Other - Help Center - Stack Overflow - stackoverflow.com (HTTP) Meta Is Murder - www.codinghorror.com (HTTP) Are you familiar with the term "meta"? It permeates many concepts in programming, from metadata to the <meta> tag. But since we're on a blog, let's use blogging to explain what meta means. If you've read this blog for any length of time you've probably heard me rant about the evil of blogging about blogging, a.k.a. meta-blogging. As I said in Thirteen Blog Cliches: I find meta-blogging -- blogging about blogging -- incredibly boring. Triple-meta alert! Generally speaking, I am not a fan of the meta.
Yes, you read that right. Joel Spolsky had a great example of how meta-discussion can kill community in our latest podcast. Let's say that you become a podcaster, so you get really interested in podcasting gear. If you don't control it, meta-discussion, like weeds run amok in a garden, will choke out a substantial part of the normal, natural growth of a healthy community.
The danger and peril of meta has been known for years. We've dealt with our meta problem on Stack Overflow, finally.
Stack Exchange - Free, Community-Powered Q&A - stackexchange.com (HTTP) New Global Inbox. One unwanted side effect of launching so many awesome new Stack Exchange network sites is that the more you participated in, the harder it became to keep track of all your questions, answers, and comments across every site you participated on. That’s kind of a bummer. Well, I’m pleased to announce we’ve added a new global inbox to every site in our network. On the genuinetm Stack Exchange logo in the upper left hand corner, the one you already know and love — you may see a new, small red numeric indicator light up: That small red number tells you how many new replies you have across the entire Stack Exchange network of websites.
And by replies, I mean: New answers to your questions New comments on your posts @replies to you in comments Click the number to go directly to the global inbox. At any given time, the inbox will contain a list of the last 30 global messages for your account, along with: Tag Sets. Over the last few months, we’ve been continually improving our central network hub at stackexchange.com: After a two week public beta test, we’re adding yet another ability — tag sets. A tag set is exactly what it sounds like: all questions matching a set of tags across one or more sites in the Stack Exchange network.
We got a lot of feedback that community members also wanted to view: questions with only the subset of tags they are interested inquestions with the same tags across multiple Stack Exchange sites That’s what tag sets are for. Click on the tagged questions navigation link, then select my tag sets to construct your own. Look in the sidebar on the right for a tag-centric autocomplete area. You can enter any tag (or wildcard tag, yep, it supports wildcards) that exists on any site in our network. You can also create multiple tag sets and toggle between them. You can then quickly toggle between your tag sets to keep track of multiple topics.
Area 51. Greetings, Earthling! Area 51 is the Stack Exchange Network staging zone, where users come together to build new Q&A sites. New site ideas are proposed, discussed, and the best go on to beta. See the faq for more information. Earth Science For those interested in the geology, meteorology, oceanography, and environmental sciences. Veganism For vegans, Vegetarians, aspiring vegans and anyone interested in vegan nutrition and consumption, willing to engage in factual discussion about their nutritional, environmental and ethical aspects.
Worldbuilding For creators (authors, game designers, artists, etc.) who are designing their own worlds, universes, continents, or the like, usually drawing heavily on real world science for accuracy and on how real societies come into existence. Data Science For data Science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field. Painting and drawing Joomla Ukrainian Language and Usage Startup Business Moderators Origami define. Factionalism: Site or Tag? Let’s say I told you we were going to create a programming website that merged all the C#, Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP programmers, so they could all ask their questions together — and simply tag those questions with the appropriate language. You’d probably get a response like this one: I disagree with merging. I think [Java] should be a niche site that will attract the relatively expert crowd that doesn’t usually care (or not as much) about other types of developer language questions.
Yes, I’m talking specifically about myself, but also know about several others I know in the community who can speak for themselves if they wish. By not merging it, we are giving a good one place to find answers only about [Java], with the ability to have a very engaged and focused expert crowd ready to answer, and benefiting from specialized “rank” in this specific field. By this logic, Stack Overflow itself should not exist! How do I unit test threaded code? So my advice to you is this: join or die. Why Can’t You Have Just One Site? Now that we have four sites in the Stack Overflow trilogy: Some users disagree with the idea that there should be four sites. The whole point of these sites is to form a community around specific topics. There’s nothing more toxic to a community, in my experience, than not being able to set boundaries around it. To define what it is, and is not.
Is it really so hard to figure out which community you belong to, and thus, where your question belongs? What is your job title? You can use the same mountain to go downhill really fast on snow — but it’s plainly evident to the participant which culture they consider themselves a part of, “skiers” or “snowboarders”. Furthermore, there’s plenty of precedent for the “many sites, each dedicated to a specific topic” model on the web. GigaOM Network Gawker Media Network Weblogs, Inc. We’re doing something like that, but we don’t think of it as a mundane “network”. Do you think anyone sets up camp outside the League of Justice with a bullhorn, shouting: Trusting the Community. The team and I have been busy cranking out Stack Exchange proposals like crazy. And by “the team and I,” I mean “the team.” They write tons of software while I chime in with encouraging remarks like “good job” and “move this thing over there.”
The tools our developers create provide an unprecedented opportunity for communities to create world-class Q&A sites. So, by “the team,” what I really mean is “you, the users.” Creating an environment where people want to create great Q&A sites is much harder than just throwing together a bunch of sites on your own. In short, you learn to trust the community. The detractors of our community-driven process said we were doomed to create little more than a bunch of technical sites for programmers.
In our first weeks of operation, Area 51 has already shown great diversity. People are absolutely lousy at predicting what others will do with new technologies before they try them. Users learn to trust the community. Learn to trust the community. Asking the First Questions. What is the single most important design element of a new Q&A site? The name? The logo? The colors? The FAQ? Think about that for a moment — see if you know the answer — and we’ll get back to the question later. If you’ve spent any time on our back-channel at meta.stackoverflow.com, the most recent pastime has been proposing ways to redo Area 51.
Most of the ideas suggest a need for more up-front discussion: discussion about the questions, discussion about tagging, discussion about the FAQ, etc. Last week, Area 51 launched Web Apps, the first site to reach private beta. Seeding the Site I was a bit put off by the context implied by “seeding the site.” But it’s a popular way to avoid the classic “empty restaurant syndrome.” Back when Stack Exchange 1.0 sites were struggling, administrators had the problem of jump-starting their communities. But Stack Exchange doesn’t have the empty restaurant problem. 48 Hours of Web Apps: How did Web Apps overcome the empty restaurant problem? The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta. Groups have an amazing ability to self organize — not by following rules or hierarchies of authority, but through basic human nature. Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a spontaneous brainstorming session with a group of colleagues?
Sometimes you just know that you’re at the start of something big — something important — when everyone is abuzz with ideas, collaborating wildly with enthusiasm and energy. That’s how it feels each time a new Stack Exchange site is launched. Not only in the questions and answers that are posted, but in the back room collaborations where the self-governance is starting to take shape — in meta. Every new Stack Exchange site — not some of them, but all of them — gets their own dedicated meta site.
This is a “child site” set aside for discussing issues concerning all the behind-the-scenes intricacies of running the main site. Yet, with every new site to date, members didn’t wait on us. I applaud their initiative. Take Ownership of Your Community 1. 2. Merging Season. Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously niche proposals, overlapping proposals, and proposals that are already covered by an existing site. Do we really need a site for each individual content management system?
The Stack Overflow experience taught us one thing pretty unequivocally: bigger is better. We didn’t make Java Overflow and .NET Overflow and Ruby Overflow, we made one big site for all programmers and told them to use tags and, lo and behold, it worked. Why? Critical Mass. So. Well, not quite. Yahoo! So, what’s the right size domain for a Stack Exchange site? Imagine that one day, due to a monumental lapse in judgement, you find yourself thrown into a Turkish prison. (Jeff wants me to put pictures in my blog posts. Communities consist of concentric circles. Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I mean you have to accept them.
We need some rules! So. Pruning season. Soon, we’re going to close down one of the 24 Stack Exchange sites that were created over the last two months. Sadly, the Gadgets Stack Exchange will go dark soon. A lot of the questions on that site were about Apple gear and Android gear; those questions can be migrated to the (beta) Apple site, or the (private beta) Android site, as appropriate.
Gadgets will be closed and will no longer be accessible, except for our usual creative commons data dumps where an archive will be made available. This isn’t an arbitrary decision; we did a ton of thinking and questioning before we decided that the gadget site just didn’t have enough momentum to get out of beta. Q: Why do sites even need to get shut down? Are we running out of bits on the Internet?
First of all, because it’s what we said we would do in the original Stack Exchange 2.0 announcement: Why is the plan to close down sites that don’t get enough traffic? A site that’s not really functioning is a trap for the unwary. Think of it this way. Does this site have a chance of succeeding? Anytime you find yourself answering the same question over and over and over and over … blog post time. This is that blog post. This cycle has repeated itself on more sites than I can remember — When a new community approaches the end of their beta period, users start looking forward to graduation.
So when that 90th day looms, anticipation starts to turn into speculation about whether the site is going to survive. In reality, 90 days is a minimum length a site is expected to to remain in beta. The blog post, When will my site graduate? So why all the angst? Communities should generally know when the site is failing. When users seek out a report on their performance, they turn to the analytics of Area 51. Wow, pretty scary. Let me dispel a widely-held misconception… The Area 51 summary does not represent some sort of “report card” filled with pass/fail grades.
So what do these statistics mean? The Area 51 statistics provide an opportunity to see where your site can improve. Questions per day. When Will My Site Graduate? At 90 days into beta, we’re supposed to evaluate each Area 51 beta site and either “pass” or “fail” them as full Stack Exchange sites. Some sites feel they’re not going to make it. Please do not close GIS SEThe Geographic Information Systems SE site has one more day of beta.
We are Excellent in Qs answered and answer ratio, Okay in visits/day and Worrying in number of questions and number of avid users. Are the admins planning to shut us down? Users put a lot of effort into their sites and, understandably, they feel a sense of attachment and responsibility for the site’s well being. It’s true that GIS shows a “worrying” number of questions and a “worrying” number of avid users. As long as the questions and answers are of high quality, and people get answers to their questions, you shouldn’t worry about the site actually being closed. How long can a site stay in beta? The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. Why are editors and closers so important?
When a Site Grows Quiet. In the lifecycle of a Stack Exchange site, we’ve long held the philosophy that “it takes as long as it takes” to build a sustainable community: The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. We’ll wait. If a site needs more activity, go out and evangelize it. As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will march on. But when a site struggles to maintain any semblance of steady progress — when it’s struggling to garner an audience, a healthy core of experts, and a steady stream of questions — it becomes increasingly unlikely that the site will find a core audience to sustain it. Next week, we’re shutting down six sites that fall into this category: AstronomyEconomicsLiteratureFirearmsHealthcare ITTheoretical Physics There’s nothing inherently wrong with these topics, or with the good folk who put time and effort into trying to make them work.
A Recipe to Promote your Site. In The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta we covered what we believe to be the crucial steps in forming a viable Stack Exchange Q&A community. Today we’re going to offer some aggregated advice, both from us and our existing meta communities, on step 7 — How do we promote our site? Share Great Questions and Answers The absolute best and easiest way to promote your site is to simply share links to great questions or answers. The hallmark, the cornerstone, the fundamental bedrock of Stack Exchange is producing Q&A that we’re proud of, Q&A that’s worthy of sharing with others. At the risk of explaining the obvious, here’s how to obtain a link to a question: copy the URL in your browser’s address barright click the question title itself, which is a link to the question, and select Copy.right click the “share” text just under the question, and select Copy.
If you need a short URL, remember that we don’t require anything beyond the number ID of the question. This can be shortened to: Stack Exchange Naming for Dummies. Domain Names: The Wrong Question.
Guidelines.