3
Good point! I just created that tag-wiki accordingly (and re-tagged the two non-matching questions). One more thought here is that in the future we might need a third variant of "task manager": todo lists. As for now, they should fit into project-management (project: "My Tasks" :D).
3
The master tag is now sql-server and I've created mssql as a synonym. We don't need to introduce every variant: if someone starts typing ms-sql-server then mssql will show up as a completion, and as for sql-srever it shouldn't be in the SO list, we can't catch every typo.
answered Mar 31 '14 at 12:10
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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3
I would rather not see this type of pre-populated template in the Question box.
By auto-entering a pre-populated template into the Question box, you are essentially forcing all the questions to look the same. Lots of questions won't fit whatever template that we end up with, and they will read very awkwardly.
Also, when every question looks the same, it ...
3
As a moderator on Stack Overflow, I'm against this. Recommendation questions take a lot more effort to moderate. We'd have to train the Stack Overflow community, the Super User community, Server Fault, and anywhere else we do this, how to moderate recommendations.
Moderating recommendations is hard. Honestly, I'm not sure we can train three very large ...
3
If that were possible (reading the comments), then Yes. This, however, may be not possible as looking at some of the other StackExchange sites, each Help Center is exactly the same. This may be something where if content is to be added to the Help Center, it has to pass through Stack Exchange's Meta.
If it is possible, I agree that this would be a great ...
3
This would be very welcome here!
There are always a hundred questions in review, and the volume of incoming off-topic questions is such that our community is not able to reduce the backlog despite doing its best.
It leaves the 3 moderators alone to do all of the work of closing questions, which is not their primary role, and causes burnout.
Single-vote ...
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