In an aid to reduce the amount of rubbish that gets posted from brand new users (or long time listeners, first time posters), it could be useful to make them sit a short test (or an "interactive tutorial" might sound better).  This "interactive tutorial" might consist of an initial page presenting a cut-down version of the FAQ, highlighting what makes a good question, and what kind of things they should avoid asking.  The user would then proceed to a number of bad question examples, the user would then be required to select from a list of choices, what is wrong with the example question.  Of course, we wouldn't want to deny membership should anybody "not pass", so instead, whenever a user selects a wrong answer, they are presented with an explanation as to why their selection is wrong, and why the correct answer is a more suitable reason. The user should be forced to read this by using a short 30 second timer (or however long), before they can move on to the next question.  This could be extended to work on a per-action basis. For example, before a user can have privileges for an action (e.g. post question, answer, comment, vote up/down, etc.) they have to sit the "interactive tutorial" related to that action.  This could also be enforce on existing users. I would have no problem sitting a few short tutorials in order to earn my privileges back if it means we improve the content from new users.
We often see new users make offtopic, low quality posts, with broken English and cries for help. These questions look significantly different from most on SO.  When I worked in publishing, we would frequently receive documents that were incorrectly formatted. This was a major problem and we wasted a lot of time sending emails back and forth.  I made a small JavaScript quiz asking our authors about the formatting directions and the number of emails drastically dropped. I felt this was much nicer than simply rejecting them, additionally providing us a chance to make the directions more clear.  It is slightly unconventional but, would showing new users a quiz where they have to identify good and bad posts help to improve the quality of SO questions?  Edit (3/8/2017)  Recently a Norwegian website got some media attention for .
Avoiding "(Not Responding)" label in windows while processing lots of data in one lump I occasionally need to process a large amount of data from one package off the network, which takes sufficiently long that when the user tries to interact with the application windows adds the "(Not Responding)" string to the window title. I am aware this is because the processing is being done within a call to handle a message (some way up the stack) and therefore is blocking the message pump. I'm also aware the ideal way to deal with this is to process the data asynchronously in a separate thread so the pump can continue running, however this is a LARGE desktop application which is single threaded from top to toe and safely spinning this processing off is not feasible in our time frame.  So with that in mind, is there by any chance a way I can at least avoid the "not responding" moniker (which to most users reads as "has crashed") by telling windows my application is about to be busy before I begin the work? I believe there is something along these lines when responding to a request to close, one can keep asking windows for more time to avoid it proclaiming that your not "closing in a timely fashion"  I should add this is a C++ MFC application. What is the rigor behind U subsitution? Pointwise convergence of $h_n(x) = x^{1+\frac{1}{2n-1}}$ Okay, maybe I'm missing something obvious but consider $h_n(x) = x^{ 1+ \frac{1}{2n-1}}$ on the set $[-1,1]$. Now consider a fixed $x \in [-1,1]$, we have:  $$\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} h_n(x) = x \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} x^\frac{1}{2n-1} = x$$  But my book says it's $|x|$? Why? When is a biased estimator preferable to unbiased one? How do you determine how much to ask for when someone wants you to photograph a wedding? I've been asked to shoot a wedding for money, which would be the first time that I've had such an opportunity. I've taken pictures at three prior weddings, two as the main photographer, but not while getting paid. (For the two where I was the primary photographer, well, they really just didn't care much about their pictures, so...)  Anyways, how does one go about figuring out a decent price to charge for a wedding? I should add that while I wouldn't mind doing this every now and then, I probably wouldn't shoot a ton of weddings, so I don't want to subscribe to some service to tell me how much I should charge. Could someone please check if I'm saying something that make sense? I am trying to check the following:     If $f$ is a measurable function, then $\text{supp}(f)$ is measurable set?   Is it simply because, if we consider $E_1 = (0,\infty)$ and $E_2 = (-\infty,0)$, since they are open, they are measurable. So their union $\mathbb{R}-\{0\}$ is measurable as well. Since $f$ is measurable, then the preimage $f^{-1}(\mathbb{R}-\{0\})$ is measurable. But the preimage is just the support? What does "...from nonmagical attacks not made with silvered weapons" mean? I'm sure your first thought is, that's perfectly clear.  Unfortunately my group who aren't normally rules lawyers disagree.  Party encounters a  (MM p.211).  It has:     Damage Immunities: bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical   attacks not made with silvered weapons.   My reading of that is if the weapon has to be magical and silvered to hurt it.  So a +1 silver dagger will hurt it, but a +1 regular dagger or a +0 silver dagger won't.  The group's interpretation was that all three of those weapons would hurt and only a +0 regular dagger would be ineffective.    I would also note my interpretation would mean something like blade barrier would also not harm it since you could argue they're magical blades but nothing indicates that they're silvered.    This also appears to be the same wording for some undead so I'm not looking for a lycanthrope specific interpretation but something general for every time that wording is used.    Thanks in advance. Sync +- 70 000 records from CSV into drupal I have a CSV file with approx. 70.000 records that I want to import into Drupal 7. Once this is done the client will provide a new CSV file on a daily base that has to sync the updated rows to Drupal.   I wrote a import with  and the  module, but in both cases it takes like forever to import the 70.000 rows. Is there any other solution to import the data faster in Drupal 7? I would like to say something like     The boy, Adam's, favorite toy was a bike.   What is the proper way to say this? Does casting blindness on a Medusa (or other gaze using creature) stop their gaze attack? tcpdump : lost packets Draw a vertical line over the entries of a column in an array How to model the bottle threads? The picture show the threads I want to create on the highlighted object. Problem is I don't know how and tutorials really haven't helped much as most of them seem to be about creating a bolt. So I was hoping I could get some help on how to do this efficiently.While keeping the top flat like a water bottle. The picture shows the threads I'm after. I'm thinking of following some kind of education in physics online. I have a master degree in Computer Science and have reasonable good knowledge in physics. I would like a program of 1-2 years and I'm more interested in particle physics.   Is there any good online program that offer something similar? My account has 20 (!) sites associated to it.  I only use it for 3-5 sites.  To reduce clutter, I would like to delete my profiles that I do not use much.  I have went through , but when I enter the profile URL as:  http://russian.stackexchange.com/users/5772/alex   it gives the error message:     oops! this isn't a link to a valid profile   What procedure do I go through to delete my profile only on certain sites? How to determine the encoding of text? how I can continue this limit resolution?  The limit is:   $$ \lim_{n \to \infty}{\sqrt[n]{\frac{n!}{n^n}}} $$  This is that I have done:  I apply this test: $ \lim_{n \to \infty}{\sqrt[n]{a_n}} = \frac{a_{n+1}}{a_n} $  Operating and simplifying I arrive to this point: $$ \lim_{n \to \infty}{\frac{n^n}{(n+1)^n}} $$  I've done something wrong? Thanks! $-1$ is a quadratic residue modulo $p$ if and only if $p\equiv 1\pmod{4}$ Increase close vote weight for gold tag badge holders Do messages in archive count to your inbox space? Pretty much as the title says, do messages in archive count to your total inbox space?