33
I hesitate to post this as an answer, but since this is a discussion, here goes. I can see some value in gathering historic information at U&L, if there are people who know (or know people who know) the answer to such a question. "Why" questions could have evidence behind the answers, or may have an unknown origin. The worst-case scenario is that it gets ...
26
There are two reasons why you shouldn't worry about “breaking rules”.
One reason is that the assertion that the user wants to “break local rule” is an assumption on your part. You have no way to know whether this is true. There is quite a leap of faith between “I want to install Screen” and “I want to bypass the job scheduler to run my jobs ahead of other ...
answered Jul 31 '16 at 22:26
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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24
The most important thing for a new user asking a question is to get answers.
When someone's first contact with the site is to ask a question, that's usually because they have a problem to solve, not because they want to join a community. Joining a community comes later, if the community has proven to be useful or interesting.
So when evaluating questions ...
answered Apr 25 '19 at 20:45
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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22
Yes, what you describe (comment asking the OP to post an answer and post one yourself if they don't) is the best thing to do.
No, mods cannot post under another user's name, so there's no point in flagging for moderator attention, we can't do anything you can't already do, I'm afraid.
So yes, go with the SO approach, that seems reasonable.
17
My first instinct is that it wouldn't really be on topic, no. GRUB isn't a *nix thing, as such, it acts before the operating system so isn't really a part of any OS. Yes, it is a tool more commonly found in the *nix world, but using GRUB to install Windows systems doesn't seem to be something that would fall within the scope of this site.
It would, however,...
16
There's a specific close reason for this:
Questions describing a problem that can't be reproduced and seemingly went away on its own (or went away when a typo was fixed) are off-topic as they are unlikely to help future readers.
That is available in the flag menu when you reach 50 reputation and, after 3000 reputation, it's in the close menu. If this is ...
15
Leave the original in place and try and make it so that it's as clearly in line with the A's. Then start a new Q and post your learnings as a new A. Also reference the original so that others see the linkages.
15
Questions asking for lists of resources tend to degenerate into lists of items, as opposed to answers. They tend to become a poll rather than a question with its answers.
Stack Exchange does not work well for polls, where each answer is a separate items. Voting on the answers results in a score that does not at all reflect the quality of the item mentioned ...
answered Jan 12 '14 at 23:12
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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13
Upvote button hover text:
This question shows research effort; it is helpful and clear
The fact that someone answers a question does not, de facto, make it a good question. Questions may have answers and show zero research effort, or be borderline incomprehensible and people will still answer them.
Upvotes are the only signifier of quality.
Answered, ...
13
Did you leave an empty line before the code? For example:
Test line
line 1 indented by four spaces
line 2 indented by four spaces
Test line 2
line 3 indented by four spaces
line 4 indented by four spaces
Shows up as:
Test line
line 1 indented by four spaces
line 2 indented by four spaces
Test line 2
line 3 indented by four ...
12
I guess we may as well close them. Closed questions don't count as unanswered so there's no real reason to delete and, anyway, closed questions with no answers get deleted automatically after a while.
I'm not sure what reason we'd use to close them though. Non-reproducible is probably the best choice. We might want to consider adding a new close reason for ...
12
The premise is that Stack's goal is to build a library of high-quality answers,
thus in general I think alternative answers are welcome, as long as they fit the site's scope — here, they should employ tools typical of a Unix system.
In your particular case:
The question at hand nicely asks "Some ideas?" at the end, complying with the keep an open ...
12
Unfortunately, many people misconstrue the meaning of the accepted answer and think it is some sort of indication of quality. It isn't. The accepted answer is just and only the answer that the OP decided worked best for them. However, the OP is very often not an expert and can end up choosing a poor answer to accept. This is a well known issue that has been ...
11
If you've found an answer to your original question then I'd encourage you to provide an answer to it yourself. It's perfectly acceptable to answer ones own questions, even after you've continued to research it yourself. That's fairly typical, actually.
As to your new question. If it's completely different, then I'd ask it as it's own question and not ...
10
It's perfectly fine to ask distribution-specific questions here. In fact, look at all the distribution tags — we try to use them only on questions that are specific to a distribution (or class of distributions — for example, many questions tagged ubuntu are relevant to Mint), or at least that have solutions that are specific to a distribution.
It's also ...
answered Dec 7 '13 at 16:37
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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10
I sympathize with what you're saying, but if you look at those graphs that Braiam posted one thing you should be noticing is that they're all trending up. This IMO, is a good thing and will continue to grow if we keep doing what we've been doing here since the site's inception.
Keep the community friendly
Look for holes in the existing Q's, if you find ...
10
Questions like:
Does anyone know how to install xyz` under Labamba X.Y?
are about the capabilities of certain people and are off-topic on this site. So are questions, asking for names of people being able to help:
Who knows how to install xyz under Labamba X.Y?
Such questions are inappropriate for this site as they are not about Unix&Linux ...
10
There was a time years ago when Stack Exchange was on a big kick about phrasing titles as questions, but I think it mostly died out. Personally I couldn't care less, "Centos cannot ping default gateway" and "Why can't Centos ping default gateway?" are functionally identical.
Any statement in a question title comes with the implied question "how do I fix ...
9
Popularity is not an end in itself, it should be a by-product of a high quality reference site maintained by a knowledgeable and approachable community.
Personally, I don't think that there is a "situation" that needs "improving." That isn't to say that the site can't be improved, it just means that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a slow, ...
9
My major problem with recommendations for outside material is they are by nature inevitably very weak questions. As terdon says, there is no real problem: it is not as if such material is hidden in some secret place requiring some special knowledge to find. If you can log in to an S.E. site, you can use a search engine, and that's exactly what a search ...
9
Bad — titles should be a proper sentence or (usually better) sentence fragment:
GRUB - How do I apply parameters to specific kernels?
The system adds the most popular tag that isn't already in the tag as a prefix, which looks bad enough on its own — here, this leads to duplication:
grub2 - GRUB - How do I apply parameters to specific kernels?
Better, ...
answered Dec 8 '13 at 22:43
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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8
If harmonized file names are really useful to follow the question and answers, then please do harmonize them. Pick a sensible set, preferably the one in the question, failing that one used in an answer. Which answer doesn't really matter.
Harmonized file names don't always matter. If there's just one input file and one output file, it's easy enough to ...
answered Jul 9 '16 at 23:07
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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7
There is no shadowban-like state in which you can post questions but they aren't displayed to other users. It is possible to be blocked from posting questions entirely, but you would get an error message when you tried. If you're able to post questions, other users can see them
7
To quote the relevant points of the ever-useful FAQ (useful to me, at least, as it contains explanations for many of Stack Exchange’s workings) regarding the community user:
Randomly poke old unanswered questions* every hour so they get some attention
* Questions with at least 30 days of no activity, at least one answer scoring zero, and no answers scoring ...
7
There's another syntax for code blocks which is mentioned in the advanced formatting help. Surround the code by three backticks on a line of their own. The backticks have to be on their own line but don't need a blank line.
```
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello, world.
```
This is rendered as
#!/bin/sh
echo Hello, world.
This syntax also makes it easy to request ...
answered Mar 14 '19 at 1:09
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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7
I agree more with position 1.
It is extremely surprising for a user, to learn that some readers consider "thanks" harmful enough, that they will edit purely to remove it.
I saw a similar edit on a question marked as being from a new user. I cannot see enforcing this on new users as being "welcoming". If the poster works out what's going on, it feels like ...
6
I'd like to state that I didn't think Ask Ubuntu needed to exist at all, and I could possibly be persuaded to feel the same way about Apple. Though we never got to have that argument about Apple, and lost the Ubuntu one, possibly because early descriptions said we'd be for advanced users only. There is much, much, overlap across AU, Unix, Apple, SU, and SF, ...
6
You'd have to find a way to make it longer to get past the quality filter... For example, maybe list a few of the things you've checked. Or some system details. This isn't just a way to defeat the filter, it also makes your question better.
But in this case, there is already an answer here: What is a distro-agnostic way determine the OS install date?
I ...
6
The community user also pushes old posts back to the front page. See its profile:
Hi, I'm not really a person.
I'm a background process that helps keep this site clean!
I do things like:
* Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention
6
Technically any activity on the question will get it back on the front page, but bounties are the real way to get your question more visibility. See this main meta question for more information
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible