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Although there is a new site that exclusively handles software recommendations, we have been hosting good software recommendation questions since the beginning of Ask Different in August 2010.
Here is an adaptation of an excellent thread from the Software Recommendation site on how to ask a high-quality question here.
Great software recommendation ...
24
I have had a look at your links and you clearly flagged that post correctly. I handled the flag incorrectly - for that I apologize.
Worse, I had dismissed some other similar flags to yours - I'm not sure when/how I got the idea that rude and abusive needed a personal aspect, but it's pretty clear that gibberish should be flagged as abuse.
Thanks for ...
13
Your mission progress counts seven out of ten shares; these are the seven posts that meet the sharing requirements:
How can I disable animation when switching desktops in Lion?
How does iMessage know that the recipient is an iOS 5 device?
Does iChat block content in China?
Is there a keyboard shortcut to move the position of the Dock?
Is it possible to drag ...
13
Voting is how the community gives you reputation and how they take it away. You can't keep the ones you like and not the ones you don't.
As moderators, we all are responsible for watching and do regularly monitor all voting, closing and flagging. Furthermore, the system has built in checks should we miss vote swings that accumulate over short and long time ...
12
When a post gets a score of -3, it means that three different people have voted against it. Downvoting is rather rare on this site; if three different people make a point of voting against a post, it is certainly not the work of a single "cyber-criminal"; it is the community speaking that a particular post does not belong here.
I speak from experience here: ...
10
Questions shouldn't be deleted just because they haven't received an answer. Despite everything, an answer may still be found in the future and deleting the question doesn't help anyone as the original research is lost. Moving the research to a new question defeats the purpose and the original question may as well remain if this occurs.
Bounties are the ...
10
You should never bump. Community (the Stack Exchange bot) automatically and randomly (fairly) bumps older unanswered questions (questions with zero answers or questions with no answers with a score >1).
If you haven't received an answer you think is suitable, you can refine your question by editing it. Everyone is encouraged to make substantial edits to ...
10
Use img tags with a custom width attribute. In the example you linked to, I've edited it to do just that. Check the revision history to see what I've done.
<img src="http://i.stack.imgur.com/1vIgO.png" width="375">
iPhone 4–5s: 320
iPhone 6–6s: 375
iPhone 6+–6s+: 540
If you resize an image and re-upload it as a suggested edit, I'm likely to ‘reject ...
10
We got hit by a massive flood of spam posts. The automated spam detector and the moderators are working on removing them, but they still bump up every question to the front page. To see new questions only, use the "week" view.
Also, if you still see answers looking like
my name is NAME My private video, see URL
please flag them as spam so we can remove ...
9
I would argue that no, one need not feel any obligation to comment when downvoting a post.
First of all, voting is, by design, anonymous, and comments are not. If we don't want the site to have an anonymous negative feedback mechanism, we should request that feature be removed. Having an anonymous negative feedback mechanism in place that no one is supposed ...
9
Is it just me or is there a sudden uptick in Clash of Clans questions with tons of “me too” answers?
This kind of thing is very common on Ask Different when a change occurs with something within the scope of the site. It begins with a reasonable question on the subject, and thanks to SE's very high SERP rank, is the #1 result for many search queries.
People then post 'me too' answers, either because they want to participate in the question so that they ...
8
While editing does bump questions, editing for the sake of bumping a question is not encouraged. The officially sanctioned way to draw attention to a question you believe has been neglected (your own or another's) is to offer a bounty for said question so it becomes a featured question.
8
Mass deletion of posts is something that will generally get you suspended.
That being said, the SEDE (Stack Exchange Data Explorer) is the place to go if you want assistance in crafting such a query so you can study your acceptance rate and your scoring / ability to get the "check" which are all excellent and fine goals to have.
http://data.stackexchange....
8
Late Note:
This was broken for several months, but is now working again.
I Like grg's method, & in fact use it myself quite a lot for quick edits to posts.
There is another method, slightly more work, but this not only reduces the apparent size on screen, but also the actual image size - useful for if you're on the phone, etc.
Assuming it's your own ...
8
You'll need to earn reputation by having your questions, answers and edits up voted. (Like I just did gratuitously to your question.)
You get:
+5 when your questions are up voted.
+10 when your answers are up voted.
+15 when your answers are accepted.
+2 when your edit to other questions are approved.
Have a look at the Welcome to Ask Different Tour, and ...
8
There's two things here:
If you look at the transport logs (and not the "from") you can see in fact the email is from Stack Overflow
The email itself matches what others receive
On both fronts I can confirm this email looks like an legitimate email from the Stack Exchange network. That being said, it's always possible for a spammer to take that mail ...
8
Because - believe it or not - you still earn reputation on Meta; it is just not shown and the main site's reputation is shown instead. Each upvote on an answer counts as +10 towards these badges, and each upvote on a question as +5, just like they would do on the main site.
If you track the Epic or Legendary badge in your (Meta) profile and click on the ...
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This link has your user number embedded in it - so since I clicked the share, my number of 9058 is embedded. You can omit that part if you don't want "credit" for the share (yes there is a badge for that and on occasion contests).
Under the hood, each post (a question or an answer has a unique post number) so you can also tack the post number on the end of ...
7
That would certainly be one good way to go about it, and honestly the method most likely to get you a useful answer. In your question, be sure to acknowledge the existence of the other question and to explain how your situation is different (that question specifies that it is for 10.7.4; the answers there do not help you) so that your question does not get ...
7
I would have rather cut more bullet points, but as you can see, I took quite a cut of text from your question to reduce the scope and make it less broad:
From our help page on closed questions you can see why I removed several bullet points to eliminate the "too broad" problem that I saw with the question.
Specifically, how to transfer an entire mac to a ...
7
Welcome to the site! I'll try to answer your questions.
OK, you have a little misunderstanding about the nature of Stack Exchange sites. Stack Overflow was the first and original site, and then Stack Exchange was setup to create further sites along different topics. These days there are SE sites for everything from coding to parenting via philosophy and ...
7
That was my fault. I removed an if check that was very important. It has been reverted.
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Yes, if there are more than 5 people in Level 3, the others will get iPod Touches. They will also be entered into the raffle.
To figure out who the "top 5" are, we'll look at the posts you made for the contest and figure out the total combined score (so if all 35 of your posts had a score of 6, your combined score would be 35*6 = 210). The 5 who have the ...
6
The points encourage you to do your duty to edit where you can, by way of instilling the SE desired habits into you. Once you hit 2k, you shouldn;t be editing just for the measly points on offer, it should just be a habit. The points help you get into that habit. Think of it as getting promoted, you suddenly have to do unpaid overtime ;)
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Stack Exchange uses Markdown for its markup language and the Markdown documentation has this to say about list items:
Ordered lists use numbers followed by periods:
1. Bird
2. McHale
3. Parish
It’s important to note that the actual numbers you use to mark the
list have no effect on the HTML output Markdown produces. The HTML
Markdown produces ...
6
"Accepted" basically means that the asker was happy with the answer (which doesn't necessarily mean it's correct). Usually votes are a better indicator on answer quality/correctness because more eyeballs are involved. So if you run into such a situation you can
downvote wrong answers (even if they are accepted)
upvote correct answers (or provide the correct ...
6
We removed the "Other" option for users who don't yet have the cast close votes privilege. Trusting folks who haven't yet gained the system's trust to even know what's on- and off-topic, much less write helpful comments to this end, is pretty risky.
Removing the option to flag blatantly off-topic stuff isn't great either though. I tend to think the best ...
6
Ask Different doesn't seem to migrate many questions anywhere very often; in the last 90 days, 7 questions were migrated to SO and 1 to SU (and 6 to the child meta).
Migration paths are only created when there is a history of many good migrations having happened between site A and site B.
Source: Can we have StackOverflow added as a site we can migrate ...
6
You do not have to award the bounty to anyone. You cannot award the bounty to yourself.
The point of the bounty is to "buy" exposure and attention for the question. That's what you paid for; that's what you got. If it results in a great answer, awesome. In this case, you determine that it did not generate a sufficient answer from someone other than you (and ...
6
Is it just me or is there a sudden uptick in Clash of Clans questions with tons of “me too” answers?
I've cleaned up most of them now. If you run into more, just flag them as usual.
As for the reason, I can only guess. Maybe there was a change of rules on CoC server side which triggered some changes in the app.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
