Why not have a 'request move' flag on SO posts? Keeping a discussion alive and having it moved to the right place seems more useful and friendly than just shutting it down.
People with enough reputation can do exactly that.
StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
131–139 of 139 posts
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#132I wonder if there's an archive available. You know, for the many deleted but useful questions and answers.
http://www.stackprinter.com/deleted has an archive of many high-scoring deleted questions from Stack Exchange. (You need to click the printer icon on the left to see their copy.) http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/224922 has previous Stack Exchange data dumps, which include many of the deleted questions. With sufficient effort somebody could use to construct a partial archive. (Provided that they follow the requirements…
Nice. Thanks so much for posting this!
I wonder if the people from archive.org are interested in long term archival of these data dumps.
At the very least, overall it's.. inconvenient for our tech community to regard information as volatile so often. Especially Q&A. Take threads on forums for example, that get closed simply because they are old. What's the word again? Necroposting?
Sometimes I find an old solution to something I'm currently struggling with. And that goes to show that age says nothing about quality. So it's a real downer to me when I see people complain to someone who responded to a three year old topic when at the same time it's clearly still relevant to someone.
When someone has a problem, searches for a solution, finds that same question asked 4 years ago on a forum and unanswered, later finds a solution, and decides to share that solution by reviving the 4 year old forum post, they get nothing but thumbs up from me.
Information simply does not expire. Wish people (moderators in particular) would stop acting like it does. In most cases, if someone replies on topic, it is clearly still relevant.
Sorry for the digression, it's just a pet peeve.
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open questions can get updated if there is new information (years later: "BTW, since version 7.3 this workaround isn't necessary anymore/this has been renamed to/...") Closed as "out of scope"/"duplicate" isn't saying "this is finished, moving on", but "don't ask this kind of thing, go somewhere else, even if you probably would get a good answer to your related question here".
Incorrect. Closed questions (and answers) can be edited even by anonymous users. Voting is also possible on closed questions and answers.
Interesting, wouldn't even have tried that, motivational aspects ("This obviously isn't wanted, why invest in it?") aside.
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#134Totally agree. Recently I asked a specific question on ServerFault, mentioning only that I run a SaaS monitoring service to give context. My question was closed, and I was accused spam. My question didn't include a link nor even the name of the business. I was offended but mostly just disappointed I couldn't find the help I needed.
ServerFault is super aggressive against any additions and "admin panels". My detailed question was closed because I mentioned Webmin installed.
[deleted]
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a tendency among the new mods to retroactively close questions which were asked and answered years ago. Honestly, I don't get it. Here is a question of mine for example ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4701538/javascript-based-... ). Leaving aside the question if the question is indeed off-topic, I don't know why anyone will come 4 years later and question intelligence of person asking the question and p…
There is apparently a deep queue between the action of recommending that a question be closed, and when thwt recommendation is acted on. I have a question which admittedly, I put in the wrong section of the site. When I comolained about an anonymous, unexplained downvote, a helpful passerby left a comment that included useful advise, meta advice about where to post if I needed further help, and the observation that q…
This is one of my pet peeves as well; an awful lot of questions should be closed, but with a few exceptions it really doesn't do much good to close them years after the fact - that should be reserved for questions that time has proven are actually causing harm (attracting spam / misinformation / flame-wars) not everything that someone once thought was problematic but has been doing fine for many months anyway.
Over the past year or so, we've altered the mechanics of close voting to encourage fast closure and discourage gradual accumulation of votes. If you're interested in the details, see: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250223/age-close-vot...
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#136By definition, this question is off-topic. That said, there are exceptional cases where SO community appreciates the valuable information provided by the answers and marks a question as protected. For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m... This is one of these rare cases. I'm glad that this question was re-opened and got protected - I think that was the right thing to do. All that sa…
Your comment is so ironic that this long time lurker needed to create an account and reply.
I'm not sure if your typos are "dumb" or ignoring "autocorrect". See how we can both be pompous dicks?
The worst part about SO is pretending like you are trying to help people learn, when, as other commenters have called out, the answers are spread across multiple replies. If a person asks how to do X, and your answer fails to do that, you are part of the problem.
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#137By definition, this question is off-topic. That said, there are exceptional cases where SO community appreciates the valuable information provided by the answers and marks a question as protected. For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m... This is one of these rare cases. I'm glad that this question was re-opened and got protected - I think that was the right thing to do. All that sa…
Your comment is so ironic that this long time lurker needed to create an account and reply. I'm not sure if your typos are "dumb" or ignoring "autocorrect". See how we can both be pompous dicks? The worst part about SO is pretending like you are trying to help people learn, when, as other commenters have called out, the answers are spread across multiple replies. If a person asks how to do X, and your answer fails to…
> See how we can both be pompous dicks?
Please don't do this in HN comments. It's true that upping the ante is common on internet forums, but as you probably know from lurking here, we try not to be that way.
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#138Seems like it would be much better to move the content to a blog post then. The thing with sites like StackOverflow, Facebook, and Youtube is they can change and you have little to no control over it. If you write a blog post on it and then maybe just briefly answer the question on StackOverflow with a link to your blog then you get to control the content.
Link-only answers are discouraged on StackOverflow - the mods will ask you to copy the relevant information into the answer so that it can be useful even without following the external link. The justification about "the sites change" goes both ways.
That is why I said write a brief answer to the question and then put the full detail in the blog post. After 6 months you will be up at the top for searches of that keyword and StackOverflow can do what they want.
Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moderators feel any question that can have discussion should be closed. They just want one right answer, anything with multiple is bad by their definitions. So if you are getting discussion, you are actually just experiencing the common case of getting your needs addressed before the terrible moderation kicks in and closes good content.
This is also incorrect. There can be multiple answers, there just should not be dozens, or hundreds. The dozen case is where you start to see that the question isn't a question, but a discussion.
But sometimes that is also exactly what a programmer looking for information needs.
It happens quite often that I look up something that I already have (or could write) correct working code for. It's when I notice that there's more than one way to write that code, and I want to do it the "right" way the first time, so the decision doesn't come back later and bite me, when I go out looking for what is considered "best practices" in such a situation.
Usually there's more than a few "correct" answers to what is considered the best practice, and the choice depends on the context of your problem. That is when the discussion is invaluable, without it I cannot determine which of the choices apply to my problem.
But of course it's your fair right to say "well okay, but SO is not intended for that".