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Yes, please change the threshold on close/reopen votes.
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Is it fair? I don't know. Fairness is notoriously subjective. What's fair to one person, is often unfair to another. Since you mention you're new to the community, it might be helpful to first learn what the justification is for the current system. So let me suggest a different question: Does reputation serve its purpose?
What is the purpose of ...
7
There is a Stack Snippets feature that we can turn on. However, as we told GIS:
[Snippets] are really only for JS/HTML/CSS code (a replacement for jsfiddle.net, basically). A good indicator of whether they'll be useful on a site is the number of answers with javascript in them, and especially posts linking to jsfiddle.
Not being directly the topic of the ...
7
If the answer was recent and is deleted, try following the “deleted recent answers” link at the bottom of the “Answers” tab in your profile. The URL is https://cs.stackexchange.com/users/recently-deleted-answers/ followed by your numerical user ID.
I'm not sure what the exact criteria for inclusion are. The answer must be recent (60 days if I remember ...
answered Sep 20 '17 at 14:13
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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6
I'd guess it's a side effect of the fact that Stack Exchange considers comments second-class citizens: transient, liable to disappear at any time, not a priority for preserving, etc.
Or, it might be a side-effect of the fact that all deleted comments are treated the same way, and the primary way that comments can be deleted is for them to be deleted by a ...
6
I consider deleting one's question after receiving an answer to be an abuse of the system. If you're aware that this has happened and the question is appropriate here, you can raise a custom flag for moderators; moderators are able to undelete the question. The problem, of course, is that it can be hard to learn that the question was deleted after you ...
6
As D.W. points out, something like this was already implemented on StackOverflow! Hence, this feature only has to be turned on.
I propose that this feature is turned on on all the language-specific tags (c, c++, java, python, prolog, haskell, lisp) with the following warning text:
Questions about $LANGUAGE are often closed as off-topic!
If your ...
5
Before I get to your question of whether the question ban system is fair and should be changed, let me first explain a bit of how getting out of a question ban works in the current system. The full information is in this help center article; (Note that moderators do not have more information or are able to lift question bans) I will highlight the points I ...
5
I think the title is misleading. SE doesn't promote cheating; true is that it doesn't (and can't) prevent it.
There is no tech solution to this human problem.
Here are two simple ways everybody can take to make the site less attractive for cheaters, neither of them new.
Don't answer obvious homework dumps.
I've actually been saying that since ... forever. ...
5
I suspect it's very unlikely that Stack Exchange is going to change the behavior of the software for just this site. Realistically, the revenue from our site is nowhere near large enough to make it a development priority. My impression is the general trend has been that other projects (e.g., Teams, Careers, etc.) have been a higher priority for software ...
4
You do not directly lose reputation because you answered a question and the asker's account gets deleted. You only lose reputation in two cases: if the account that cast an upvote or an accept vote on your post gets deleted, or if your upvoted post gets deleted.
If the account that cast a vote is removed, the vote is removed. This helps limit vote inflation ...
answered Mar 26 '19 at 23:31
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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4
This has come up before, so I'm not going to repeat what I wrote the last times:
Self-deleted questions
Another self-deleted question
There hasn't been any change in the Stack Exchange software. Askers can unilaterally delete their question if it has at most one answer and that answer has no upvote.
As a reminder, our policy is that moderators undelete ...
answered Feb 1 '19 at 12:07
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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4
We've just turned this on for you folks. Enjoy!
4
We've turned on Syntax Highlighting in an opt-in basis. That is, to use it, you'll need to specify the language for your highlighting in an HTML comment, as explained in the Editing Help section for Syntax Highlighting. It will also apply it to questions that have a particular language tag, though I don't think that's a regular occurrence given the subject ...
4
Congratulations Joey that you work at the company that created the awesome yEd - Graph Editor (I use the Java-based desktop application, not the browser-based one). While I do see benefit in educating our users (via posts on cs.meta) about the great tools allowing create nice looking graphs and other illustrations (succinctly describing an idea or ...
3
We're not really sure why it wasn't turned on for Meta - it should have been enabled here when it was enabled on main. It's enabled now. :)
3
I can suggest two ways to handle the case where you misinterpreted the question:
Delete your answer. Enough said, no further action needed.
Delete your answer. Post a new question, that asks the question you thought you were answering, and post your answer there.
How to choose between those two? It might depend, for instance, on whether you expect the ...
3
That would depend on whether your question is a computer science one; embedded systems touch multiple fields. There are multiple SE sites that potentially fit, for instance these:
Computer Science Stack Exchange for questions about algorithms, data structures and other principles of data processing.
Stackoverflow for programming questions.
Programmers Stack ...
3
It is now possible to protect a tag from this silent deletion by [writing a tag wiki] (Do not expire single-use tags that have a tag wiki).
So that's one more incentive to write a tag wiki when you create a tag.
answered Oct 25 '15 at 11:44
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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3
Because the math can include things like \def, \label, \ref, etc., it turns out to be a more complex process to do incremental updates than you might think. I did a version of it here, but I don't think it works any more (hooking into the SE editor was fragile, and I think the code has changed since I wrote the userscript, and it no longer is able to hook ...
2
You may use this online graphical tool to create Latex formulas:
http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php
2
I definitely think that syntax highlighting can make huge chunks of pseudocode more readable. At a minimum, keywords could be fat to indicate some structure.
The hightlighting method Stack Exchange uses is already able to let the use choose from a list of languages (for each code block). Thus, every user could pick the language that matches their pseudocode ...
2
In the last 90 days, there have been 16 CS => SO migrations and 2 have been rejected.1 That migration volume falls just short of my prefered criteria.2
That said, there have been 94 questions closed with the custom reason pointing to Stack Overflow. Since these were not migrated, we can't actually know how many would have been rejected, however. (Migrating ...
2
Algorithms are generally on-topic; implementing them is a gray area since programming questions are offtopic.
This question would certainly be welcome on our site.
Note that we have a tag [distributed-systems] with many questions on Paxos already.
2
You can:
create custom filters;
watch tags, configured at https://cs.stackexchange.com/users/tag-notifications/$userid;
create a fancy search and bookmark it;
subscribe to tag RSS feeds like e.g. https://cs.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=algorithms+sorting&sort=newest.
2
I suggest keeping the close vote requirement (stuff gets closed quickly anyway) but lowering the open vote requirement since there is usually less interest in questions that have been closed, and this makes it hard to reopen prematurely closed questions.
2
I don't want to disrupt your suggestion, but I can make the following offer in the meantime:
If you see a good question that you think is of high difficulty and has a good answer that hasn't received the recognition or reputation points it merits, leave a comment here, and if I agree, I'll offer a bounty on it.
1
A similar feature has been requested on the main Meta: My work has been deleted - how can we discourage that? and People deleting their own questions once they have an answer, but the system hasn't been adjusted since January 2011.
I guess that if the Q&A are really worth keeping, you can always raise a ♦ moderator flag to have the question ...
1
Apparently you can create a post here. So open a new post here. write your text. You have the same formatting possibility as on the main site. You can view your formatted post here without actually posting it. Save your text in a local file using a text editor and discard your post here. You can also use Formatting Sandbox or Sandbox for drafts of long, ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible