I often ask niche or difficult questions, and as a consequence I get a few Tumbleweed badges.   Very often, these Tumbleweed questions do slowly accumulate views and answers because they're the only quality Google result for the problem, and often they attract answers, many upvotes and favourites (even in some cases gold Famous Question badges) months and years later. They're not bad questions, they're just niche (I'm saying this because I know ).  I find the Tumbleweed badge very useful as a notification that my question is getting very low views. .  Then I realised I only ever got one badge per site, and I found that this is by design - it's a once-only badge.  I think this doesn't make sense. If the Tumbleweed badge is useful, surely it's useful for what I use it for - a notification that, for whatever reason, the regulars on this site haven't shown any interest in this question, and therefore you should think about whether it can be improved, re-pitched, migrated or promoted, and also, lower your expectations for how quickly it will get answered.    If there's a serious concern about people becoming "tumbleweed addicts" or trying to inflate their badge total by asking deliberately-boring or needlessly-niche questions, a compromise option would be to add the new question to the existing Tumbleweed badge, and notify the user the usual way. So, if I had 3 Tumbleweed questions, I'd only have one badge, but it would list all three questions and I'd have been notified each time.  I'm not bothered about the number of actual badges I get, I'd just like to be notified when a question goes tumbleweed on me.     Maybe also, it'd be interesting to be able to browse my tumbleweed questions (not just the first from each site) and see what became of them. I know at least one of my questions that began as tumbleweed is now at +7 with 29,815 views, and several others got great answers and thousands of views eventually. It'd be interesting to see how others fared over time.  Even better still, would be to be able to browse all tumbleweed questions on a site, looking for good but difficult or niche questions where a good answer would really make someone's day. Special rewards for answering tumbleweed questions have been proposed in the past (e.g. the above link and ) - I don't think a special reward is necessary, but it'd be nice to be able to tidy up tumbleweed just for its own sake.
123686
It’s just a consolation badge, and I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure of asking my second question that would earn the badge. It would be nice (for some strange reason) to get another tumbleweed badge.  I’m not sure if the reason is that given in “”. That is, my first question was eventually answered, so it negated my first tumbleweed badge, but it wasn’t taken away; I just didn’t receive a second one. But this seems to conflict with the definition of the tumbleweed badge:     Asked a question with no answers, no comments, and low views for a week.   which is still true of both questions.
92948
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
59553
Is there a way to view your own progress towards certain badges? For example:   Tumbleweed - What value constitutes low views for a week? Fanatic  – Is there a way to view how many days in a row you currently have? Beta – Is it even possible to get this badge anymore?
84583
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.
91315
Poking around the people's profiles to see how the  I keep seeing things like this:  It looks strange to have a 25/5 progress on a badge, but the dialog explains that what this user is missing is a positive record of asking. The  is: (total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions &gt;= 0.5  If you look at , it's hard to see how his asking record could be anything but exceptional. According to  his asking record is 0.875. The problem is that he asked many of his questions in the early days of the site that were well-received, but later deleted. Some were deleted after the question was . My suggestion is that we change the asking record formula: (total questions - negative questions - closed - early deleted)/total questions &gt;= 0.5  The early deleted variable counts only questions deleted within 60 days of being asked. I picked 60 days because it's the dividing line between being able to . After looking through the list of people who would get the Curious badge on Stack Overflow with this change, I noticed a few things:  Many of them have self-deleted questions on their record. Often these are questions that were asked and basically ignored. After a few months, the original asker went back and deleted their question. It's hard to know what happened in each individual case, but my guess is that they never found a solution to their specific question and worked around the issue instead. (I have a few of those, but I'm not courteous enough to delete them.)  These users don't tend to ask the same question over and over again. I ran a similar test that excluded self-deleted questions. That group included a lot of cases of people asking a question, not getting an answer after a day or two, deleting the question, and asking the same question again. This strategy doesn't work if you wait two months to delete your first question.  Two mods (George Stocker and Gordon), Tim Post, and myself are on the list of users who would get a Curious badge under this system. On Meta Stack Exchange 5 current employees would be newly eligible for the badge. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, these are curious users.  I did some spot check on the lower end of the reputation scale. Every user I looked at fit my model of the ideal recipient of the Curious badge; they asked mostly upvoted questions with few closed questions. This change would add about 3286 new Curious badges on Stack Overflow, so there will certainly be a few exceptions I didn't find. But I think they are more than balanced by the clearly deserving users who will be awarded new badges.    Proposal: For the Curious, Inquisitive, and Socratic badges, don't count questions deleted 60 or more days after asking as deleted for the purposes of calculating asking record. These questions may still count as negatively scored or closed, if applicable. Days that include deleted questions, no matter when they are deleted, do not count toward the days asked criteria.   Modified Proposal: For the Curious, Inquisitive, and Socratic badges, don't count questions deleted or closed 60 or more days after asking as deleted or closed for the purposes of calculating asking record. These questions may still count as negatively scored, if applicable. Days that include deleted or closed questions, no matter when they are deleted or closed, do not count toward the days asked criteria. On Stack Overflow, that would add about 665 Curious badges, including two more for moderators (casperOne and 0x7fffffff) and one for an employee (Oded). On the opposite end of the reputation scale my spot checks are a bit muddier. Instead of a small number of deleted (and usually closed) questions, this list turns up users whose latest questions still aren't all that interesting. Even so, on balance a few extraneous bronze badges seem worthwhile in exchange for acknowledging truly curious users.
27608
Right now there isn't a great way to monitor the questions that I am interested in following. What I seem to do now is go to my recent history for questions I have commented on, and then link to the questions from there. The problem is, if I am really interested in a question, I have to monitor it closely. Sometimes I will "favorite" a question so it is easier to access more quickly, because I do not have a lot of favorites. But favoriting is not the right thing to do. I think you should only favorite a question if you really really like it, not to make it easier to follow.  I propose that you can mark questions as "interested" or something like that. What this means, is that you will get notifications for everything associated with a question: any time a new answer is posted, the answer/question is edited, and any comments to any of the answers (or question). This would make it much easier to follow questions. Especially if someone adds a new answer or comment way down the road, after you have long forgotten about the question.  It would also be nice if such a feature allowed you to write a sentence or two to associate with the question to remind you about something. In fact, if this is done, we could just use this feature to implement  to allow an edit to notify downvoters. Instead of that specific feature, you can mark a question as interested after downvoting and add a comment, "remove downvote when fixed".  What do you all think? Do you propose a better way to manage monitoring questions of interest? (The other thing I do is keep a bunch of browser tabs open with questions I am following... and this is messy :-( ).
43789
Sometimes you spend a day or more solving a technical problem, and when you finally solve it, you may want to post it on your blog (if you have one) to share with the community.  However, most developers don't have a lot of time to update their blogs, and that is why personal blogs are not ranked very highly on Google/Bing.  So even if you describe a brilliant idea, chances are that, except a few of your friends, nobody will ever find it. This is a common reason why some developers start their blogs and soon give up; it is not interesting to write for the community if you have no feedback on your posts.  Unlike personal blogs, Stack Exchange sites are highly ranked in Google (I was amazed when I saw that a question asked on SO just an hour ago appeared 3rd in my Google search!), so if your question and answer are valuable for others, they will be rated highly and will be visible for other developers.  With this in mind, is it good practice to post a question and answer it yourself immediately when you want to share an idea with the community?
77613
It might be useful to encourage existing users of stackoverflow to cross pollinate other stack exchange sites.  While rep-sharing is not useful, as rep is meant to be a measure of expertise in one subject, badges may be one way to encourage participation across many sites.  This was triggered by seeing how few people actually had greater than 1k rep on all three main sites (SO, SF, SU) via Dennis Williamson's  app.  I had tried to do this by hand prior to the API under the assumption that many people would be answering questions on all three sites, but it turns out there are only 33 people, of all the users of stackoverflow, that have a 1k+ reputation on all three sites.  Over time it may be useful to provide badges that appear on all sites one is participating in that are awarded for extraordinary participation in the whole universe of Stack Exchange sites.  For instance, a silver badge might appear on all my profiles if I obtain 1k rep on 5 or more sites, and a gold badge if I have more than 3k rep on 5 or more sites.  I would hesitate extending this much past 5 sites as we don't want to encourage spamming questions and answers on sites where the user has little interest, but across the universe of stackapps I know I'm proficient or expert in at least 10 current sites, and while it's not a big nudge, the idea that I can get extra awards - especially ones that appear on all sites I'm in - would move me to participate a little more on sites that I am registered on, but don't visit regularly.    I expect, eventually as sites are launched, most users of any one site will have some interest or knowledge in at least 5 other sites.  This may provide the extra nudge some sites need to maintain an excellent rating in terms of usage.
31792
I think sometimes there is a need to post question as anonymous, reason being to avoid linking content of a question with the identity of the questioner. This may not be so evident or required on technical sites like stackoverflow.com but sometimes is a necessity on sites like  or maybe in future depression.stackexchange.com  On such sites user may not want to link his identity to some questions where he may detail about his being over-weight or skinny or maybe some other attribute which he may like to keep private and avoid making his concerns public, but still want to ask a question with valid data.  I am not suggesting that user asking question should not be registered or not responsible for content. I think all down-votes or up-votes should still be attributed to user, but this way most users would not suffer , and reputation could even be used for a bounty. The only change should be that while asking question a valid registered user can hide his identity (the whole user signature block/user card and the reputation should be replaced by "identity-hidden") and that question should not be listed in his public profile.  Anyway identity of questioner doesn't add much value to question. If we think such anonymous question may reduce social nature of Stack Exchange sites, and maybe majority of questions will become anonymous we can curb that by putting a daily or monthly limit per user or put a price of say 50 reputation per anonymous question.  PS: I don't think this is duplicate of        because motive for question and reason for feature request are different, and I propose a different solution too, because creating another account for asking such questions has many problems which having a single account doesn't have    I don't have to manage other account If I keep single account I still may want to keep my details to be linked to my non-anonymous questions I may want to use reputations I earned as bounty for anonymous questions    also allows anonymous questions and may be we can take some hint from there.
35566
Since a , I see more than I should:    I see no reason to see 134 posts are awaiting review, when there is literally nothing I can do about them. I think it is a bug, because notification is meant as something that will make me act. When I know I usually can't, obviously I will start to ignore it.  If it's not a bug, please remove bug tag and explain how it is supposed to be useful, or how can I switch to only seeing notifications about things I can act on.  Note that apaprently there are no flags for me, neither. I see only stats, migrated, close, delete, there, as if there was no flags waiting:    If you expect us to click on it every few minutes  just to see personalized numbers next to queues, why don't you simply query for personalized numbers every few minutes and cache them for us? It should cost you similar, in database usage, and will save us a lot of clicking and frustration.  If all this number means is "there might be reviews, or not" or "for sure there are none"  it would be simpler just to hide "review" link in the second case. We don't need two links with the same function next to each other, thank you, one is enough, and meaningless numbers are only irritating.
7731
There's now a feature-request based on this discussion; see:   I'm about fed up with the First Posts review queue. Oh, it was : give folks a chance to welcome new users to the site, without  with Low Quality review. The problem is, the review system was designed around the idea of guiding folks to accomplish specific goals. And there's no clear goal for First Posts. Without a goal, folks tended to just , until we &quot;fixed&quot; that by adding a &quot;do nothing&quot; button and strict audits. Great fix! , and those that do find that trying to automatically audit an open-ended system is . It's the same problem we had with , with the addition of . So yeah, this review queue is terrible and useless But before throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I figured I'd best check with y'all to see if any baby even lurks in these murky depths.  What value do you see in having a First Posts review? What outputs do you see as valuable from such a queue?  I'm thinking we could probably make this work if we narrowed the focus considerably; less &quot;help new users in some mostly-unspecified way&quot; more &quot;help filter the wheat from the chaff&quot;:  Separate queues for questions and answers, with answers being sanity-checked for spam and questions requiring one vote - up or down. Essentially answer voting would be left to those with a specific interest in a given question (as it should be) while question voting would be used as .  Allow flagging, commenting, comment voting, etc... But don't count those as a review action (unless we decide that the goal of reviewing these is to dramatically increase the number of comments or something, in which case we should probably drop that &amp; try jSobriety).  Send more things into the queue faster, remove them more quickly if they're &quot;reviewed&quot; organically. Less waiting for a new post to get attention, but less duplicate reviewing when something is getting attention without the need for review.   ...Thoughts?
60416
I was recently browsing through the Hot Network Questions and spotting a weird pattern with the frequency of the sites. So I decided to tally up the results and what I found was not reassuring. These are the sites with more than two questions in the Hot Network Questions and the total questions they had:    => 11  => 6  => 6  => 5  => 4  => 4  => 4  => 3  => 3  => 3  => 3   The bottom of this seems OK but the top 3 are a little alarming. Especially the Code Golf one. I think that you can agree that 11 in the top questions is a little much.  Some of you will surely comment with "Clearly they have a lot of top quality questions". But that isn't true. Or at least it isn't the reason that they have this many. The reason is quite simple: code golf is a competition and so it sure to attract more answers and views than a regular question.  Therefore, I am suggesting that we change the way that the HNQ bot checks for questions. The bot should only promote, at maximum, 5 questions to the HNQ list. I have seen this pattern happen week after week, where code golf takes at least 10 of the HNQs. If we change the algorithm, more questions from less populous sites will be able to gain recognition, allowing them to gain more users and thus expand.  If a site has reached the 5 questions and another question becomes incredibly popular, then the lowest ranking HNQ from that site is removed and the new one replaces it.  Or, for an alternative option, see   What do you think? Any questions?
116252
For some questions the accepted answer is not that useful but the OP likes the answer for whatever reason. Later possibly, someone else comes along and provides a better answer (which ends up being rated much higher). For examples you can just look at the .  I wondered - if an answer has more than 20 votes and more than 2x the votes of the accepted answer should it show first in the list?  Justification  A great deal of the popular questions are hits directly from google. The user is going to read the answer, try it and move on to searching google further. Occasionally you will have users that want to read further into the other answers but that isn't always the case. This is still probably important because I'm guessing a good percentage of stack users operate this way. Just theorizing a bit.  One More Thought  The OP is may not be an expert (tons of questions are asked by first time users). So we are putting the first answer that appears in the hands of someone who probably doesn't care all too much. I agree their vote needs to count more than others (Since they know what they needed), but to always show it first may give them too much power.
99727
This is probably going to get me a lot of flak, but I honestly think that the concept of the Unsung Hero, as a badge, was a bad idea. ; the ratio makes sense as it is in fact rewarding the unsung heroes of S[OFU]. The fact that it is not luck-based and that it is pretty much impossible for some high reputation users to get it is both acceptable and fitting for its purpose. I think that mechanically speaking the badge works very well at its job. What I am concerned is whether the decision to implement it at all was wise. Because seeing  really makes me bothered by the implications:     This is not meant to be another badge amongst the 1400 badges Jon Skeet already has, its about giving these users that contribute in a less popular way an incentive to keep contributing.   When I see Unsung Hero and Tenacious, I don't see the encouragement of good activity like other badges are designed for. I see praise for users who missed out, users who work hard where others don't look, users who are unsung heroes. To me, this conflicts with the very nature of the site and the badges - when did we shift our focus onto the users instead of the content?  Is a user who participates more often in overlooked subjects more valuable than a user who gives the same kind of answers but also is extremely active in popular subjects? Is unseen content of relatively unspoken users truly of greater importance to the site than the unseen content of well known users? On the other side of this user focus, why has Jon Skeet become an actual reason to decide on the implementation of new features and rewards? Aren't we supposed to be weighing our decisions on the content of the users, not the users themselves? I always figured the general idea was that while Jon Skeet has a lot of praise for his popularity, beneath all of that was excellent content that was continually contributed.  What behavior does this badge encourage? Posting in low-visibility questions? Create a new version of the badge that lacks the ratio. Is it to encourage avoiding high profile subjects? If the specialist badges aren't enough then  suggests is perfect. No matter how I read this badge, it is focused entirely on the concept of rewarding eccentric users instead of good behavior and content in the community. To me, this is little different than the people who give Jon Skeet upvotes just because of his reputation, which I always figured was discouraged.  I think it's great to highlight the people who tirelessly work without any reward. But the existence of these badges is basically stating "Participation in low-profile subjects is good, but only if you avoid high-profile subjects". Which is a horrible, horrible idea. Why can't we just encourage everyone to participate in low-profile subjects, especially the well-recognized experts who may know the answers?
60377
Today I had some time and felt like writing a relatively good answer on Stack Overflow; explaining both the underlying mechanisms and good practices, unlike usual declarative answers in a "do that" style.  It took me like an hour of time, $50 if I were free lance. It'll bring me nothing but 3-5 occasional views, and - if I get lucky - some ignorant comments.  You know, it's quite discouraging.  Instead of pride for the job that was done, I feel frustrated. I know, this answer may offer help to the OP, if he ever notices it (being already satisfied with other answers).  So the only fate the answer will meet is to sink forever, below thousands other questions, falling like snow.  So, being a programmer, I am thinking of efficiency. It's a waste of time to spend so much effort to answer one question when there is no way to [actually] reuse it. So, I wouldn't do it again but just turn back into short answers mode without explanations.       Seeing other answers, I don't think I am only one with such feeling.  The current policy is driving knowledgeable and educational users away, yet it attracts inexperienced ones in numbers. Ones who will tell you to use [some technology] which they never have laid their hands upon. Ones who write answers just because they have learned some "good practice" from other questions, and this "knowledge" becomes an endless source of rep points.  The idea of Stack Overflow is rotten. It was excellent when trees were high and traffic was low.  It turned bad now; it has become a honeypot for all the "enthusiast programmers" of the world, eager to share their 2 cents faster than you can say the word "close".  You're killing a great resource. Despite all the nice words and proper declarations, it discourages the reuse of the knowledge. And encourages fast on-site answers.  Of course, the rules will tell you contrary. It's all nice and proper (if you don't mind it's strict mutual exclusivity). But mechanically, technologically it works in the way I described.  I tried to write a tag wiki. You know, it was biggest waste of time in my life. As a matter of fact, it is not a wiki at all; you can't even link to a certain section. Not to mention that nobody ever has the idea to read tag wikis.  Reference questions? Don't make me laugh. There is no good mechanism to store and categorize links. Favorites, although intended for the different purpose, are a chunk of crap when you want to use it as a reference. So, you can't compete with 30-seconds answers: a question will get 5 answers before you can even find an appropriate link.  Okay, I can organize links myself but, there are some problems:   I am just a human. I cannot remember everything I am just a human and I cannot answer questions at rate of 1 qpm. One person cannot fight the Tide. It's helpless. When technology makes people writing fast [incomplete] answers -  no good will of proper declarations can do a thing.  Even if a question gets finally closed, it won't hurt anyone - the hydra grew two more already.   You'll call me a brute for insulting honest users and innocent volunteers, but that's fact: There are much more inexperienced users than experienced ones. And inexperienced users have much more spare time to hang over than experts who have their job to do. So, from that fact we can conclude that most of the answers on Stack Overflow have a low quality. Nobody cares. But I do.   There should be a technical way to limit the activity of not-so-knowledgeable-yet-eager-to-answer users. There should be a technical preference for the closing a question over answering it (have a silly answer for the silly question? welcome to comments). There should be a technical solution to accumulate and structure knowledge, a system that lets you choose a good answer instead of writing it by hand.   That's the only way. Otherwise Stack Overflow will remain an automated dispenser of bad practices.  Well, I just felt like letting it out again. Thank you for reading.
32392
There is so much great information on Stack Exchange. A lot of it one discovers only on a need to know basis when running into a similar situation. I was thinking about a new feature to leverage this.  I think that Stack Exchange holds great value in turning its old questions (which already have answers) into a more direct learning experience. Let us say I'm a user that wants to learn more about a specific topic. SE has some knowledge of my skill level on that topic. If not it can try to estimate it by presenting me with questions which already have answers. If I feel comfortable with answering the questions I receive, and the answers are familiar terrain, I can give feedback on how confident I am in resolving the question and also how entertaining the question is as a learning experience. This way SE can update my skill level and update the difficulty and meta information of the question. With this closed feedback loop it can then continue providing me with questions which are relevant to my skill level. Once I'm at a high skill level it could then occasionally present me with questions which don't have an answer as well.  Do you think this makes sense? Would you use it or do you think it would help attract new users to the site and teach them how to write higher quality answers?
79416
A question is eligible for bounty 2 days after creation. Probably because  New questions don't need to be bountied, since they already show up in the New tab and the Active tab and so on (and thus get attention anyways)  . But reality is different In the first 5 minutes after asking you get the majority of views. That has probably *. The view counts drop due to the heavy amount of new questions - thousands every day! If you don't get an answer in the first minutes then you have to wait 2 days to put a bounty on it. Please either remove the bounty delay or reduce it dramatically to an hour or so. * Of course that query does not factor in that question lying around for years have more views than new ones. But the tendency is given IMO.