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Activity for Olin Lathrop
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer | — |
A: What criteria are used to determine to launch a new community? It seems that two things are required for a new site to be successful: A core group of domain experts that commit to being around to answer questions, and initially, to do the housekeeping. Getting the word out. Somehow those people with questions need to know to ask here. I think 3 com... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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Suddenly need to sign in every visit In the last few days, something has changed so that I now have to sign in again every visit to Codidact. This is using the same browser on the same machine as before (Edge, Win 10) which worked fine previously. I think it was months since I had to sign in before. Yes, I have the "remember me" bo... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Future planning: what user preferences would be useful? status-declined I would like a way to disable Markdown by default in posts I write. The HTML formatting is richer, and it's what I use because I don't feel like having to remember yet another set of formatting syntaxes. One big disadvantage of Markdown is that it's too easy to trigger by acc... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Future planning: what user preferences would be useful? whether your votes are public or private by default I would probably use that, but it also shouldn't be a big deal to click the appropriate button at the time of voting. Maybe this is to make the immediate voting interface less cluttered, but there still has be a means to override the default at ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: General discussion on making votes public I know this is not a popular stance, but I agree with you. I have seen first hand the problems caused by anonymous voting on SE, especially anonymous downvotes. Whenever there is a way to do any harm without being identified, vandals will do so, or it will be done for personal reasons and not the... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Proposal: tool for user-requested import of a single question and its answers from SE If you create such a feature, at least make it optional per site with the default off. I would be strongly opposed to any direct import from anywhere else to the Electrical Engineering site, for example. There is really no necessity for imports. If a user wants to bring over one of their own que... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Do we have/should we have community wikis? I have no real objection if others want a community wiki (or whatever it should be called) post type, but want to point out that these never really worked right on SE. I'm very unlikely to make of such a post type. I can see how it sounds nice at first glance, but take a look at some real example... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How should staff deal with posts critical of themselves that they want deleted? Unless something is clearly and directly abusive, let it go. Letting a trolling post get downvoted to oblivion is way better than any mod action of removing or otherwise censoring it. People know crap when they see it. Let them vote accordingly. Not only does that get around accusations of mods... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Informing community users of new permissible features Please, no. With modern technology, we all get way too many nagware messages as it is. Let's not have Codidact add to that. It's easy enough to visit meta occasionally. And, there is already a mechanism to sign up for notifications for things like new questions. There is no problem to solve ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Orientation / Welcoming Committee Should I just let loose and post every question I can't find an answer for? Absolutely not! You first need to understand the specific rules and norms of whatever site you want to ask on. Codidact is more about the individual sites than the organization, so help pages are mostly per-site. Th... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should we show tags before the body, to provide context for reading the question? The real problem was that the question didn't provide it's own context well enough. Tags aren't content. They are only for filtering questions to what you want to view, in a search, etc. It is a misuse of tags to rely on them to provide important context to the question. Putting tags at the top... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How granular should network communities be? The main guiding principle should be what fraction of posts a typical user would find interesting, or at least feel are related enough to their interests to not be annoyed at them for being off-topic babble. Individual users will have a more narrow focus of interest than a whole site. They will g... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Allow users to link more than one website in their profile. As you say: they have no way of doing so (outside of putting it in the info box) Since you can put any links you want within your arbitrary info text, there is no problem to solve here. You can look at my profile as an example of this in action. I included a link to my resume in the info t... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Question | — |
Randomize order of answers with same score Answers are shown in order according to their score derived from their votes. However, for answers with the same score, they seem to be shown in chronological order of creation time. This tends to "feature" earlier answers higher than later answers, even if the later answers have been rated the sam... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: I cannot understand the meaning of some downvotes why should anyone downvote a community proposal, like this post? Because they think it's a flawed proposal. That really should have been obvious. In the particular case you cite, note that you got many responses disagreeing with lumping physics and math together. I didn't vote at all, but if... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should we allow capitalized tags? Capitalization is part of spelling. Tags should be allowed to be spelled correctly. Forcing all lower case not only looks stupid, but may lead to confusion. For example, "microchip" is quite different from "Microchip". If you don't think capitalization matters, consider the sentence I help... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What html tags can we use in posts? I have tried to document all markups allowed in posts in a help page for the EE site. Let me know if you find anything not described there. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Request: Headings and footnotes act as link anchors Using numbers as references to the Nth heading is a bad idea. When a heading gets added or deleted, all the links out there will be wrong. If this is going to happen at all, it makes more sense to use the existing id="name" attributes on heading tags. That's already a well-defined standard. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Is there a consensus on comment layouts for the MVP and beyond? Comments and chat serve two very different purposes. Comments should only be for communicating with the author about modifications to the post. These should not be conversations or chit-chat. In a lot of situations, allowing such chit-chat would seriously degrade what people come to the site for. ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Question | — |
Can't post images on Outdoors I can't post images in answers on the Outdoors site, like for example here. When I click on the image button, nothing happens, or a little text pops up above the button too quickly to read. However, the exact same thing works fine on other sites. I tried it on Photography, Electrical Engineering... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Question | — |
Should be allowed to vote on answer to own question I wrote a question on a site I hadn't been to before, and got an answer. I tried to upvote the answer, but was shown: Image I only have 1 rep (should start at 0, but that's another matter), so I can understand why I wouldn't be allowed to vote all over the place. However, voting on an answer ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Why does the title come after the body when writing a question? This has bugged me too. To be clear, we are talking about when you write a question, not how questions are displayed. When I click on the button to write a new question, the first thing I want to write is the title. I remember the first few times thinking "What the...? Where do I put the title?... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should tags be written in American or in British English? Most English speakers are aware of the difference on the other side of the pond, at least for common terms. As an American, I wouldn't be bothered by a Brit using "lorry" or "colour", although I might misunderstand "minced meat" at first glance. However, it would be very off-putting if I were for... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Subscriptions graph doesn't make sense On the EE site, Moderator Tools > Reports > Users yields the following graph: Image This can't be right, because it shows users joining before 7 June, the day the site was launched. It's also not clear what the real Y axis units are, since absolute numbers of signups is meaningless without a t... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Do we need templates for new posts? Please no, except perhaps for unusual form-like posts. I have never experience seeded text to be useful. It's actually a negative because it distracts and I have to delete it. Seeded text is never what I want to say. It also feels like an intrusion on my author's rights, and nannyish in general... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Is gaining rep based on SE content ok? Is it a problem if specific users harvest highly-voted questions on SE, then self answer, to farm a huge amount of rep? Eh, maybe, but it's not important enough to spend much time thinking about. If they actually add new content here, then I don't see a problem with it. Ideally, rep here onl... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Can't post image I can't post a new answer when that answer contains an image. Clicking Post Answer makes it turn gray, but it then just sits there. I removed the image from the post, and it worked. See https://photography.codidact.com/questions/276303#answer-276768. The image uploaded normally, and shows up co... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes? All the proposals so far are missing what people really want to know, which are two orthogonal metrics: How good/bad the crowd thinks the answer is. How heavily the crowd has weighed in. The first tells you how much to believe the answer, and the second how much to believe the first poin... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Scoring System for Trust Level Requirements I'm therefore proposing that we use this same scoring system to 'score' each individual requirement in the Trust Levels: (accepts + N) / (accepts + rejects + 2N), for N=2. This is good enough for as measuring the success of some specific activity. However, trust should be earned with a user's bro... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Pending edit review should highlight changes There is a pending edit on one of my posts. When I click on Review Changes, I get a page showing two versions of the post side by side. The problem is, there are no obvious changes. It's not even clear which side is pre-edit and which post-edit. Either there aren't actually changes, and the s... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Don't upload images automatically Please no! All those "Are you sure" popups are annoying. You get used them, and then they don't serve their intended purpose anymore anyway. Then you'd have to add "Are you really sure?", and "Are you really really sure?", etc, popups. It's your job to be sure in the first place. Let's keep ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What should happen with inactive communities? What should be done in these cases? Should we just wait and let the site open? Should we train some monkeys to write questions? Should we "freeze" the site and provide the contents for download? Should we close it down? Let it be. The only real harm inactive sites are doing is to their own futu... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Comment character count does not reset when posting the comment It seems to me that the real problem is a new blank edit box appearing after having just posted a comment. This just invites abuse of comments. If you had to click "Add a comment" again, the length would probably start at 0 automatically. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Show me the rep! Now that we are getting some activity on the EE site, I'm discovering features I used more than I realized on SE. On SE, you could go to your activity > reputation and see all the recent votes you received. You could also look at your question and/or answer history sorted by rep. I miss both ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Echo of typing in posts is *very* slow. I was just writing an answer on the EE site, and what was shown in the edit window (not even the preview) was way behind my typing. This made it very tedious, to the point of being unusable. I was going to write more, but gave up. In one case I timed it, and it took 5 seconds for what I typed to... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
First image file name entry line doesn't work When you click on the image icon icon to insert an image into a post, you get the popup Image upload popup However, there is no way to type the image name there. The cursor isn't put onto the file name entry line, and just typing does nothing. Clicking on the entry line brings up a whole new ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Network-wide sign in created accounts for me on all sites even though I had no accounts there beforehand Here is another possible user presentation to this problem. Anyone can visit a site and look around. This doesn't sign them up to the site. They won't show up in the user list. The first time you try to do something on the site, you get a popup. It explains that you need to "join" the site to ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Preview keeps jumping up and down In the last day or so, the preview when writing a post keeps jumping up and down. Even just typing a few characters causes this over the next few seconds. I think I see what's going on. Whenever you make a change, something saves the new version as a draft after a short timeout. So far so good.... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: General Engineering Codidact Website I was active on the SE Engineering site (still #2 all time, although I haven't been there for 1½ years). My perception as to why it never really took off is: Too broad. The site was not so much about anything in particular, as any engineering that didn't fit on a more specific site, l... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Problem with adding images to answer Here is a example. In the preview I'm seeing the markup text instead of the picture. Now I'll post it and see what it looks like then. Image alt text After the picture. I did some more experimenting, and if I just type and add a picture it works. I ran into this problem originally afte... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Problem with adding images to answer I was writing an answer, which included two images. Something seems to be broken with the markup text generated by clicking the image icon. I clicked the icon, and entered the pathname of the image file. Some markup got inserted, as expected. However, the preview window showed the markup text, ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: An alternative approach to the view order of answers You only consider the case of an old but good answer losing value over time. That's relatively unusual compared to time hasn't changed anything, and the voting reflects the quality of the answers. If you want to fix a corner case, you first have to make sure it doesn't break the normal case. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Answer own question before anyone else can? I want to write a few canonical questions. I'll ask these questions, then also write a detailed answer. On SE there was a feature where you could write an answer to your own question before releasing both onto the site. In effect, you could post the question and answer simultaneously. I used ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Help page multiple boxes with same name I made a small edit to one of the help pages on EE. Now there are two help boxes. Previously there was only one, as desired. Here's what it looks like now: Image alt text I understand you're in the middle of working on this. I'm not complaining, only trying to make sure you know about it. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Help --> Site Information? Just now I noticed that when clicking on Help, there is a new box called "Site Information". What the …? This seems to have infested all sites, and doesn't provide much real information. It's about a made-up site, so doesn't actually help anyone. Maybe it's work in progress, but then it shouldn... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
More control over Help page I've been writing help topics in the process of getting the new Electrical Engineering site ready for the public. I'm finding that organizing and presenting the various help pages could be better. For context, here is what you get when clicking Help on EE: Image The problem is that I have n... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Help pages display order? Can the display order of help pages for a site be explicitly set somehow? I'm starting to create help pages for a new site, and would like to set the order they are shown in. For example, I'd like the "Introduction to the site" to be at top. It seems the order is alphabetical, at least by defa... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Details on creating a Help page? I'm trying to create Help pages for a new site. One of the things I have to enter is "URL slug:". What is that exactly? I looked to see how help was organized on another site. For example, on the Outdoors site, Help gets you to "https://outdoors.codidact.com/help". Clicking on the topic "List ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Markup documentation? Where is the documentation for the markdown codes used on these pages? I'm trying to RTFM, but can't find the M. I did look in HELP, but it's not there. Below where I'm typing this, there is a brief description of bold, italics, and "code" (Mono-space font? Not sure, haven't tried it). In the ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
New site setup process? I proposed the new site Electrical Engineering, and I see that the basic framework has been created. Thanks. However, there is a difference between the basic mechanics of a site, and a fully up-and-running site. Now that the dev team has worked behind the scenes to create the site, how can we no... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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