There's an existing proposal to let moderators opt-out questions from HNQ:   I would like to add: there is a category of heated questions that attract debate, often rude debate, lots of comments, a suspicious mix of upvote and downvote, and occasionally a meta question asking how to discuss the question better, that should not be picked up at all.  This has definitely come up on Academia.SE (meta: ) and also tends to come up on workplace.SE. . Questions that are not only hot but very polemical - in the above case the presence of sexism was contentious - should not appear in the sidebar. It hurts communities when they do.  The hot questions needs to be less blunt. You should not put the spotlight on something that is only "hot" because it is "heated". And this can happen upstream in the algorithm rather than relegating it to moderation.  The algorithm should watch out for signals like downvotes in addition to upvotes or high comment volume to tell apart "hot" from "heated." Machine learning is not magic but I think isolating the signal here is a use case for offline ML analysis to write business logic against. Some communities have this problem worse than others; perhaps more aggressive HNQ-suppression logic should be deployed there, and softer logic elsewhere.
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Sometimes a question that is not representative of a site makes the HNQ list. This can lead to a large bump in traffic on a question the community may not be well equipped to handle. I propose that moderators and gold badge holders in the tag be able to set the "hotness points" to zero (or vote to reduce the points).  The idea is for the HNQ to represent questions that are both "popular" and a good (not just not bad) fit for the site.
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The Problem - The Stack Exchange network has so many sites with more being added all the time, a user probably doesn't know that a Stack Exchange site exists to answer a question they might have. In addition, when asking a question, the user might not know the best place to put the question. Asking the question on the wrong site could be downvoted, and it might not be in the user's best interest to ask the question if he/she doesn't know exactly where it belongs.  The Idea - A Stack Exchange site where you can ask any question, and it's up to reviewers of the question to decide which site would be best suited to answer the question.   I don't know much about the process for migrating questions to other sites as they stand today, but I think a voting system would be good, to allow reviewers to vote where the question belongs best, or someone with enough rep is allowed to move it directly.   The conditions that determine when a question is migrated could vary. Some ideas:   After a certain period of inactivity When the vote gap between the #1 and #2 result is large enough   The voting system should also have some way to denote that this question doesn't (yet) have a Stack Exchange site suited to answer the question.   When asking the question, the page could provide a list of similar questions as it does now, and "suggested site" box. This way, if they're writing the question they could see some suggestions as to where the question might belong. They could then select one of those sites and have it submitted on that site. The primary data source for this would probably be the tags. For instance, if the user enters tags that have a lot of followers on StackOverflow, the page would suggest that the question might belong on StackOverflow.  This feature would allow users to ask questions without being as concerned about where it belongs among the vast Stack Exchange network. In addition, this could be a valuable resource in determining what Stack Exchange sites people would like to see. If there are a lot of questions that are filed as "Site Doesn't Yet Exist To Answer This Question™", that would be an indicator that there is a need that Stack Exchange isn't currently fulfilling.  Please comment with any suggestions or criticisms.   PS: I hope that this is the correct place to post this suggestion.  Edit  Maybe a dumbed-down version of this might be useful. Instead of having the review process, just have a page for a user to enter their question, get suggestions to where it might belong, and choose at the end where the question belongs. Right now, choosing where to ask the question is the first step. I think moving it to a later point in the conception of the question would allow the asker to better categorize the question.
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I often click on the questions in the "Hot Meta Posts" section of the sidebar. Today when I clicked on one of the questions I noticed that it had already been deleted.     I view this as a bug, though you could also view it as a feature request I suppose. I do not think that a deleted Meta question should still be considered "hot".
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I'm going to ask this, even though it has some resemblance to other questions, but I think it's important to ask this question in this manner, because it has some semantic meaning that the other questions allude to but do not come out and say.  Should moderators close questions for reasons other than obvious violation of the rules?    I've been noticing a lot of closed questions by moderators lately, with only a single vote.  For example,   I did not ask the question, and i don't know the author, but something bugs me about moderators heavy handedly bypassing the community process of choosing what is and isn't a good question to ask.    True, the community can re-open a closed question, but that's a little bit like being presumed guilty until proven innocent.  I think far fewer people look at closed questions and think "that should be re-opened" than people that look at open questions and think "that should be closed".  I'm not trying to suggest that moderators should have this power taken away, just that they should voluntarily leave questions to the community unless they are obviously violating the rules.  Even good intentions can go bad because someone was in a hurry, or didn't read the question well enough.    I'm also not trying to suggest some kind of recourse for closed questions by moderators.  I think that issue goes away if moderators don't close non-violating questions solely by themselves.  I think, by default, moderators should merely be one vote to close (or migrate) questions, with an option to force close if necessary... but SOP should that moderators votes do not (normally) carry any more weight than anyone elses (again, unless it's an obvious violation of the rules).  Moderators have a purpose, and an important one at that.. but I don't think that purpose is to decide for the community that questions are duplicates or not a real question.  That's the communities job and moderators should not take it away from them.  EDIT:  I think people are missing the point.  I am not making any judgement call as to whether the actions taken by mods in any given circumstance was correct or not.  Even if the community would have done the exact same thing, it's still the communities place to make those decisions by consensus, not a single person unilaterally deciding.  Comments?
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I have deep issues with the 'Hot Network Questions' containing questions from the religion sub-sites. This is not because I dislike questions about religion, nor because I think these sites have no place on the network in theory - they do. The reason I am annoyed by these Q&amp;A's is that the quality of highly upvoted questions is often extremely low, and questions that are out of scope (since they are about reality) are not deleted.  Obligatory examples: All answers have been upvoted and are popular, I did not rotten-cherry pick:   Q    A +0 accepted   Q    A +10   Q    A +36     Q    A +4   Q    A +8   Q    A +9     I imagine questions, and answers such as these would be deleted on any other StackExchange site. Would I not be told 'reality' was not in scope if I asked a question on scifi.stackexchange.com like .   The level of answers at the sub-sites specifically for religion is very low, especially the answers that turn up in the 'Hot Network Questions' list. I propose removal of these sites from the network, as they do not fit the quality standards for SE. Alternatively, I would like to filter out these sites from the 'Hot Network Questions' list.  Addendum There is a related question under , a denied feature request for personalizing a filter for hot network questions. While that would have solved my issue, the fact that it wasn't implemented means my issue is unsolved, and my wish for a resolution to jarring questions on the Hot Network Question list remains (and in this case it's not just the low-quality floating up as usual, but actually especially jarring for the non-'experts' of religion.SE).
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I've been lurking Stack Overflow whenever I had a problem for at least the last 2+ years. More times than not, I find my solution (or cobble one together) before I get frustrated enough to have the innernets help me with my specific custom problem.  Many times, the only commentary I would be able to add would be "thanks!" which really only wastes bits and bandwidth.  I understand implementing measures to keep the bots and SEO kids out, but sometimes it's a PITA to start participating in a community.  If you couldn't extract my question from the above rant (or title), this might be a little more clear:  Why do I require 15 reps to just up-vote something?  I feel like it's kinda silly.  Additionally, I noticed the quote off to the left:     We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.   yet I have looked around here and haven't been able to find any justifiable explanation.
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There has been a tug-of-war in the  list.  seem to be unhappy with the traffic that it brings to their site:  'But we want to encourage people to post, that's the whole point of the HQ list!' I hear you cry. I disagree. We want to encourage people to the site not just to that question.  The SE Community Team seems to have  (emphasis mine):  the results have been... Not great so far: a significantly smaller number of people are clicking through to randomly-selected questions than to the top questions, which hints that the algorithm may've been doing a better job of identifying general-interest questions across topics than some expected.  Disclaimer: This should not be taken as a slight of the community team whatsoever, nor do I think this is some cause for revolt or a boxing match as the below prose may indicate. These are just poorly applied literary tools to emphasize the drastically different approaches to the same list between two groups. In the Red Corner, the Community Members The goal of the hot questions should be to drive up interest in the site. The hot questions should be a lure to encourage SE network users to contribute to other content, not just do a drive-by on the hot question. In the Blue Corner, the Community Team The goal of the hot questions should be to drive traffic to general-interest questions. After all, the Hot Network Questions used to be more accurately named as &quot;Popular Questions&quot;. What is the Goal of Advertising Network Questions? Before discussing , or , we need to come to an agreement on what the heck we are actually trying to achieve. Once we know what we are looking to accomplish, we can find the best way to do that. The list of questions from a variety of sites is in a great location screen-wise, it is readily accessible and does get a lot of eyes on it. But as with any marketing, the goal isn't just to grab eyes, it's to grab the right eyes.* * I have nothing against left eyes. Most of my friends have left eyes too. And they are awesome. But in the context right eyes are not a geospatial thing, but rather in the 'correct' sense. So what are the right eyes? What type of people do we want to attract to our site? What would we determine as 'success'? How can we measure that success? Please do not limit yourself to the very narrowly scoped topic above. Think outside the box if you'd like. On every page across the network we have a nice piece of real estate for showing off the rest of the network. How can that space best be used if not on a list of questions picked by an arbitrary algorithm?
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Along the lines of the discussion (poll) on , what is the policy for them in chat?  In my mind, there is a very large difference between proper SE site content (posts and comments) and chat.  Chat far more fluid than the "fixed content" of the site, and the occasional expletive here and there rapidly fades into the past.  True, there's a transcript for chat, but one needs to go reaching into the past.  Also, just to be explicit, I'm simply talking about vocabulary, not intent or context.  Saying "F*** these g**d*** if statements" is wholly apart from "Abc's mother looks like a coprolite"  This is part of the   , where people in different rooms see a flagged message containing profanity, and without context reach far too easily for the "valid" button.  If we don't care so much about the language as the idea, that would go a long way (people could instead click "not sure", not that they would, but that's another matter).
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This question has nothing to do with whether or not SE wants to fix   things or engage with the community, the answers to that are already   known: ‘nothing to fix’ and ‘no’. This is about the origins of the   discontent with the way the long time veteran community as a whole has   been vilified and blamed for the few rate bad actors in the past and   used as a scape-goat for whatever the corporate entity has in mind for   their future to save their reputation or whatever.   TL;DR  It is not and never has been  It is not, and it is not about Monica either, she is caught in the middle of something, made a public example of as a warning, and all that was completely avoidable regardless of her opinion on the pronouns and the CoC.  It is just the logical backlash against the continuation of the blanket vilification that the Stack Overflow community experienced with the Jay Hanlon , but now applied/implemented against the entire StackExchange of communities.   There are many that are on the autistic spectrum that are probably an inordinate percentage of the technical communities, especially Stack Overflow, and when they get accused of malice when there is none and without any proof in the comments and their flags of abuse are ignored and they are sent curt messages by the moderators handling the flags to suck it up, or that they are mocking someone when they are asking a legit question in all sincerity, it seems like a double standard and hypocrisy at its most egregious cases.   I am done with the abuse here, from the moderation staff, from those that just want to lash out at everyone and accuse everyone of everything implicitly just because that is the popular thing to do right now. And to paraphrase Jay Hanlon,      I know when I am not wanted or appreciated, you know how? Because, you   told me so ...   The first 3 or 4 dozen times should have been enough of a message, but then again, those of use that are on the spectrum do not get the hint as easily as others.   And to those that think, good the problem people are self removing themselves, good riddance, I put 10 years into SO, had a huge impact number and never once was abusive to any group. I was vocal when people attacked me or my character in public comments and their comments were allowed to stand because they were part of the cool kids weaponizing the first CoC changes, because well they were better at manipulating language and people to language lawyer their abuse as polite,  when one person did comment in my defense that polite abuse is still abuse they got their comment deleted as well. You are losing allies, with no sarcasm, your online paradise you are creating, I hope you get what you want.  This outcome, this place the sites are in, is not unexpected and could be completely predicted and completely avoided.
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When a moderator comes across a question that deserves to be closed, they should not. This should be left to the community to handle.   Here's a fresh example right out of the Stack Overflow oven: "".   It's a crappy question, to be sure.  It is long, ranty, and flame-fodder.  It should have been closed, but not by a moderator.  It is not the moderators' jobs to decide on their own what is and is not proper content for a site.  That is the job of the community.
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Some sites appear far more often in the hot questions list than other sites. I don't have any hard data on that, as that kind of data is just not publicly available, but I'm pretty sure my subjective impression on that is reasonably accurate.  Those sites don't appear more often because they are inherently more interesting, but because they have certain voting and answering patterns that favor them in the hot questions algorithm. I would argue that the goal of the hot questions list is to present questions from a large variety of SE sites to the whole network, and to show possibly interesting questions to users that would not have found them otherwise.   To achieve this goal, the spots in the hot questions list should be distributed among all SE sites. The algorithm should try to get a good sampling of all sites, and it should try to normalize the results for varying voting behaviour. At the moment, sites that intrinsically get more votes and more answers per question seem favored in the algorithm.  So I think one part of the algorithm should try to identify questions that get an unusally high amount of votes and views for that site, and give the smaller sites a chance this way.  I'm not sure on how exactly this weighting should be done, as a complete normalization would likely not work across the huge difference in scale for all the SE sites.  As a specific example that the current algorithm is broken I'll present . I don't think any site should occupy a third of the whole list.   Here's another instance where one site is overrepresented at the top of the list:
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Preamble: I know that 'give a reason when downvoting' is a very common request, and I assure you that I have read these posts and the discussions in them and my request is very different. This isn't about encouraging people to comment and is more about gathering metrics.  I'd like to see a feature whereby people who are downvoted get some better feedback on why they were downvoted, especially given that people rarely leave comments in practice.  So my suggestion is that when user clicks on the downvote, they are prompted to pick from a short list (No more than 5) of common reasons. It would be a popup that replaces the existing "Please consider adding a comment" box.  The user receiving the downvote would see how many people downvoted them for each reason, but not who did it. It would significantly address the issue of people being too lazy to comment or not wanting to comment (for fear of retaliation or any other reason) while helping to ensure the user gets useful feedback.  Perhaps the downvote could also be weighted based on whether or not a reason is picked.  For questions the list might look something like:   Not a question Not relevant to the subject area Trivial question with no research effort Poorly asked question Other   And for answers, this might be:   Nonconstructive or not an answer Incorrect or dangerous answer Poor explanation Doesn't answer the original question Other
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I really like the new sidebar. With the new top bar eliminating the &quot;Hot Questions&quot; area there, I think this is the perfect place for it. One-click access to time-wasting questions about topics I may or may not have an interest in. Seriously, it's a procrastinator's dream come true. The only suggestion I can add is to extend it. I assume the &quot;hot&quot; algorithm can spit out more than 12 questions, and since we now have a huge amount of room for it(without being restricted to a weird drop-down scrollbox), why not show more? If there's something else planned for that spot, disregard. At a minimum, the title could link to the , as ShaWizDowArd suggested in comments. I've been using SE for a couple years now, and I've never seen that page, so it would add visibility there.    Update: They added a link! Just noticed this, I'm pretty sure it wasn't there yesterday. When you click it, it loads 12 more. At the moment, the link disappears once clicked, so you can see a total of 24 here now. Not a link to the full list, but better:
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Question description  There are many questions (~250 in the last five weeks) relating to      sometimes they are about licensing, legal issues, , , , etc.  These questions relate to the same growing polarization between community and Stack&nbsp;Exchange staff. But, it is not easy to search or filter them because the tags are not uniform for those questions, they do not have the same tags.  Could we group all these posts together by some common tag (new or not)? (in addition, maybe we should create less of these questions, they tend to become noise now, water down the core message, and it is ).    Relevance  Overview of current tags (aside from the discussion tag) for the first ten  (           ) questions relating to  (ordered by relevance)                              1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10     moderators              x           x   x   x     community               x           x   x     etiquette                   x     users                       x     company                     x     moderation                      x     code-of-conduct                     x       x       x     deleted-questions                               x     legal                                                   x   These tags are obviously not the same while it is arguably the same topic (it is even for the same, specific, search term) .  Instead of using multiple searches one might wish to control tracking these question by adding some single relevant tag to watched tags or ignore tags. But, this is difficult when they do not use the same tag. And in the case of ignoring one might ignore too much when the tag is not specific.  Another indicator that these posts need consistent tagging is the fact that there exist highly upvoted answers that function as an archive for these questions (see  and ). But it is only a hack/workaround for the absence of a common tag; they are not an optimal solution.    Why now?  In an older question () it was suggested to create a specific tag. That was rejected at that point. But, now we are several weeks, and many many questions, further. The situation is more escalated than what might have foreseen at that point. The overview becomes a mess and something needs to be done.  See the bump in the image below which indicates that something is 'going on' and it entails a large fraction of the current post. (obtained from )
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I know this seems like a good idea, but this far into the game you should be able to tell from network behavior that I'm not a spammer…  I had a compound question. I broke it up because breaking it up was possible—it probably isn't even necessary in that it wouldn't otherwise get closed. Now I doubt either of my questions will be easily answered, but it stinks when you want to run (irl) to have to wait on a question timer which means posting one at a later time. Can't we fight spammers more effectively in a different way?  You know it's my intent to ask the question (or you'd give me a captcha). You also know that historically my questions have been   Can't we find a way to make this not stupid?
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I have experienced this on a couple of sites (and I'm ) :    You look through the question list. You see a pretty bad (or at least not-so-good) question heavily upvoted. Or even worse, a very poor answer to a good question - upvoted to stratosphere.  Or even worse, a very poor/incorrect answer upvoted high up - and a later, correct answer, languishing with a couple of upvotes (since the flood of views is no longer there). Upon checking, you see tons of views, which came from SE Hot List inclusion.   So, people see an "interesting" "fun" question, head on over in mass numbers (especially if the destination is a smaller site), and due to association bonus, can - and do - upvote any random "fun" crap that's "hot" yet to an expert on the topic is at best not worth being upvoted (and at worst should be downvoted).  As per @Thursday's comment, this is made even worse because of the asymmetry of hot list effect: those coming from Hot Questions may recognize the question is crap, and perhaps 50% of them would downvote it under normal circumstances. But having only 101 rep, they can't. The 5% who want to upvote (for reasons that are difficult to fathom) can and do. Result: vote count that does not represent the opinion of either the particular community, nor the network at large.   UPDATE: The above effect just got a spectacular . As of this moment, the bad answer has only 7 downvotes (and 20+ upvotes), despite the fact that my comment which indicates it's a bad answer in need of downvotes has 23 upvotes - 3x number of people agreed that the answer is bad, than actually downvoted   One solution presented to this dilemma - which seems a bit too heavy-handed - is to .  My suggestion is a much more surgical and localized:  Do not allow voting in the following case:   The question is currently in SE hot list The user's reputation on the site NOT counting association bonus is not enough to upvote.   Note that an association-only users can still upvote any other content on the site - or even questions that used to be on hot list but aren't anymore.    As an example, an answer posted by myself recently was upvoted to 100+. It wasn't a bad answer, but if I'm being honest with myself, it clearly wasn't great enough to deserve 100+ upvotes that it got thanks to hotlist
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just wanted to report a problem with Data Explorer and realized I was banned from asking questions on meta. Probably because I .  Reading through the :   to prevent help vampires users who can't be bothered to form sentences users who don't do the most basic kinds of research themselves users who barely even explain what it is they are trying to do etc., etc. &hellip;   Nothing of this applies to my case. Here on meta, , so I think this should be reflected in the policy for question banning.