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.
Activity for Karl Knechtel
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer | — |
A: Syntax highlighting comments break the unsupported tags warning message Based on the comment discussion, I can see no reason to consider support for syntax highlight hinting via HTML comments. "Code fences" have a built-in syntax highlighting suggestion and are all around quite practical and standard: such "fenced code blocks" are part of the CommonMark standard, and ove... (more) |
— | 25 days ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Why prefer Codidact to Stack Exchange? Superior technology The site software supports more post types than just Q&A, and multiple Q&A sections with separate labels. This allows each community to organize content, post high-quality information without the need to hew to the Q&A format, set up "staging" areas for questions that might ne... (more) |
— | 30 days ago |
| Question | — |
Proposal and design for temporary blocking of new user links (anti-spam) Discussion on Introduce a spam reaction? brought up the idea of preventing new users from posting links, so as to create an additional hurdle for spammers (who will rarely make any serious attempt to integrate themselves into a community before spamming). This of course has the drawback that quest... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Introduce a spam reaction? I like this idea. I'm not worried about the potential for "drama" because disruptive users already have many other tools at their disposal (such as, say, posting), and in practice this kind of disruption is quite rare outside of spam - even on massive sites like Stack Overflow. (Even there, nonsense ... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What's more important for codidact - quality or helping questions get answered? At last we are getting to addressing the elephant in the room head-on. Lundin and Olin's answers both capture ideas that I feel are very important, that apply to varying extents across Codidact. I'll include a couple collapsed sections of background, and then present a proposal. There are fund... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Can we streamline the process for closed bad questions? > Reopening takes a while, usually a few days.... If our goal is to make it as easy as possible for experts to share knowledge, this goes against that goal. ...a lot of these questions are not that important - especially the ones that end up closed. They're small, simple things... I'm not going to cr... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Question | — |
PSA: question tagging UI apparently now depends on JavaScript from codidact.org I use Noscript, so Javascript is blocked by default for new domains for me. As it happens, prior to today I had `codidact.com` (and `jsdelivr.org`) whitelisted, but not `codidact.org`. When I was writing my previous Meta post just now, I found that the tag search/auto-completion (at the bottom of ... (more) |
— | 3 months ago |
| Question | — |
Is "voting different on Meta" for Codidact? Stack Overflow's help section offers the following guidance for its meta site: > ### Voting is different on meta. > > Like normal Stack Exchange sites, Meta allows members to vote on questions and answers. For most posts, votes reflect the perceived usefulness: well-written, well-reasoned, well-... (more) |
— | 3 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Why do we have "General comments" threads? History Originally, comments worked much as one may have seen Somewhere Else; but in mid-2021 the threaded comments feature was introduced. Each comment thread needs a title; by default, the software uses the first part of the first comment. It wouldn't make sense for existing comments to be al... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Can you post a question just to answer it yourself? Such questions are accepted and encouraged, by design It's not our idea, or a new idea, either. It's fundamental to the design and concept of Q&A sites, Codidact included. People who actually need an answer to a question are often in a uniquely bad position to actually ask that question. Out of... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Question | — |
Implement inline spoiler text It was previously noted that Codidact does not support explicit spoiler tags, although it's possible to hide blocks of text in collapsible sections (using `` and `` HTML). I'd like to propose adding explicit support for inline spoiler text. Just as preformatted code blocks don't always suffice and... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What community would be appropriate to ask a business question about software development? It depends what you mean by "business". Questions about the process of developing software, or "life cycle management", are on topic for Software. However, we'd want them to be from the perspective of a team lead, rather than a manager. So, not e.g. questions about the psychology of getting softwa... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
| Question | — |
How about explicitly inviting new user feedback? Prompted by comments in this comment thread - I agree that it's often very difficult to get feedback from new users in the meta area of a community, especially one that has custom software on top of a particular culture. Relatively few people will go out of their way to raise their voices, and those ... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
| Question | — |
How are tabs handled in code blocks? While this question is of particular interest to the technical sites, and especially to Software, it concerns core site functionality. I figured it would be more polite to ask than to make a "sandbox" post. I'm planning to write some canonical Q&A about `IndentationError`s in Python for the Softwa... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
| Question | — |
How can I fix or edit comment thread titles? It happens to me all the time that I write a comment - as the first of a new thread of comments - and then either overlook giving it a title, or expect that the default title will be good enough and am then dissatisfied with the result. Is there any way to edit the title of a comment thread, as th... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should we start displaying the score of a post instead of the raw votes? Background: the information content being presented In principle, the number of upvotes and number of downvotes on a post are two orthogonal pieces of information, that collectively tell you the community's overall opinion of the content (or at least, of those who voted). Traditional systems (l... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
| Question | — |
Grace period for immediately noticed small errors Sometimes I will compose a lengthy post, submit it, see it in context and immediately notice a typo - no matter how careful I thought I was being. I'm not sure it's desirable that, when I go to fix it immediately, the revision is recorded in the post's history. I could of course use the Redact fea... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Merge abilities help page with abilities dashboard I think it's important to discuss this, but I'm mildly against the proposal as it stands. In principle I like removing redundancy, but it does serve some purpose here. It seems awkward to have that much framing text when simply trying to check one's own abilities, and weird to see information specifi... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Probationary shadowban for new accounts If it's possible to characterize the problem as being caused by "That Guy" - i.e., a singular person behind it all - then unless the problem involves a botnet or something, it's small enough that we shouldn't need to come up with new technical solutions just because that problem user exists. To me, t... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Question | — |
Improved UI for filtering posts on score Inspired by the confusion in https://meta.codidact.com/posts/290048 , I'd like to propose a UI enhancement. Using a spinner for this value doesn't make a lot of sense, since the user needs to think about what the value means, and that value is somewhat abstract. It takes considerable experience (or a... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What fluff (and what level of fluff) is acceptable in posts? > Should we remove such fluff? ... If we should remove fluff, should we remove all kinds of fluff? Or are there exceptions? (e.g. "emoticons are fine"). ... Does (or should) the policy depend on which community (i.e. which subsite of codidact.com) the post belongs to? In principle, I think that - ... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Dealing with questions "settled on" Stack Overflow Monica already gave a good explanation of the issues with imports, so I'll focus on the other approaches described. About question selection > We could just focus on the obscure questions to attract mainly expert users. Once the site is a healthy community for questions by experts for experts, ... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself? Users vs. questions Personally, I don't care much, if at all, about the motivation behind a question - as long as it isn't a thinly veiled rant or other sort of soapboxing (i.e. is genuinely a question). On Stack Overflow meta I would say that questions are 100% about the questions in themselves a... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What is "clutter" in the context of Codidact? > It's common to hear comments about QA sites being "cluttered", "clogged", "spammed" etc. Even disregarding advertising / off-topic astroturfing etc. (the sort of thing that the "It's spam" flag is intended for), I think that "spammed" has a subtly, but fundamentally different meaning from "clut... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Question | — |
I can close my own question by myself, but not reopen it I was surprised to find that ordinary user privileges allow me to close my own posts unilaterally. It does seem useful; just now I posted something on Linux Systems and realized it needed some fixes to be answerable, and thought that I might not be able to get to it for a while, so I opted to use thi... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Question | — |
How should we approach non-English content? It seems almost taken for granted on every Codidact site - even Languages & Linguistics - that questions and answers are supposed to be written in English, although I can't find any official policy actually requiring this. I've noticed that a fair amount of friction has already occurred - especially ... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Question | — |
Enhancing community involvement with per-site Help Centers By my understanding, one of the key features of the Codidact network is that individual communities are more in control of their local policies. In particular, it appears that community moderators are able to edit the per-community Help Center documents (e.g. this listing for Meta itself) and perhaps... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Notifying each other that a commented-on issue is resolved, to produce fewer comments rather than more Suppose we have a post author A and a comment author B. Here's a simple proposal for addressing the problem. When B writes the comment, the UI offers B a checkbox to "allow A to propose resolution" to the issue. If that option was chosen, when the system notifies A about the comment, it indic... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Question | — |
Notifying each other that a commented-on issue is resolved, to produce fewer comments rather than more I just made a comment on another Meta post because I wasn't sure whether something in someone else's answer was a typo, or if so what the correct wording should be. It turned out that my best guess was correct, and I got a comment in reply to that effect (along with the author editing the post). I... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Shouldn't be able to delete question after any response It would be bad to prevent deleting questions by simply commenting on them, because the comments could point out why the question actually can't be salvaged from OP's perspective. Currently, comments are the only way that ordinary users (without at least the "vote on holds" ability) can signal a real... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Bringing bad posts to the attention of curators, not just moderators - flagging vs closure reasons Before I found out about the explicit closure reasons in the interface, this is the proposed set I was working on: Duplicate Description: self-explanatory. Commentary: here is still an open question about what to do with near-duplicates and "related" questions. Misplaced or off topic Des... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Question | — |
Bringing bad posts to the attention of curators, not just moderators - flagging vs closure reasons As things stand, the options for flagging a question seem rather spartan: Image of flagging dialog > The dialog has a header which reads "Why does this post require moderator attention?"; the options are "it's spam", "it's rude", "needs author's attention", "is a duplicate", and "other reason" ... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Could we have a "Close as outdated" close reason? I generally don't think this is a good idea. As you note, status-completed tags work fine for noting that a Meta process has run its course. If such a process has run its course - why not use the same post for post-mortem discussion? For main-space questions, if a question is about a problem that ... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Let's improve how we handle duplicates Psychology In sum: I think the social problems here have more to do with communication than they do with policy, and I'm extremely wary of softening policy in order to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. To be fair, sometimes people should feel judged for posting a duplicate question - they clearl... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Regular deletion (roomba) of content unlikely to ever be useful Yes, we need to clean things up For a Q&A site to come across as useful, the chaff simply needs to be separated from the wheat. We can't expect external search engines to care about our internal quality metrics; at best we can get them to care about how many times a post is linked internally, and ... (more) |
— | 8 months ago |
| Question | — |
Discoverability for the new Proposals site Now that there is a separate Proposals site with its own Meta and other categories, that would seem to qualify as a separate "Codidact Community" which should be listed among the "Other Codidact Communities" in the standard page footer. (Since this footer also always lists the current community, mayb... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Problems i have encountered/seen in the last week > Codidact has been divided into 2 categories (PowerUsers/SoftwareDevelopment) No, it hasn't. It is a network of 17 communities plus the global Meta site - just like how Stack Exchange is a network of (assuming I got my dev console magic right) 181 communities plus its global Meta. The scope of th... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Question | — |
Improved layout for individual search results Currently, when I look at search results, or the list of posts on my user profile, I get results that look like: Example I have two objections. In my view: Answers should show the tags of the corresponding question on the bottom line. This is how I'm accustomed to it working from SE, and it... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Who should be able to create new tags? Automatically collect new tags for review As Codidact communities grow, I can see a need to transition smoothly from the norms of a "new" site to those with open, wide participation. Initially, people should be trusted to create new tags, but eventually there will be a need to nip them in the bud.... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Question | — |
Support shortcut links to Codidact communities / categories I would like to be able to write e.g. `[software.cd]` and have it generate a link to https://software.codidact.com with a friendly title. Currently, it becomes a link based on the actual text contents, surrounded by ordinary square brackets: [software.cd]. (This seems to actually check the TLD; softw... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should we be able to tag answers? Examining precedent The Stack Exchange network has the core of this feature: you can write `[tag:tag-name]` in the body of a question or answer to get a button (really an `a` tag, just like here) that works just like the tags underneath a post. Tags that are specially marked on the site, still... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Question | — |
Flag details vs. comments When flagging a post as "Needs author's attention", the interface provides a single-line text entry field for "Details?", which does not allow for newlines. Input text scrolls without any clear indication of a length limit. The interface also claims that such details will be added to the post as a... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Indicate stale reactions based on user activity Argument against Quite simply, none of the available reactions has a clear and pressing need for such a marking. "Works for me" can be directly contradicted The only good reason to mark a "works for me" reaction as "stale" is because the solution is now obsolete - and there is already ... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: A way to prohibit creating certain tags. Some thoughts: 1. If e.g. profanity in tags is becoming an issue, that should definitely be dealt with, perhaps with a regex filter. (If a community runs into the Scunthorpe problem this way, a failed tag creation could be discussed on the Community meta and a valid tag whitelisted by a moderator.... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Issues with copying post source from revision history As a workaround, it's possible to write code in the browser console to iterate over the `` tags within the `` for each diff entry, and join their text with newlines in between. The page renders empty space with empty ``s. I was able to extract the text I wanted (I think) - each revision, as separa... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How to edit a post for small modifications without affecting the visibility of other posts? Maybe when our communities are much larger I share the others' concerns about getting fresh eyes on edits to avoid abuse (or even just errors that would motivate a re-edit). As things stand, I think the concern about "drawing away attention" is greatly overstated. I'm generally willing to look at ... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Question | — |
Issues with copying post source from revision history When I try to copy and paste text out of a revision history for a question or answer, I notice that: Blank lines are not preserved If I copy the entire text of a revision, the entire thing will also be indented by four spaces on each line, and have two blank lines added on each end. (Skipping e... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Question | — |
Trying to use Markdown formatting on detail-section labels causes unexpected centered alignment in preview I knew that blank lines are needed in certain places when mixing HTML markup with Markdown so that the Markdown will actually be processed. For example: ``` Gory details that are incredibly shocking Ha, fooled you! ``` produces: Gory details that are incredibly shocking Ha, f... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Can I please ask questions from the search page? As a workaround, click "Q&A" in the title bar to go back to that category, then the "Ask Question" button will appear in the usual spot. It's one extra click, but hopefully fairly intuitive. (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should we display the number of views? View counts are a measure of the importance of a post to the site. A question that's viewed a lot should be prioritized by curators, because it's likely to be viewed proportionately often in the future. They need to have this information to act on it, so I'm in favour of displaying it. It's especi... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |