Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Remove "Post" terminology from sites other than META

+0
−7

Why are (outside of META where it makes some sense) Questions and answers called Posts?

Is this because the coders are trying hard to show neutrality or are wanting to reuse some code snippet?

As an answerer and a questioner and I suspect most other visitors to the site, occasional and recurring it would not bother me one little bit if a Question was called a question and an Answer was called an answer.

I would actually personally feel more heard.

It may even be possible that search engines will give more weight to the site Answers if they are formally labelled as such.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

2 comment threads

There are more sites which have non-Q&A content. Take for example the recipes on cooking or the photo... (1 comment)
Where is the "posts" terminology you're referring to? (2 comments)

2 answers

+8
−0

There are other types of posts (and other types of top-level posts).

In a comment you mentioned the category bar that contains "posts", "tags", and "edits". This has to work on all categories on all communities. While every community has categories where all top-level posts are questions, some have other post types like articles. See, for example, Papers on Electrical Engineering, Recipes on Cooking, and Blog here on Meta.

You might then think that ok, we could use "questions" for the Q&A categories and "posts" or "articles" for those other categories, but there are two issues there: first, a category can include more than one top-level post type (questions and articles, for example), and second, more post types can be created through the UI (not baked into the code). Rather than trying to choose the right word for each category on each community, we use "posts" which is true everywhere.

You also mentioned URLs. Post-type-specific URLs actually work; you can access this question using https://meta.codidact.com/questions/286465 (which is then rewritten to the "post" URL). Originally all our post URLs embedded the type like that but, again, it wouldn't work for new post types. There are still places in the code that hard-wire the idea that questions, answers, and articles are the only post types (the stats on the profile page, for instance), but this is technical debt, not the desired design. We've created one new post type through the UI (wiki) already and people have talked about others. There will be more post types, almost certainly.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

0 comment threads

+4
−0

Questions are called "questions", and answers are called "answers". Sometimes you want to refer to such writings generically regardless of whether they are questions, answers, articles, papers, or whatever. "Posts" is the generic term used here, which seems reasonable enough.

We need both the specific and generic terms.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

0 comment threads

Sign up to answer this question »