I love the "Hot Network Questions"... so much that I am looking up real work and the next thing I know 45 minutes have gone by and I have not even read what I came for.  This happens multiple times a day -- you can do the math.  Is there a way to turn them off or hide them from my normal view?    Sorry, I just found  (which was highly downvoted???) And it sounds like my answer is "fat chance".  Thanks.  I guess this can be closed/deleted.
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This may sound like a 'first world problem', but I am quite easily distracted by the 'Hot Network Questions' sidebar, as I find them quite amusing and some of them quite intellectual  But where the problem lies is that, even at work, if I google something up and find a solution on Stack Overflow, to some random problem I am working at, I (always) get distracted towards them (Hot Network Questions), and end up reading the whole Qs as well as As of that respective question, and this is adversely affecting my productivity.  Any suggestion would greatly help.
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I almost never use the review queue.  I mean, look at this big dumb thing        It lumbers along, slowly plodding through the list of questions with close votes, one by one, until I die from boredom.  It's slow, inefficient, and wastes what little time I have to help close crap.  What I want is to jump in my F-15 SCREAMING EAGLE CRAP QUESTION SLAUGHTERING SPEED DEMON, zoom over the landscape looking for targets of opportunity upon which I can swoop down and strike with my depleted uranium VTC rounds.    It could look like your normal questions list, but only featuring those questions that have active close votes        (Wow, Jarrod, I didn't think you were behind those spam posts!)  I can skim through hundreds of questions in minutes, popping open interesting candidates for further review into background tabs.     "Oh, hell no, we don't recommend web hosting companies!" ctrl-click "What moonspeak is this translated from???" ctrl-click "Did you just link your website in your title?" ctrl-click "Did you just say best practice???" ctrl-click "I'll give this guy a Tutorial!" ctrl-click "BROTHER PRINTER SUPPORT NUMBER!!!!" ctrl-click   Essentially this is the same workflow I follow when going through the regular list of questions.  I see a question which smells funny, I pop it open in a new tab, and when I get to it I can deal with it as I do any other question.    I find this workflow so much superior for finding and dealing with questions that need closin' than the actual review queue.  It's much faster and I get to help quickly do the needful.  Please make it even better by showing me a list of questions with close votes.
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I took this screenshot just now, and  about the new . I refreshed the page, went back, and nothing changed.    And, here's what I find odd:  It clearly isn't almost 2014 years old. That's more likely when it was started.  How can there be 8.7 questions a day, while there are 0 visits a day? That's kind of impossible.   I'm hoping here that it's not just me. I know very limited Japanese, not even enough to hold a conversation with a toddler. I'm merely observing.
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I've just started getting these messages:     Please avoid extended discussions in comments. Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat?   Why should one avoid doing this? I think it adds to the site...  (Tagged  in more ways than one!)
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asked me to report this (apparent) bug.  When he tried to protect  question someone (or something) stole the question's protection, which has since been missing:          The question shows no sign of having the protection removed, thus I believe it was abducted. I am sure justice will be done, and this poor question will receive the protection it deserves.     I recommend interrogating the  that was said to have announced this question to the world, I bet it would have some useful information.
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seems to be making edits to his own questions and saying that he's flagging them for deletion (not sure about the flagging part though since I don't have enough rep for that, but that's according to his newly edited questions. However according to his reputation - 10 currently - he shouldn't even have flagging privileges yet).  I stumbled upon one of his questions in the close queue, it had an accepted answer so I reverted the question back one step, and having seen that he's done the same thing to multiple questions I'm not sure about how this should be handled. I am not sure about if he has access to the delete button on his own questions or not.  As I'm not sure how to handle this I wanted to bring it to the community's attention and ask for support for how to handle future cases like this. Should all questions be reverted back? Should they be closed (possibly with the motivation "user seems to want this question gone")?
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Update: Found in the "Highest voted questions" list on the 10k tools "stats" tab today:    (question is +37 and best answer is +27)  (question is +23 and best answer is +15)   both with obvious duplicates of long standing. I've voted to  close, but I doubt it will ever happen, not am I entirely sure it would be fair at this point.  But I think is points out very clearly that we're not getting enough policing.    Original:  On any given day, I can open the 10k tools on Stack Overflow, go to the close tab, and burn through all my close votes in an hour or so (hey, I take some time to compare proposed duplicates and search out better ones myself, and try to write politely encouraging comments to users I guess may be to be new or sensitive).   And it doesn't make a dent in the supply of bad questions that need to go.  I put to you a set of linked questions:   Do we need to get more questions closed? If so, what can we do to encourage more closing? What do we need to do to maintain quality control while we do it? Are the cultural norms we bring to closing sufficiently professional? What can we do to create fewer hurt feeling even while we maintain discipline and focus on the site?   Some related questions:   Are we closing the right questions right now? Are we closing too many good questions, and if so are they getting consistently re-opened?     Many related resources:      and several other like it   and
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This is just depressing:    And I don't mean it's depressing that there are that many questions that might need to be closed. There are nearly 6 million open questions on Stack Overflow - if under 2% of those are crap, we're doing great. Realistically, that number is probably going to get a lot bigger before we're done... But I'm working on another post about that, so enough said for now.  No, that number is depressing because I can't do anything about it. Ok, realistically I could - since I'm immune to the normal voting limits, if I spent the rest of my evening reviewing stuff I might be able to bring it down by... .1 or .2K. That's assuming my wife doesn't kill me first. But for most other folks reviewing stuff, there's literally nothing they can do that will affect that number. They can burn through their entire review limit, and it'll still be exactly the same.   That's depressing. And it's a lie. Those folks are helping, they are accomplishing something useful... The system just doesn't tell them this. And that's wrong.   So here's what I'm proposing: every time the background task that populates the queue adds another bunch of items to it, figure up how many pending review tasks are in there from the past 24 hours... And display that number. Yeah, it'll still be a pretty big number - but now we're talking 2-3 digits at worst rather than a progress-hiding abbreviation. And more importantly, with sufficient effort it'll be possible to watch it go down.   For informational purposes, I would keep the full backlog displayed on .  This might eventually be useful for other queues (broken links...) but for now it's only really needed for close and only on Stack Overflow.
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I would like to see the icons in the 'Hot Network Questions' right panel clickable, leading to the homepage of the site where the question comes from.  It would make it more comfortable to switch to the site when you want rather to visit it than to see that specific "hot" question.
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I was peacefully reading the Gaming.SE blog, when suddenly, GASP I . I diligently look for a way to get rid of it... but found none. , so I'm doing a feature request. Ah, also, if someone is kind enough to remove that spam, thanks! D:
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I have answered two questions:       On the first one we've posted 12 comments, and on the second one only 7.   But - Why am I only getting the Please avoid extended discussions in comments. Would you like to automatically move this discussion to chat? notice in the SECOND answer, while the first one has more comments?
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Seems like a stupid question, but I'm after a nice solid answer if possible.  I joined SO a while ago to ask the odd question, but recently I'm starting to use it more often.  I've been reviewing the 40 max items (20 first posts/20 late answers) per day, and editing anything I see wrong with them (lots of +2's)... flagging them... etc.  I've also been  per day.  But other than commenting where I can and answering the odd question, I'm only  (1k at the moment).  I might just be overeager, but I was hoping some high-rep users might be able to write a little something on how they earned their stripes?  I've , and to be honest I was hoping I'd get a hit, because it sounds like a stupid question... anyways, here you go!  Also, I'm not referring to how to gain rep on Meta, since it's a bit of a fluke I've earned the rep I have on here. I'm asking about main SO.
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Super User got hit by another batch of spammers creating profiles. They've got accounts on other sites from what I've heard from other mods and from the comments here.  Last time it was streaming. Now it's  (as of december, looks like they're spamming scammy finance too). I have 160+ pages of users from that search, and a quick look suggests most of them are spammers. Comments from this post indicates it's network wide - and a quick check indicates Stack Overflow has a handful of these too, though not as many as we have.  While the powers at be have been taking action, both directly, and indirectly, it feels like between shared IPs and search, mods might be able to take a good chunk of these out if we can somehow have a way to delete accounts somewhat in bulk. You guys are awesome. But these... People keep doing it still, and it would be nice to see their works undone.  Unlike our streaming spammers, they've switched to phone numbers, presumably because Adam so kindly blocked links.    There's a few good suggestions at mitigating these - but ideally - I've heard from fellow mods that we want them gone.  They add to the broken window effect - which we can't do anything about due to sheer volume, and they probably poison our search engine results.  We can probably reduce the risk of oops by filtering by IPs (clearing everything on an IP lets me whack, 10, or so users at once, rather than clicking through 3-4 pages a user) and optionally selectively not deleting accounts that seem legit, we can probably clear out a bunch of these without really needing CM intervention. It does make it a little too easy, but these incidents, well kinda need a flamethrower's gentle warmth.  I'm cool with a no. I'm probably going through the usual channels in future. Would be nice to have something that lets mods deal with this effectively though.  Related:    - Actually goes into the impact of this  by a user - so clearly these are discoverable to an average user
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For nearly 5-6 hours now, I am not getting the usual sorted list of questions on  page. Here are two screenshot(with awesome red-circles)(which are becoming more common in my questions :():      As it can be noticed, all the timestamps are placed randomly. Is it newest feature/change in SO? If so, please revert it. :/ Or is it one of the two options mentioned in the question title?
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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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The Boardgames Stack Exchange question  became a Hot Network Question three times, according to its :  All three events have the exact timestamp (19:14:39 UTC - shown when you click the 'toggle format' link or upon hovering) so it's probably a race condition or something. It's not a unique case;  finds instances on a single site, and  lists all occurrences in the network (currently 448). The current record holders, with 44 HNQ entry events, are   on Retrocomputing  on Worldbuilding
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So you are camping (please excuse the MMO jargon, sometimes I just can't help myself) your own particular corner of Stack Overflow, hoping for a couple of upvotes before bed.  It's freezing cold and you can't quite drag yourself across the room to grab the little blow heater, because that would mean leaving the almost adequate warmth of your laptop.  A completely objective question pops up, to which you absolutely know the answer.  Riding the surge of adrenaline, you spend the next twenty minutes typing like a madman. Desperate to beat the other lunatics that loiter in your tag of choice.  You beat them to the punch and enter a superlative answer, code samples, examples and maybe some ironic humour. You are flushed with your own awesomeness.  You go to bed. Satisfied you have garnered a couple of points of virtual self validation. You look forward to the flush of pleasure in the morning when you see your account bumped ever closer (yet never close enough) to that shining example of Skeetness.    Yet, the next morning, no such flush occurs.  Your answer sits in prime position for some questioner love and none eventuates.  You might get a couple of upvotes from some sympathetic SO compatriot, but the ultimate (I'll try to avoid any unsavory metaphors here)  satisfaction of accepted answer is denied you.    So my question. How you react to this kind of situation?   Catch yourself monitoring the questioner's account waiting for them to log on and then breaking nearby inanimate objects when your answer continues to be ignored. Panic that the questioner might delete their account, leaving your beloved question to evaporate in a puff of uninterest.  Wondering if it was something you said and answering some other of the questioner's queries in the hope of redeeming yourself in their fickle eyes.   I have seen a few examples of this type of frustration on Twitter and wondered how the hardcore Stack Overflow community dealt with this type of rejection.