Yesterday, on Stack Overflow, I gave some constructive criticism to a user, when I downvoted (how foolish of me, I know!). Unfortunately as some users do, my point was taking poorly; in this case it was advice that a WHILE loop in T-SQL would perform awfully vs a set-based method and provided a couple of fiddles to do so (which evidenced a huge performance difference).  After a few comments I disengaged as the other user wasn't going to listen and also started to throw play ground insults out; I flagged the comments, moved on.  Unfortunately, they decided to instead start posting comments on my website (which he would have found via my profile). One of these said "Stupid Prostitute" in Turkish, another was the "Right Clicker"  insult they were throwing at me in the answers comments, and also the swear word for "poo".  Now, these don't offend me, this is just a small troll on the internet, but the behaviour is clearly not something that any SE community would want. They clearly aren't going to contribute constructively to any communities.  I realise that I "technically" have no proof, however, the fact that they hurled the same insult is a good indicator.   Does SE have an opinion on such user behaviour, even though they've moved off site?
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Someone mentioned in chat the possibility of interpersonal conflicts between Stack Exchange participants spilling over into the real world and resulting in socially inappropriate behavior off-site. Does the Code of Conduct (CoC) regulate our behavior off-site as it pertains to interactions with or affecting the community or company? Another way of asking the same question is whether the CoC has extraterritorial jurisdiction. For example, if I want to post a message on Reddit about my experiences on Stack Exchange, is it sufficient to obey Reddit's code of conduct or do I need to be concerned about potentially being suspended on Stack Exchange if my behavior would have been improper if it had been done here? There are arguably two main possible scenarios here:  The behavior would be in violation of the CoC if done here, but is allowed according to the rules of the venue in which it is actually performed. The behavior is a violation both here and there, but the other venue already has a system in place to investigate violations and issue sanctions (e.g. being banned from Reddit, having one's Tweets drastically rate-limited, expulsion from a university, being escorted out of the mall, etc.). In law, this principle is sometimes referred to as &quot;double criminality&quot;.  If Stack Exchange's response would be different depending on which of the above happens, what is the rule? In response to a comment by Tinkeringbell, if I want to interact with Stack Exchange participants off-site and/or engage in behavior potentially affecting them, do I have to follow the SE CoC in order to not get banned here or do I simply need to obey the rules of the venue where I am? In response to a comment by Sonic, Wikipedia's concept of &quot;off-wiki harassment&quot; could apply here. That is, does Stack Exchange prohibit or provide for specific remedies for &quot;off-Stack harassment&quot; or does it defer such off-site activity to the codes of conduct of the places where said harassment might occur (e.g. if someone uses Wikipedia as the venue to engage in a harassment campaign against a Stack Exchange user, then Stack Exchange will refer and defer any complaints about said harassment to Wikipedia)?
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This is related to  question. I think we should discourage "Belongs on S[OFU]" type comments. I think they encourage the OP to go to the indicated site and re-ask the question. Flagging/voting to move on the question should be sufficient. Assuming this is the case, would it be proper to flag those comments for mod removal to hopefully get them removed before a new user sees them and duplicates the question?  Or, another example:    Or, even worse, but this new (!) user probably just doesn't know better:
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I have just answered a question on .  The nature of this error means that it requires DBA access to diagnose and resolve.  So I think it is more suited to ServerFault, and voted to close it accordingly.    Except that I wasn't offered the choice of selecting a more approprate Trilogy site.  I think the reason for this is that the question was .  But it was migrated by an SF moderator, Chopper3, and no other voters.  By  Chopper is "no Oracle expert", and I think he has made an error here.    I'm not launching an ad hominem attack, and I'm fine with moderators having super powers.   I just think that we ought to be able to bounce migrated questions back, even if the previous migration was ordained by a moderator.    @AdamDavies suggests I post a comment on the original site.  That indeed was the first thing which occurred to me.  However, comment is not an option. I don't know whether this is  a reputation thang (I don't use SF much) or because the question was closed by a mod.  I have also flagged the question with the SF moderators, so we'll see.
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I have noticed a couple of kinds of behavior that seem to crop up in the SO community, and it really seems to artificially boost reputation. There may not be a solution (or it may not be a problem!) but here are some thoughts.  The first is the fact that "celebrity" users, or users with lots of reputation, are treated significantly better than others. Take Joel Spolsky's most recent question:    It was closed, opened, closed, and re-opened. And the question has earned Joel - what - 1030 reputation 103 votes, and lots of reputation! Wow! I'm not saying that Joel's question is a bad one. But lets compare to other questions that one might consider to be in the same equivalence class - easily answerable, specific questions, short questions:   (5 votes)   (5 votes)  If you look at the , I can hardly find any which are specific technical questions. So that Joel's question was so upvoted could only mean that:   It was upvoted based on his celebrity People have been interpreting the questions as a sort of zen-like wakeup call, designed to get people talking and thinking about they way they vote.   I do not mean any disrespect toward Joel, and again, I think his question was a good one. This post isn't about Joel! But the boost in reputation did not (imho) mean "Joel is really good at programming, and he has earned my trust as someone knowledgeable about computers." It may be true that Joel is a proficient computer expert, but not based on the merit of that one question.  Which leads me to an example about myself. I recently gave  (130 reputation) to a question about PHP's image-creating libraries. I am very appreciative of the community's support for my answer - an answer which I believe was well-thought and that I put effort into.  At the same time I can't look someone and tell them, with a straight face, that my reputation is a great reflection of my computer-related knowledge. Billions of people on the net have created tutorials for PHP's GD image library - I just happened to be the person to post a few of them. Heck if I know why it got 13 votes! (oh, but please don't downvote it!!)  SO is built by the community - so the community absolutely gets to decide what questions are important, and how they choose to dispense reputation. But in practice, I feel like peoples' reputation would be much lower if the community were more discriminating about the way they voted.  So: am I totally off base here? Is this even something that can be corrected with a different reputation algorithm? Or am I the only one who sees this as a detriment to the SO community?  (And, to be completely clear, I do not intend for this to be an ad hominem, and I am not jealous about not having a higher reputation. But I do take reputation with a grain of salt, in part for these reasons, and I thought I'd bring it up! It is meta, after all!)
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I put a lot of effort in writing comments in a conversation, arguing against one initial comment made by another user. That user finally deleted her original comment, as well as an ulterior one, rendering the whole conversation meaningless to any other potential reader.  I can understand that one would not like traces of its past errors to remain forever visible on the Internet, but it is obvious that everybody is exposing himself to that when posting on Stack&nbsp;Exchange, and should accept the risk. The conversation was polite and, to my mind, interesting – deleting it does not do any good.  I find it rude and disserving to the community to thus break a whole conversation. My comments now seem to spring out of the blue – you can guess what that makes me sound like.  If the deleted comment doesn’t come back, I’ll have to delete my comments and consider my time lost. Maybe I’m wrong in caring about that, and I got too invested in commenting what went a bit off-topic (but not that much).  Still, I find this pretty rude on the part of the deleter – although she did post a comment saying that she deleted her comment (actually, she deleted two).  The conversation is here, right below the original question:   I did read  and . So deleting or flagging my own comments as obsolete seems to be the right thing to do now.  But I’m unhappy with the time wasted, and, most importantly, I disapprove of that user’s behaviour. What can I do? Would I be right to comment that such a deletion is rude?
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I just wrote an answer to , which was trying to find numeric strings with or without commas (e.g. 1,234,567.89). I wanted to be thorough because I've seen this problem a lot, both on SO and in real-world code.   When I finished, I found 7 other new answers waiting for me, mostly variations on each other. Which would be fine, except for one thing: They're garbage answers. Unless I'm severely mistaken, every answer but mine (so far) is deeply flawed, and I want to downvote all of them. Yeah, I'm a stickler on regex, but IMHO if your pattern lets stuff like  ...,.,,.,,..9 or even ... pass as "numeric input," then you've failed to meet even the bare minimum requirements.  Enough venting. The reason I'm whining to Meta about this is that I'm about to do something that'll REALLY look like tactical downvoting, and I'm mildly concerned about the consequences. If I answer a question and then rain downvotes on every competing answer, will I get flagged for abuse? That would certainly seem like suspicious behavior to me.  More of an opinion question: At what point does a semi-correct answer deserve a downvote? Obviously, if it were just a typo, I'd edit it myself. Where's the line between "close enough" and "this answer sucks?"  Basically, is it just me? You've seen the question; am I right that these answers deserve downvotes? Seven people thought that [0-9,.]+ was good enough to declare something a number, so why am I the only one who doesn't?    Note: I found some related questions, but nothing that seemed like a duplicate:    - More of an etiquette question, plus the voter hadn't posted his own answer.  - I guess this pretty much covers my second question.   Also, as some have noted, my answer ended up pretty long and thorough. I put in a lot of effort because, with all this talk about how the other answers sucked, I wanted to be extra sure mine didn't. I don't expect pages of detail in a normal SO answer.
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Disclaimer: I understand that down-voting (social discord) is an important part of community building. Communal negative messages help to deter behavior destructive to the group. Down voting places warning sign in the road for new travelers (don't tread here) and to temper overexcitement.  Rant: We techies are a hazing culture. We invest countless hours mastering languages, algorithms and nuances. We accomplish great things. We rub it in people's faces to feel superior. We feel good becoming an "expert". We feel good when we master lambdas or create a great search algorithm.  Admit it, even the humblest among us feels warm and fuzzy when someone marvels at our work. It's validation. And it's not a bad thing.  But the joy of accomplishment has a darker sibling: PRIDE  It's part of what drives us so hard. It's part of every negative decision we make. And it's often at someone's expense!  Looking through posts on Stack&nbsp;Overflow, I see many answers with negative ranking. Many questions get negative rankings too. Many of these questions are repeats of ones asked in the past. The user could have done a more thorough job googling and probably deserves a mild slap.  But some questions are interesting and well thought out. New users usually aren't familiar with the thorough and serious natures of experts who frequent the forums. Some useful and interesting thoughts could be refined with a little help. Instead they're insulted and leave.  This spree of "reckless down-voting" may be hurting our "community"  In searching for my own name, I went through 10 pages of users with similar names and found most had rankings of 1. This means they never did so much as except an answer (automatic +2). Many of them just wanted their answers and no interest in community.  But I wonder about the many users who got "Geek-hazed". I wonder how many "Noob"s were scared away by unnecessary down-voting?  As of this writing I have a "rep" of 75. Barely noticeable compared to the super-users with rep above 32,000. But so much higher than most users ever get. My low score reflects some serious attempts to ask and answer worthwhile questions. But it's only a month of "real participation".  According to this article (from 2009)  what I witnessed in non-participation is nothing new.  Good reasons for downvoting  1) Person didn't even try to figure out answer by coding or serious googling.  Example: How do I validate user input on the client level?  2) Vague question; No code, No error msg  Example: Every time I run my application I get an error  Constructive alternatives to downvoting  1) A clearly new user didn't give code samples but described his error and error messages  Action: Suggest the user elaborate and include relevant code samples.  2) An answer is correct but vague. No examples, not enough detail. Maybe even sloppy English.  Action: Suggest the user elaborate and include relevant code samples.  Question: Do you think gratuitous down-voting hurts participation in our "community"?
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I just saw a  from a user asking about a C# stack trace.  It was a valid programming question for someone with little experience, yet it was marked down twice.  I've always believed that there are no stupid questions. Am I wrong?
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From the guidance on spam and offensive flags:     Additionally, any answer that accumulates enough offensive or spam flags will be automatically deleted.   What if a bunch of lunatics simply cast offensive flags for fun and random posts get automatically deleted? Does SE have some mechanism to prevent this situation?
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I recently filed what I initially thought was a bug, but was mostly user error here on Meta, and tweeted about it. Once it was pointed out to me that it was user error about 2 hours after I posted it, I deleted the question.  I've just been awarded the  for that deleted question, which while nice from a badge point of view feels fraudulent, as most people would see the question as a broken link:
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Is there a constructive way to put pressure on Stack Exchange (the company) without putting any pressure on the community in general and the moderators in particular?  Goals   Give Monica her diamond(s) back, with a public apology if the accusations were not founded. Address the underlying issues that led to this blowing up:   Significant policy changes without review; Not assuming good intent when people ask questions; Dictating to—rather than working with—moderators and the community; Attacking or going silent when challenged; Insufficiently asking the community they claim to want to protect for their input on how to do so.    Desired properties  The methods to achieve these goals should:   Be constructive. No trolling, no personal attacks, no targeting of minorities. Be sufficiently effective to change some of the company's KPIs to red () Not require any additional work from the moderators. There's an extreme amount of pressure already, but it's been mostly directed towards the community. Be reversible as soon as improvements are noticed. The goal isn't to permanently damage the company but to force the company to realign with the community. Stack&nbsp;Exchange is still doing a lot of things right.   Past actions  Those actions didn't seem to impress corporate very much:    (While it has a huge impact on the community and the content, there hasn't been any sign that the higher ups seem to care at all). .     What else could work?   Offer a platform for SE employees to anonymously share information relevant to the current problems. Some of the employees clearly feel a strong link to the community, but they are apparently forced to either stay silent or repeat corporate buzzwords. Stop using Stack Exchange paid products at work (e.g. ) Advise everyone to enable Ad-Blockers on Stack Exchange. Change our . Reach out to a prominent Twitter user and let them publicly complain about one of the many recent problems.   Any suggestion is welcome.
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My reputation rating on SO took this hit an hour ago, and it is due to what appears to be the simultaneous deletion of multiple questions.  I am uncertain why it happened, am concerned, and would appreciate an explanation.  Going to  shows that it was removed due to moderation.  Was a script run deliberately, or were we hit with a question deletion attack; what happened?  -12     today -2  1 hour ago  removed     How to send a 2d Vector over UDP in c++ -2  1 hour ago  removed     How do I use the Eclipse debugger to debug a Java application? -2  1 hour ago  removed     PHP string error; inconsistency with local and server -2  1 hour ago  removed     Unable to start the MySQL service after a server migration -2  1 hour ago  removed     How to use Java to print a text file on a ticket printer? -2  1 hour ago  removed     How can all of the ZBrush Obj files be imported to make a complete model?
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I'm not a fan of the downvoting feature in general; frankly, I think it should be removed from all of the stackexchange sites.  Negative feedback leads to negative results. I recognize that the intent is not to provide a means of giving negative feedback, but that's what downvoting does. "The community's way of telling peers that their content can be improved" isn't an accurate description of downvoting: people who downvote other people with no explanation as to why (the usual practice) generally consider them not their peers, but their inferiors.   I fear that the downvoting feature panders to the worst aspects of human nature, to an extent that far outweighs any possible benefit that it can provide. I recognize that the intent of downvoting is to make a form of constructive criticism available, but that it fails to do. It simply says "this is bad" without any explanation. If someone really wants to offer constructive criticism, he can do so in the comments, or by closing questions with an explanation of how to bring them up to par. If he does that, it is that that has the value, not a downvote that might or might not go along with it.  I submit that the increasingly negative "elitist" reputation of many of the stackexchange sites (stackoverflow, the "bread and butter" site, in particular) is due more to unexplained downvotes than anything else: downvoting is (much) more often than not a way of telling new people that they aren't welcome in the club. This isn't conducive to growth.  It seems to me that the recently introduced admonishment to "be nice" to new members acknowledges the problem without really doing anything about it. It would be given more teeth if the downvoting feature were removed entirely — people have to give a lot more thought to a comment than a downvote decision. Furthermore, the (apparently many) "serial downvoters" who contribute little if anything else to the site would take themselves elsewhere.   Thoughts? What are the positive contributions (are there any?) that downvoting makes to the stackexchange sites?
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Recently, there was a user in the Tavern who was... um, either highly delusional or a bot. In any case, since unfortunately no employees were around at the time, it took us almost a full hour to get enough people to spam/offensive/abusive flag one of his messages in order to get a measly 30-minute chat ban.  All of us in Teachers' Lounge felt so helpless in that we could barely do anything in order to... well, be moderators. Even our custom "other" flags went unhandled since no employees were around at the time.  Therefore, I hereby propose that we assimilate chat.MSE into chat.SE!    , but it was from a long time ago, and things have changed.   chat.meta.SO is no more. The reasoning provided for having a separate meta chat was:     And MSO? hmm... well... er... hmmm... MSO is a curious beast; in part it discusses stackoverflow.com and in part it discusses the Stack Exchange Network.   That no longer applies after the MSO/MSE split. chat.SO is active enough to have a separate thing, but chat.MSE is much less so. (This is obviously true given the fact that it took over an hour for a single blue person to appear.) The above point is especially exemplary considering that most users with chat moderation privileges on Chat.SE don't have those privileges on Chat.MSE. In order to participate in Chat.MSE, users without the association bonus need to have explicit participation on this site. This is unlike Chat.SE, where any user whose combined rep across all sites is 20+ can chat in any chat room on any site (except Stack Overflow).  Meta isn't even as special as it used to be (yes yes I know, we're very special unicorns, but just listen to me), since it's now basically a "normal" site (in the technical sense. The users are... well, we're something different.). Since it's actually much less active than other *.SE.coms, I don't see why it's treated so differently.
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I noticed that  (about basic  syntax) received a lot of downvotes as soon as I posted it. Is there any specific policy against the posting of questions with "obvious" answers on Stack Overflow?  I'm unclear as to why questions with "obvious" answers aren't usually well-received by the community - are beginner questions considered harmful for some reason? ("Obvious" is a relative term, of course - this type of question would be helpful to anyone who was learning C# for the first time, but it wouldn't be helpful to an experienced C# developer.)
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I've downvoted several of the answers on these Meta discussions:       Both questions are typical self evaluations, Stack Exchange runs them on all young Beta sites and as you may have noticed they are essentially polls, a series of example questions from the site that we are supposed to vote on.  Today I noticed that almost all of my votes have disappeared on both evaluations, only an upvote remains in the later one. My votes triggered the serial voting script, something that :      Heh, it appears I just serially downvoted you (I downvoted a lot of the answers here), hopefully the script is smart enough to not reverse my votes. Will check back in 24h, and if it does, I'll rant about it on MSO ;)    My voting behaviour on both evaluations was very simple:   I had the evaluation open in the left monitor, Opened all the example questions in their own tab, in the right monitor, Scanned each question quickly, and voted on the Meta answer (most of my votes were downvotes), Repeat for the next one, and so on...   I didn't spend more than a few seconds on any question, as I'm fairly regular on the site and I've already read all of them while casually browsing the site. In fact, if my memory isn't failing me, I had voted (up/down) and/or commented, and/or voted to close on each of the 20 example questions. I might have spend a minute or two re-reading a couple, but I mostly scanned through them. In any case I think my voting pattern is quite normal, and the script should be somehow tweaked to take serial posts, posted by the same user in quick succession, into consideration, especially on Metas.   Since I had anticipated that the script would kick in, I could have tried to fool it by pausing a bit between votes or trying to look for other Meta posts to vote on, in between voting on the evaluation answers. However I'm a very active voter on Meta Workplace, there aren't many posts I haven't already voted on, and the few that I haven't is probably because I neither agree or disagree with (my opinion on them is simply "meh"). In any case I think my voting behaviour was natural, and although the serial voting script is awesome, this time it caught and reversed a perfectly legitimate behaviour.  Animuson, in , mentions that the script isn't really optimal on Area51 as well:      Yes, please implement this on Area 51 proposals too! Oftentimes a single user would suggest a plethora of "example" questions to their own proposal which are just terrible, yet all of everyone's votes get reversed and the question just sits there at 0. I've noticed several times that my votes have gotten reversed.    I haven't noticed it myself, but it certainly seems plausible, especially early in a proposal's life.  Mysticial found a related discussion, , but it's focused on voting patterns on main sites, where reputation is also a factor. I can understand jumping through hoops to satisfy the script on main sites where, unfortunately, there are a lot of people trying to get some cheap rep or "punish" others with their downvotes, but not on Metas, and especially not on these evaluation posts.   Voting fraud is a problem, and more often than not the script works wonderfully, but in my case it was extremely counterproductive. Critical evaluations are essential for a young Beta site, and their answers typically only get a handful of votes. I wonder how many of these votes have silently gone away...  Fix this please.
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Since my profile will be deleted in a few hours, this doesn't concern me, but the remaining people may be interested.  We know the already famous post: . One may be surprised that it has too few comments, especially highly negative ones. It seems that the reason is simple: moderation. About 4 hours ago I've written the comment there, but it wasn't published. Since I don't see it "awaiting moderation" anymore and I see much later comments published, it seems to be removed. The comment was along these lines:     There were a lot of things I didn't like in SO: too positively-skewed   reputation changes, generally-accepted reputation farming via   answering duplicates which were asked 10 times, extremely low quality   threshold for questions, "accepted answer" feature implementation, etc. and etc. Looking at the recent changes,   things will become only worse. I'm deleting my profile.   Now, the question is: why was it removed? Is it unfriendly? Sure, but I don't see why it should be friendly: we express our opinions, and my opinion is negative. Is it non-constructive? Well, to some extent, but definitely more constructive than:     Nice! I’m (hopefully) looking forward to passing the 10k mark   If there are rules for commenting (like 2. You DO NOT TALK bad about SO), I think it makes sense to publish them (and give an easily-found link to them in the blog). It also would be interesting to know how comment moderation is organized.