Is StackOverflow becoming less useful to anyone else?
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Please stop linking to the “Zalgo” / anti-Cthulhu regex rant
Please stop linking to the "Zalgo" / anti-Cthulhu regex rant
Anyone who has stopped for more than 5 seconds in the regex tag knows of this "dubious" answer: Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the ...
My comment on the Zalgo answer.
> However, there is no information on the recommended tools or libraries to manipulate HTML.
Because recommended tools is against the rules... The rules are against
the rules. Another reason I rarely come here anymore and prefer to ask my
questions to respectable communities in open discussion format.It's getting to the point where we need a stack exchange for proofing question validity before posting to stack exchange.
And the rules are inconsistent across sites, so it's hard to know when going from SE to SE whether your post will be valid.
Well, read the rules
Ok, get off my lawn @boomzilla.
What's the first praise that a videogame can receive? The game explains itself. No tutorial needed, because the player isn't punished for exploring, but punished once making a mistake after the mistake is demonstrated to them.
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Considering I don't participate in the SO community, it is of the same usefulness as it has always been. Easy place to find several answers to common questions and sometimes even an answer to a more esoteric question.
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If I have a common question or something I'm having a brainfart about, it is useful.
If I have anything more than simple, I either get answers that are too specific to be helpful, or nothing at all.
So, that means, either I know a whole lot more, or I stopped learning, or SO is somehow getting harder to post valid questions.
Looking at the chatter on meta, people seem to be getting more aggressive to slight offenses. Totally throwing out the usefulness of an answer, just because it had the slight hint of character to it.
I've also noticed the vote to question ratio getting way low.
Pages and pages of 0/0/0 questions.Tons of this
Unity Animation Cycle Offset not working
The way I understand it, is if I have an animation that's 30 seconds long and is also a loop, through Cycle Offset I can make this animation start at a time different than second 0. So I could make...
Oh, figured it out myself.
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Looking at the chatter on meta, people seem to be getting more aggressive to slight offenses. Totally throwing out the usefulness of an answer, just because it had the slight hint of character to it.
No shit. SO beats Nazi Germany in that regard hands down.
Tons of this
You're just asking wrong questions:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29529527/where-to-call-rand-so-computer-player-makes-random-moves
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Ok, get off my lawn @boomzilla.
Wut?
To answer the question in the title (as I am reading it, "Is StackOverflow becoming less useful to anyone else?") my answer is no. But that's because I've never really been a heavy participant, per se. I just get there quite often when I'm searching for an answer. It doesn't always answer the question, but then, typically neither does anything else in that case.
As questions and answers have piled up, it's probably grown more useful to me over time as a passive participant.
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You mean you don't have entire bookshelves of Oracle documentation in your library at home?
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I think I have an old 8i book on a shelf somewhere.
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It's getting to the point where we need a stack exchange for proofing question validity before posting to stack exchange.
About that...
Inactive Sandbox 2014-2017
This sandbox got a little full, so we've created some more. You should still link to this one as we will update it whenever a new one is created. Current Sandbox: Sandbox for proposed Questions
Sandbox for Proposed Challenges
This "sandbox" is a place where Code Golf users can get feedback on prospective challenges they wish to post to main. This is useful because writing a clear and fully specified challenge on
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I use SO like I use Wikipedia. An absolutely awesome resource of knowledge, but I neither know nor care why people bother wasting their lives to contribute (no offense to anyone here :P )
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closed as not constructive
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It's never been useful to me in the first place, so it can't possibly get LESS useful.
Since we had that last discussion about how it wasn't useful to me because I made a new login for each job I had (speaking of Nazis: SO basically puts new users in a concentration camp), I started posting questions using the same login. I've posted 3. None have been answered. Two were completely ignored, one was answered by a guy who obviously had not read the question and/or lived in the Twilight Zone where WebAPI 2 worked completely differently.
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Unrelated: How the fuck do you have 3000+ reputation, when you never did anything on the site?
Re Stack Overflow:
Sometimes I like to go to SO and answer questions. But I have only so much time and patience. So if I have to scroll through more than 10-15 questions that are either poor or that I can't answer or that were already answered, I loose patience and give up.
I'm pretty sure all their efforts at moderation and putting newbs in "concetration camps" and all the other crap is aimed at courting people like me.
It's not working, BTW.
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How the fuck do you have 3000+ reputation
Look at my questions and answers.
Most of my answers are slightly sarcastic, and that seems to get tons of votes if you get away with it.
I have a few good questions.Then after that, I keep getting upvotes as new people find the questions and answers I posted.
I got tons of downvotes, but instead of helping me make better questions, the community was more satisfied with blowing the questions away with downvotes until I deleted them. There's a bunch of communication on meta that the focus should be to make the question better if at all possible, but that's just not followed.
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Look at my questions and answers.
Most of my answers are slightly sarcastic, and that seems to get tons of votes if you get away with it.I have a few good questions.
Then after that, I keep getting upvotes as new people find the questions and answers I posted.
I got tons of downvotes, but instead of helping me make better questions, the community was more satisfied with blowing the questions away with downvotes until I deleted them. There's a bunch of communication on meta that the focus should be to make the question better if at all possible, but that's just not followed.
What questions and answers?
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It's useful for some of the stupid easy stuff I run into, but invariably when I run into obscure g++ error #843567 (but compiles fine in VC++) and try to post it, it claims I don't have enough reputation to ask about g++. So I try c++ but can't use that either, then I just make up tags and it lets me post it. Then mods come along and get annoyed that I used the wrong tags (hey doofus YOUR SOFTWARE DOESN'T LET ME USE THE RIGHT TAGS) and fix them, and then nobody answers the question anyway. I eventually figure it out myself, post the answer on my SO question in case anyone else encounters the same circumstance, but no I don't have enough rep to post my own answers! So I put it in a comment on the OP, and six years later it's inexplicably downvoted into oblivion with no other answers or responses of any type.
TL;DR: It's good if you want to know the name of the JQuery function to hide an element, but if you're doing real work it's pretty much useless.
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What questions and answers?
The profiles are connected across meta and SE stuff. Go look at his actual regular SO profile. Lots of stuff there.
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The profiles are connected across meta and SE stuff. Go look at his actual regular SO profile. Lots of stuff there.
Right. What a confusing mess.
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Not... really.
Traditionally on StackExchange sites, Meta sites have been linked to their parent site. This is in part because meta upvotes and downvotes on Meta sites aren't strictly because a question or answer is bad, but more to show agreement or disagreement. So they shouldn't affect your reputation score on the main site.
For a long time, only meta.stackexchange.com was an exception for this, as it was the Meta for the entire network.
This changed about a year ago when they finally realized that the Meta site for their largest site probably shouldn't be the meta for the entire network as well. Particularly since participation on meta sites is mandatory for site moderators and is relevant in moderator elections.
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@thegoryone said:
Then I posted a reply to someone having trouble with PHP MySQL (Horrible, horrible mysql() functions and about as secure as a London security deposit box) and directed them to PDO and bound values (While rewriting their code so it actually worked, safely). I got a full on character assassination by one of the resident "experts" in the PHP section on exactly why PDO is bad. I'm actually still not sure why.
Someone should have smacked him upside the head. Repeatedly.
I may not have ever used PDO myself (last time I regularly did PHP was around when PDO started getting shipped as part of PHP), but even I know that using the old mysql_ and mysqli_ methods are just so much worse. Plus, PDO tends to have less things to change if you need to port your code to a different database.
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Look at my questions and answers.
Most of my answers are slightly sarcastic, and that seems to get tons of votes if you get away with it.
I have a few good questions.Then after that, I keep getting upvotes as new people find the questions and answers I posted.
I got tons of downvotes, but instead of helping me make better questions, the community was more satisfied with blowing the questions away with downvotes until I deleted them. There's a bunch of communication on meta that the focus should be to make the question better if at all possible, but that's just not followed.
I rarely post on SO any more, but my reputation continues to go up just based on old answers. If it keeps up at the current rate, I'll cross 50,000 in a month or two.
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I'll cross 50,000 in a month or two.
I hate you.
What, no onebox?
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I rarely post on SO any more, but my reputation continues to go up just based on old answers. If it keeps up at the current rate, I'll cross 50,000 in a month or two.
It's awesome that new members are prohibited from doing about 323,326 basic actions, including asking questions in particular categories (a.k.a. the actual purpose of the site), but old users get astronomical "reputation" simply because they were early adopters.
SO must stand for "Stack Oligarchy".
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I'm struggling to figure out what the actual purpose of SE is lately. Particularly when Arquade is clearly voting to make "troubleshooting minecraft crashes" off-topic. Why? Because they're annoying. Not because they're not about gaming; they're perfectly happy to troubleshoot any game except minecraft. That's not "off topic", assholes.
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You should start a counter-initiative to make voting to make Minecraft server problems offtopic offtopic
Filed under: Turtles, etc, meta.meta.meta.meta.stackexchange.com
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You think Atwood ever reads threads like these?
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+!
This. Stack Exchange seems like the definition of perfectionism in an online community form. Sure, letting the new guys do things leads to disorganization and chaos, but restricting them from doing so DEFEATS THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF THE BELGIUMING SITE
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Depends on your definition of read. I think he visits and scrolls through them, but doesn't comprehend them. I have ready too many topics over at meta.d where he misses the entire point of the OP.
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Hence JDGI (see discopaedia)
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I think he visits and scrolls through them, but doesn't comprehend them.
Holy crap...how do we not have JDGI in the Discopædia?
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I stopped contributing because most questions in programming don't have black and white answers. The entire premise of the site is flawed as questions that actually warrant discussion aren't allowed.
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Hence JDGI (see discopaedia)
Not a first class entry, alas. This is the best I found:
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Wait it's not there? We must fix this! (I would but adding paedia entries from mobile is not fun)
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There really should be a reputation limit per item.
Why? Because anything past a sane amount is just visibility.
Honestly, I respect a lot of the highest rep people, but a lot of that rep is just momentum.
The same is true for my account. I feel I stopped deserving my rep around 2000, everything after that was the occasional question.
It's good that the owners of that site can recognize they have a problem. It's just that they can't come up with ideas that have practical results. Instead they come up with social theories, implement those, and it becomes a ghostland.
I've watched quite a few valuable people, just simply stop going there.
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Which limits its usefulness to odd trivia and the occasional, this doesn't work, what I did wrong?
But even then, that's relegated to other SE sites, like code-review.
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Wait it's not there? We must fix this! (I would but adding paedia entries from mobile is not fun)
Done!
Also, if you are on mobile and just want to do the rough outline, I have the Discopædoa set to watching. I occasionally fix formatting when I wiki definitions (so do some of the other TL4+), and I can often take care of adding the definitions to the OP.
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But that's because I've never really been a heavy participant, per se. I just get there quite often when I'm searching for an answer. It doesn't always answer the question, but then, typically neither does anything else in that case.
That's my experience too.
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Troubleshooting MineCraft quickly turns into Troubleshooting Java.
I got tired of answering "MineCraft is known to not work with Java 8" and just added minecraft to my ignored tags instead.
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I've never heard of a limit for asking questions in particular categories.
I know new users aren't allowed to post comments or upvote/downvote answers. You'd almost think that was to prevent spam or something.
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I stopped contributing because most questions in programming don't have black and white answers.
Racist.
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I got tired of answering "MineCraft is known to not work with Java 8" and just added minecraft to my ignored tags instead.
That's not true...(/me runs a server on a JDK8 only box and connects with 2 clients with only Java 8, never had an issue. Aside from 1.6.4 Forge breaking on Java 8, but that was easily fixed by doing some .class file hackery. Once.)
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I haven't checked it recently, but stock MineCraft used to crash on start with Java 8 update 25.
I don't actually play MineCraft, I just know this was the case due to the large number of questions people were posting, all of them using the same Java version.
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Hmm, don't remember that.
That may have been during the time I wasn't playing and it was on the other machine with JDK7 though.
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I don't actually play MineCraft, I just know ...
No wonder the stackoverflow minecraft answers are terrible.
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I'm struggling to figure out what the actual purpose of SE is lately. Particularly when Arquade is clearly voting to make "troubleshooting minecraft crashes" off-topic. Why? Because they're annoying. Not because they're not about gaming; they're perfectly happy to troubleshoot any game except minecraft. That's not "off topic", assholes.
Incidentally, why didn't you link to this?
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game-related websites are blocked at work, so I couldn't grab the link. Thanks :)
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...they are here too, but turns out... not if you use HTTPS.
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not if you use HTTPS
SHHHH! It's supposed to be a secret! If IT finds out, they'll just take away the whole Internet!
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I got tired of answering "MineCraft is known to not work with Java 8"
Anyone who says that is wrong anyw--oh, you probably already know that.
In my experience on /r/minecraft, most problems with Java boiled down to "you should have been using the 64-bit Java"
