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Activity for Olin Lathropâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: What's more important for codidact - quality or helping questions get answered? site culture seems to be more like the "quality content" group. This is counter-productive to growing the site. Absolutely not! We strive to be a site where people can come to get good, reliable, peer-reviewed answers. Everything follows from that. As good questions result in good answers, ... (more) |
— | 27 days ago |
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A: Should we change the dashboard layout? Let's not. The community order makes little sense as it is now (based on creation date?), but at least it is fixed. It's arbitrary, but you get used to where things are. It would be even worse if things moved around. Resources would be better spent on a customizable network-wide dashboard per u... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
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Going back in browser encourages accidental duplicate posting. I wrote an answer to a question, followed a link somewhere, then went back in the browser (Alt back-arrow in my case). Somehow I managed to go back from where the answer was posted. I saw my answer in the edit window, and thought to myself "Oops, looks like I forgot to click SUBMIT", so did that.... (more) |
— | 2 months ago |
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A: Minor suggested edits to old posts I rejected several of the edits as post author, not as a moderator. Edits to the content were trivial at best, usually none. One suggested edit made the title longer without adding any meaning, thereby making it worse. In most cases, the only change was the addition of a tag. The fact the quest... (more) |
— | 2 months ago |
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A: A refactoring convenience function. If you want to evolve multiple questions from a long writeup, do it outside the site. There is nothing preventing you from writing as much text as you want as fast as you want into a file on your own system. Then, when you're ready, you can break up the brain dump into individual coherent posts. Y... (more) |
— | 2 months ago |
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A: I can close my own question by myself, but not reopen it If we let authors close their own questions, it should only be allowed if there are no answers. I wouldn't want to spend time on an answer to have it stuck in a closed question because the OP is planning on changing the question. Once an answer has been written, the question shouldn't change in mea... (more) |
— | 3 months ago |
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A: Can you post a question just to answer it yourself? Others have already pointed out that self-answering is not only allowed, but even encouraged when you've got some insight you think would be of value to others. Over at the Electrical Engineering site we've even taken this a step further with the Papers category. It can be a more appropriate way ... (more) |
— | 3 months ago |
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A: Why do we have "General comments" threads? The "General comments" title is a left-over from earlier versions of the software that didn't have comment titles. When the threaded comments were introduced, and thread titles with them, existing comments were put into a "General comments" thread. Every new thread should have a meaningful title.... (more) |
— | 3 months ago |
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A: New activity grey circle indicators confusingly triggered on Dashboard I have been noticing a lot more unexplained activity bumps too lately. I thought it was because spam or whatever got deleted, and I couldn't see those deletions as an ordinary user. However, this morning I saw an activity indicator on the Electrical Engineering meta category. I'm a moderator the... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
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A: What community would be appropriate to ask a business question about software development? None currently, as I understand the scope of the existing communities. (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
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A: What fluff (and what level of fluff) is acceptable in posts? Not allowing fluff was the norm Elsewhere, and I consider it the norm here unless explicitly stated to the contrary. I am not aware of a community here that has stated they like content-free greetings, closings, and the like. I would therefore feel free to edit out such fluff, preferably shortly ... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
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A: What is "clutter" in the context of Codidact? Clutter refers to the unwanted or uninteresting stuff you have to dispense with before getting to what you want. On a Q&A site, that usually means low quality questions. These questions clutter up the site so that when you look around for good questions the low quality ones get in the way and make ... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
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A: Outline of what makes a high quality question Your three pillars seem like a good way to describe three orthogonal aspects of question quality. However, you have devalued your own "question" here by introducing personal values onto your three pillars. If this question is about the three pillars, whether you agree how they should be valued or... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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A: Notifying each other that a commented-on issue is resolved, to produce fewer comments rather than more Go ahead and flag the whole comment thread as no longer needed. I'm a moderator on EE, and wouldn't mind receiving such a flag. Maybe some day when site activity gets much higher that might be an issue, but not now nor any time soon. I'd rather get the flag than have a useless comment hanging ... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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A: Feature request: direct messages In addition to what Mithical said (+1), if we do ever get a direct message system, it must be opt-out by default. In other words, it must take a deliberate action by a user before they can receive direct messages. facilitate some misunderstands and clarification if those without the need for a pu... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
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A: Problems i have encountered/seen in the last week Just like on SE, things are vastly different between individual sites. You say you came from StackOverflow. Our most similar site is Software Development. It does seem to have reasonable activity, and there aren't any 8 year old questions there. That's because we deliberately didn't import existi... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
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How to avoid triggering mathjax? Apparently, two dollar signs in a paragraph cause the text between them to be interpreted as mathjax. How can this be avoided so that dollar signs can be written literally? I tried escaping the dollar sign with a "\\" before it, and also using the HTML entity "$". Neither of those wor... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
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A: Who should be able to create new tags? Currently, those users that know the least about tag policy are the ones generally creating tags. New users shouldn't be allowed to create tags arbitrarily. It takes some experience with the site and the tag policy to create good tags and not make a mess (as has already happened). Tag creation s... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
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A: Indication that I have flagged a post You can find all the flags you've raised, their text, current status, and moderator response. Click on your profile in the top right corner. Then in the lower right of that you'll see "Flags raised" with a count. Click on the count. (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
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Shouldn't be able to delete question after any response This is in response to something that happened on the Math site, but it's really a Codidact-wide issue. A week or two ago, someone posted a poorly written question. Not surprisingly, the question wasn't well received. However, I did write a few comments that pointed out confusions, asked for cla... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
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How to send message to mod other than by flag? Is there a way to send a message to a moderator without raising a flag? If yes, please explain. If no, consider this a feature request. I tried to send a message to a mod about a question that got deleted, so there was no way for me to do that with a flag. I ended up flagging an unrelated post ... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
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Let moderators grant abilities. As a moderator on EE, I'd like to be able to grant abilities to specific users. Personally, I think the system is way too restrictive with the edit ability. If someone abuses it, there will be consequences. A history is kept, and edits can be easily rolled back. Suppose an ordinary user decid... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
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A: Proposal: remove Twitter from profiles Get rid of all that stuff. Having an easy way to make a link to a few kaffeeklatch platforms that are currently popular doesn't add much value. Users can already add any links they want to their profile. That's even better since they then get to chose how the link is presented, what's said aroun... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
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A: Some code blocks extend into the right hand panel on desktop Code blocks are for showing source code, where lines must be shown as written. Wrapping could change the meaning. Long lines in code blocks must be shown as long lines. The best the system can do is provide a horizontal scroll bar. It looks like it is, so I don't see the problem. (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
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Get rid of minimum character requirements Various places in Codidact where a user enters text seem to have a minimum character requirement. If you enter fewer characters than that, the system keeps the "submit post" button greyed out, pops up a message that a minimum number of characters are needed, or the like. Let's get rid of these li... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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Let's not allow animated avatars. The first animated avatar someone has used here (https://cooking.codidact.com/posts/288814) points out that we don't have any rules addressing them. Let's not allow this. This falls into the same category as someone using all blanks in a user name, a profile picture that is all the background col... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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A: How discussions work in Codidact? Votes on meta should mean agreement or disagreement with whatever the post is proposing. Corolary: That means meta votes should not count towards rep. It is not "bad" to disagree with someone. We expect some range of opinions within a community. Users shouldn't be penalized or rewarded for ... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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A: We need to talk about Abilities coupling permissions with specific experience in the area of the permission is a good idea and should be kept as the basic premise of the permission system. I disagree. This is the basic flaw of the current abilities/permission system. It is trying to be overly specific and misses the forest for... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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A: How does displaying users in the "users" tab work? But I was surprised to see that most of those users were all 1 point users with very generic looking profiles. I expected older users to be the ones with more points. Isn't that the case? I also checked out the software development community and electrical engineering community and sorted the user li... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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A: "Needs author's attention" should not be a flag option It should be a flag. If a post needs author attention, then it's not ready to be answered and should be closed. Until we get a better close mechanism, this is the only way ordinary users can contribute to getting a question closed. Effectively, only mods can close questions here, so this flag is... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
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A: Let's improve how we manage proposals for new communities This is a step in the right direction, but I think the new system will still have a few problems: Mixing all the question for all the proposals together in a single category will be quite off-putting to asking questions. If someone is interested in underwater basket weaving, all the questions abo... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
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A: Should we have a network-wide policy against AI-generated answers? Any text you didn't write yourself must be set off in a quote box and attributed. I believe this is already existing policy, and applies regardless of where the quoted text came from (like another person or an AI). Failing to properly quote and attribute others' words as your own is plagiaris... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
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A: UI question: how should the "post" button behave in restricted categories? The mechanics of what you do now is best. The wording could be a little softer with better explanation. A grayed button or missing button will cause questions or bug reports. Dismissing an overlay is annoying, especially when ESC doesn't dismiss it. Going back to the previous page is easy and... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
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A: Miscellaneous Flag modal problems A solution to one of the issues you mention is to ditch the annoying nanny-ware and not require a minimum number of characters in the first place. Sometimes the meaning can be quite clear in a word or two. Length doesn't guarantee quality, and likely hurts quality when forced to add padding. I a... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
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Edit activity show, but not allowed to approve Now having a dot next to the "Edits" button to indicate pending edits brings up a new issue. It seems everyone is notified of all pending edits, whether they have the ability to approve them or not. Here is what I see when looking at the pending edits in Physics: Users should only be notifie... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
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A: How should we make pending edit suggestions more visible? I just ran into this issue. It doesn't seem to have changed from 2 years ago when this question was posted. As a mod on the EE site, I routinely check the recent comment activity. I saw a new comment, followed it to the post, and only then noticed there was a pending edit on the post. It was on... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
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Can't click notification icon Clicking on the notification icon: Doesn't do anything. I noticed this just now. It's probably been a month or more since the last time I had a notification. Back then it worked as expected (created a dropdown with individual notifications). What happens now is absolutely nothing, as if ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
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A: Questions previews were introduced: Can the layout be improved? Personally, I'd rather have the "preview" gone. It's too visually cluttering. Finding the time since last activity is a bit harder now. Yes, I know it's there, but for me at least, it takes more effort to pick it out of the noisy background. It's also more work now to scan down a page to see what... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
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A: Filter to show only positive posts The advantage is that the casual visitor sees less crap. However, there are also downsides to this: It makes it hard to understand what the norms are. This is especially important for the same casual visitor that becomes a first-time poster. For example, if all the lazy homework questions are n... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Why are comments hidden by default? I agree that it should be easier to see comments than it is, but one difference here from Elsewhere is that we are trying to de-emphasize comments. As Elsewhere has abundantly demonstrated, if you don't reign in comments, they get used as answers, chit chat, and to circumvent closing of questions. ... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Remove "Post" terminology from sites other than META 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 sp... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Downvoting Response Delays I was the downvoter. After I wrote the comment, I noticed that it was actually 3 days since the question was asked, but I decided not to go back and edit it since then the title and body of the comment wouldn't match. (We can only edit bodies not titles). It is frustrating when you try to work w... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Make navigation bar optionally fixed at the top When I'm busy reading or writing an answer: I want as much of the window pixels devoted to the task at hand as possible. Don't want to be interrupted by notifications. Modern computers are already way too full of things that try to get my attention regardless of what I'm doing. Let's no... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Please make dashboard button/link easier to access Even though this was "completed" 4 months ago, I don't see anything called "dashboard" when viewing this question, or even in my profile. And yes, I scrolled all the way to the bottom. (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Is the Codidact community the same as Stack Overflow? Is codidact community as same as stack overflow ? No. Perhaps we are not doing enough to explain this, but that really should have been obvious in my opinion. Codidact is an organization that has created open-source software for Q&A sites, and also hosts a bunch of sites. Stack Overflow (SO) ... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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A: Is copying from other sites OK? Copying posts here from elsewhere can be allowed, but the rules of the other site must be followed. Check the license that applies to the post on the other site. It probably requires attribution unless you are the author. Many sites let the author retain ownership, but you need to check to be su... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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A: Allow posting without logging in at least in some communities Bad idea for lots of reasons: Anonymity breeds vandalism. Enforcement becomes impossible. How would you ban or suspend an offender? Allowing unregistered users to post is an obvious gaping hole for suspended users. Someone who knows there won't be any consequences is more likely to do ba... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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TT tag works in preview, not in final post. The html tag <tt> works correctly in the preview window that is shown while editing a post. Text enclosed in such tags is shown in mono-spaced font. However, the TT tag seems to be ignored when the post is shown normally. The TT tags don't get lost. Editing a post again shows the tags, an... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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A: Hobbling of users who consistently post low-quality content The problem has gotten even worse in the four months since this question was asked. I had forgotten about this question, and posted a new one "Need to throttle users with consistently bad posts". Please consider that an "answer" here. In summary, I looked around on all the sites and found it sur... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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Need to throttle users with consistently bad posts. Now that Codidact has some experience to look back on, we can see the same thing happening here as in other on-line places and in real life. We are all here for our own personal selfish reasons. However, most of us understand what these sites are trying to achieve, and feel it would be wrong to... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |