29
We could simply use the voting system to limit low quality questions while allowing an unlimited number of good questions.
For example, there could be a limit for 30 questions per month which have got less than 5 upvotes. Each good question just adds to it, so after 20 good question one still has 30 questions left. It's even is a motivation to improve own ...
28
Experience suggests that a lot of 'newer' users will add comments such as 'That solved my problem' or 'Thanks' to answers. As the voting/accepting mechanism is the 'visible' way that this can be done on the site, it's desirable that they know this.
At the same time, experience also suggests that many people visit the site only to solve their specific ...
27
I think we could get a useful addition, requiring only few work and without a security risk to our site, which is always to consider for online compilers.
What we would get:
One-click preview
Fast testing and solving problems without a local TeX installation
Actually working with site's TeX code on mobile devices, such as tablets and phones
Additionally, ...
27
Maybe a more lively tutorial can work.
Dynamic version:
Static version:
Code:
\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{graphics}
\usepackage{ellipsis}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{framed}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usetheme{Madrid}
\setbeamersize{text margin left=30pt,text margin right=30pt}
\title{How to ask \emph{good} questions on \...
26
One I think uncontroversial close reason is for things which are typos or which cannot be reproduced: these are about TeX but are unlikely to help any future readers. Thus something like
This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or
a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic
here, this one was ...
24
Don't feel bad. You're selecting the answer "that helped you most".
There already exists a bounty system you can use to reward contributors beyond voting and acceptance. Here you can select from as low as 50 reputation up to 500 to give to someone.
23
Forget what I just said, Sean's link is way better than my pathetic implementation. :)
Is anyone else personally terrified of the new bar at the top?
If you want to keep the avatars, just comment the following part of the code:
/*
.user-gravatar32,
.gravatar,
.avatar-me {
display: none !important;
}
*/
woohoo! :)
The following text is kept ...
23
I'm rather against (too frequent) attempts to produce FAQ type documents.
There are lots of "systematic" documents available -- for instance, package documentation, books, guides and so forth. I'm all in favour of them, of course, and of encouraging people to use them.
But I think, mostly, a site like this is valuable precisely because it does something a ...
21
I think discouraging newbies is a bad idea - we were all newbies once. If I'd faced a test before being allowed my first post I'd probably have gone away (and never known enough to regret that choice).
Perhaps showing a newbie a short sample question before they proceed to their own might help. Most people would probably dismiss it with a click (do you ...
20
Paulo Cereda has developed the awesome TeXPrinter for precisely this purpose. It's a Java application with a very clean interface that takes a question ID and saves the question thread as a PDF or a TeX file. There's a video explaining the usage.
20
Not all good, on-topic questions have answers, so it's important to remember that over time it's to be expected that the number of unanswered questions will increase. That said, if there are answers hidden in comments then the correct thing to do is move them to the right place. This is one of the things that happens during 'Answer the Unanswered': there are ...
20
This is a bad idea, for a few reasons.
First, despite the fact that people like to demand MWEs, it's not really the case that every question demands one. Yes, they are important in lots of cases, but there are plenty of good questions which don't need them at all.
Second, plain TeX users or ConTeXt users would never be able to ask questions without an ...
20
Although you have nothing to feel guilty about in changing who you award the tick to, there is something you might ponder on the back of this.
This, I suppose, is one of the reasons why people may sometimes be encouraged to wait a little while (some people really do wait weeks, but 24 hours seems fair) before accepting an answer. Not only does it avoid ...
20
The question to be asked is why you are so frustrated. Past first page you wouldn't even see new questions.
There is a tendency in the residents; a bit of "come on ask me an interesting question" urge combined with a pinch of OCD which is perfectly fine. That's why they become residents. But that should stay as such otherwise this becomes a police station....
19
Using the Advanced Super Ninja Search Options, you can search for user:10827 hasaccepted:0 closed:0 sorted by "newest". This searches TeX.SX for posts by User 10827 (you) that has no accepted answer (hasaccepted:0) and is not closed (closed:0), filtered according to the posted date. Currently there are 5 such questions (see below).
You can as well add the ...
19
I guess all of us like fun. There's a long distance between totally serious and having fun like childs, which is also great. Somewhere on the way is the "hat game".
The moderators, including me, were a bit sceptical or neutral about this. I have the feeling that this activity may be great for the gaming site, maybe for cooking, fantasy and further sites in ...
18
I have desaturated the red in G+ by 30%. It will be in the next production build. (you may have to do a hard refresh).
18
The simple answer is don't even try to interpret downvotes. :) You will receive so few of them that in the grand scheme of things they are even more irrelevant than votes already are.
But that aside, the voting system on the Stack Exchange sites was designed (I think) to be the great democratic way of deciding quality, and in that democratic tradition, ...
17
It's true that questions seem to come in clusters. When someone is starting a new latex project (designing a package, writing a thesis) they tend to have a series of questions. Recent examples are: xport and Peteris Krumins. This is not a bad thing. Nevertheless, I think 1 question per day limit (averaged) is reasonable and forces people to think carefully ...
17
The reputation system is a bit of fun but I think it's dangerous to think there is any correlation between quality of TeX information and points earned. Looking at my top three answers ordered by rep
234 How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?
75 What are penalties and which ones are defined?
68 How was TeX output visualised on ...
17
No. Accepting an answer is purely the decision of the person asking the question, and does not have to reflect what others feel is the 'best' answer. It simply is a way of saying that it is the answer which helped the person asking the question the most. Of course, this can mean that a question with a good answer never gets an accepted answer: that is '...
17
The StackExchange model is that over time the 'best' answers get upvoted whilst less good ones float downward. When an answer becomes outdated, one can therefore
Post a comment asking the original author to adjust it
Suggest an edit to the original
Post a new answer which draws attention to the reasons that it is preferable
to the older one (perhaps linking ...
16
I'm in favor of introducing such a limit here. Even 50 questions per month is almost to high. Here 30 per month should already be considered enough. (Especially if half of them are virtually about the same topic.)
16
First, consider:
How many other users would be affected?
Many SE 2.0 sites need questions, so even if the incoming questions are only "Ok", a) they can be edited into shape and b) it's better to have questions for people to answer, than to not have enough.
So based on that, I'd say as long as no other users (statistically speaking) would be harmed, and you ...
16
I see a few issues. As has already been mentioned in a comment, CM is rather 'light' on the screen: Knuth allowed for the bleed in printing when designing the font, but that makes it a not-so-good choice on screen. More generally, I feel that sanserif fonts probably work better, particular on smaller screens. Secondly, the 'LaTeX always uses CM' approach is ...
16
If you feel you have identified a bug in any software, the first step is to make sure (as far as you can) it is a bug, and the second is to report it. While several (La)TeX code authors are active on the site, it's not always possible to spot every bug report for your own code. As a package author, I am always pleased if people report bugs via the 'official' ...
16
I'd be against this really.
Apart from any technical issues about setting it up, I post a lot of answers and a lot of those have images but almost never do I post a complete document.
For a multipage document I take a conscious decision which page or pages to show, and for a single page I usually crop to the area that I want to highlight in the answer. I ...
16
This would be very similar to requesting MathJax support, which has been declined here as we're more interested in the code rather than the output. That doesn't mean the output is not important, of course.
Moreover, many of the code posted by users here contain errors which they don't know how to correct. Or, it contains customizations that are found ...
15
To explain, why downvotes will be locked too after some minutes: there can be "tactical downvoting". For example, one could downvote a competing answer, so the own answer gets higher, becoming better visible and perhaps earning an upvote, later removing the downvote to cover one’s track. There could even be a sock puppet, who downvotes a good answer which ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
