Topic: design

I wanted to give you a quick look at the new Stack Exchange Beta theme. Yes, we are retiring the familiar “Sketchy” theme and rolling out a more-polished and finished design for the beta sites.

Raise the curtain, cue the trumpet fanfare…

Alas, poor Sketchy…

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be rolling out the new Stack Exchange Beta theme to all the sites still in beta.

At first glance, the new beta theme looks like an unembellished version of any graduated site: Finished, but without any particular “beta” theme, per se. But that’s sort of the point.

The crux of this change is that it’s high time we stopped equating beta sites with being somehow unfinished. Sure, in their earliest days — when a community is defining their scope, building a FAQ, and finding its community leaders — a site might be considered unfinished (i.e. “under construction”). But once you are past those earliest wild-west days of figuring out why your site exists, a site should no longer be considered unfinished. Right out of the gate, the Stack Exchange engines gives you a world-class Q&A suite worth recommending on its own merits. If you’ve been holding back, go ahead; share, promote, and enjoy!

There was a time when we thought the average beta period would last, oh… about 90 days. The site would begin and build up enough content and users to reach critical mass. Reaching that tipping point of unstoppable growth defines “graduation.” But getting to that point is hard work, and it usually take longer than 90 days… much longer. So we’re left with this big gap between the time when a site is truly “under construction” to when it finally reaches graduation and gets its own custom design.

In the meantime, holding onto that unfinished-site meme has become actively harmful to community building, and an unproductive source of frustration among the sites; I’ll get back to that later.

The idea of Sketchy started out as a whimsical nod to the early days of web development when just about every website started out with a definitive “under construction” theme.

In the mid-90′s, webmasters often labeled their sites “under construction” as if to warn hapless Internet travelers that, perchance, something might be added to the site. A funny thing happened along the way: Even as those websites grew, the “pardon our dust” monikers remained as a warning of still more stuff to come — there’s always new pages, new articles, and new features to add. Websites are never “done,” and thus the perpetual under-construction themes endured.

So maybe we carried on that “under construction” meme a bit too long. Giving our beta sites a decidedly unfinished look seemed topical for a 90-day beta. But when a beta goes on, sometimes for hundreds of days, folks start to wonder if the site would ever be — quote, unquote — “finished.”

A lot of folks like Sketchy. We like Sketchy, and he will be missed. But most communities don’t want to look like they’re still on the drawing board when they’ve been working tirelessly on their site for months or even years. Every Stack Exchange site will still get their own custom design when they graduate. This new Beta Theme doesn’t change that. But this new design gives your beta site a nice, clean, finished look that you can work with and display proudly for as long as necessary.

Way back in 2008, we had Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit, on the Stack Overflow podcast. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, but one of the things they said that always stuck with me was that Reddit always took an explicitly hands-off, no moderation approach to their content from the very beginning.

I found that a bit shocking, since I’ve… never seen that work. Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation — and more so with every passing year. We have literally hundreds of community moderators. We spend a ton of time appointing and electing moderators, as well as conducting weekly moderator chats in the Teacher’s Lounge chatroom, and emailing all our mods a monthly moderator newsletter.

The Reddit founders maintained that evil things which require active moderation didn’t happen too often, provided you build the right kind of community voting and flagging mechanisms. I can agree with that. We’ve found that to be true on Stack Exchange as well. It’s almost enough to make you a believer in the fundamental goodness of human beings.

Almost.

But there’s a deeper, more insidious problem that creeps into systems when the community is unmoderated. Stuff like, say, compilable James Bond Java ASCII art …

… or mountain-climbing Skyrim horses and wounded Skyrim NPCs with vivid imaginations.

Let us not forget the classics, either:

• What’s Your Favorite Programming Cartoon?
• What’s Your Best Programming Joke?
• What Real Life Bad Habits Has Programming Given You?

… and so, so many more.

These sorts of posts are wildly popular with the community. The cartoon question alone had over a million views by our extremely strict view counter — which easily translates to at least two million views, possibly three million. We don’t hate fun here, but we discovered that these posts become so popular over time that they truly start to drown out everything else on the site.

Ironically, the Reddit community itself now recognizes that moderation is fundamental and essential:

One thing thing that does concern me, however, is that [as this subreddit gets more popular] the amount of image macros, memes, rage comics and generally low-quality content hitting the front page has grown to annoying proportions.

The problem with image macros and rage comics (besides generally lacking wit or anything genuinely insightful) is that they’re quick and easy to digest, and thus tend to get upvoted faster than self posts and actual discussions which take thought and time before an appropriate response can meted out. If you’re not careful you end up with something akin to /r/gaming, which is now a burbling, deformed wreck of its former self, with anything remotely resembling intelligent discussion being buried under a sea of vacuous meme-repetition.

In my view what this subreddit needs is a touch more moderation to ensure that we don’t end up with a front page full of imgur/memegenerator links, and that people who want to use this subreddit as a medium to discuss the [topic] can do so without having to sift through the crap with a shovel.

This is as clear a call for active moderation as I’ve ever seen. And the moderators, to their credit, took charge and instituted changes to help guide their community away from the fatty junk food content:

We’ve heard your concerns over the direction the community is heading. We were hoping we could ride it out and things would balance themselves, but it just isn’t working, and things need to change. It’s plain to see that meme-based content attracts many upvotes, and we all love a good laugh, but it is not what we want this community to be. But this isn’t just about memes, it’s about the general tone of the community. We’re making changes to our rules for posting, commenting, and voting here — necessary changes to make [this] the community we first envisioned.

This community is for sharing thought-provoking stories, high-level tactics discussions, videos/images of the awesomeness of [topic], suggestions or discussions on mechanics, and it can all be done without resorting to memes or complaining. Reddit never ceases to amaze, I expect to be surprised! If you have any questions, message the mods! We hope you agree and understand these changes.

We know that closing the cookie jar is painful. We feel your pain. Nobody likes having their fun taken away. But it’s too addictive and too easy, and in the absence of any moderation, the community would do nothing but add and upvote the easy, fun stuff.

This is why community moderators have real power; they need that power to intervene, educate, and refocus the community’s exuberance on more substantive content. People will fight you almost literally to the death over their right to be entertained, and to entertain others:

Why can’t you just not look at these fun posts? Why do they have to be deleted? You guys suck!

The same reason the moderators and community on that subreddit didn’t decide to “not look” at the fun posts, really:

1. Broken windows. Every ‘fun’ post users see is an open invitation for them to participate in the fun by adding their own fun question or answer. The stuff spreads like kudzu! Pretty soon the entire site is overrun with nothing but that kind of fun. And even if you grandfather a few in, you’ll enjoy neverending requests asking why their fun question or answer has to be removed, while this one over here is allowed to remain.

2. Opportunity cost. Every minute spent participating in an entertaining ‘fun’ post is time that someone could have spent asking or answering a substantive question, something practical that solves an actual problem for hundreds or thousands of people. Entertainment, within reason, is by no means a bad thing — but I experience almost physical pain when I think about a brilliant topic expert spending 10 minutes on one of our sites deciding which hilarious cartoon is their favorite.

Popularity is a tough thing. I’m tempted to call it a curse, but what we try to do at Stack Exchange is make sure that questions and answers are popular for the right reasons — because they are amazing resources for learning from your peers. If you want to slip a few jokes in there with the learning, that’s fine, but when the question devolves into little more than entertainment, I hope you can understand why our community moderators are obliged to step in and protect the community from, well … itself.

I saw an interesting Battlefield 3 question on gaming a few weeks ago.

I’ve recently unlocked the EOD bot, and while playing around with it (and being hopelessly ineffectual with it) I’ve noticed that after I have driven a certain distance away I will return back to first-person view. Running towards the EOD bot will allow me to take control of it again. How far can I drive an EOD bot away from me before I lose control of it?

I play Battlefield 3! Extensively! I’ve used the remote control EOD bot before, but I have no idea what its maximum range is. I’ve never lost control of it. So I could have answered …

When I play as Engineer, I’ve never lost control of the EOD bot. Are you sure you’re not doing something wrong?

… and that is true, insofar as my in-game experience goes, but it’s kind of my opinion, isn’t it? I was curious myself. How would one figure out the actual range of the bot? I decided the only way to definitively answer this question was to:

1. Start Battlefield 3
2. Pick the biggest map I knew of
3. Spawn as an Engineer
4. Deploy the remote control EOD bot
5. Drive the bot as far as I possibly could

So I did. Which took a solid 15 minutes of my time at least. After doing this I belatedly realized that I had just run a science experiment.

Stack Exchange just trolled me into doing actual science. For a freaking game. Wow. Consider the implications. Now, if only we could harness those powers for something useful, right? Well, take a look at this Super User question.

When programs are minimized in Windows 7, do they use less memory and CPU than leaving them maximized?

The highest voted answer has an official Microsoft Knowledge Base article backing it up, but it’s quite old. Other users dispute whether it’s correct or not. Anecdotally, I’ve read other blogs confirming the behavior described in that MSKB, but a long time ago. At least that answer has a citation backing it up; many of the other answers on the question are little more than opinions. And you know what they say about opinions. Opinions are like … beautiful flowers, everyone has their own favorite.

Super User is a technical site for computer geeks; we should be able to do better than a bunch of opinions and a smattering of links. A lot better. As a fellow Super User, I decided the best way to tell what’s going on here was to …

1. Start a common program
2. Do something typical in it
3. Check Task Manager or Process Explorer to see how many resources the program is using
4. Minimize the program
5. Check Task Manager or Process Explorer to see how many resources the program is using

… so I did. And I edited the highest voted post to include the results of my little science experiment.

We do what we can to help new users understand how to base their answer on something other than an opinion by popping up this little help text when they start composing an answer:

Thanks for contributing an answer to {sitename}!

Please make sure you answer the question; this is a Q&A site, not a discussion forum.

Provide details and share your research. Avoid statements based solely on opinion; only make statements you can back up with an appropriate reference, or personal experiences.

To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.

While we don’t come out and say it quite this way*, the best answers — not just on Stack Exchange, but to any question in life — should probably involve a little bit of science.

* but maybe we should

Stack Exchange gets a staggering amount of questions and answers every day.

Our goal is not only to provide great answers to the huge amount of questions, but to create awesome gems of knowledge that can be consumed by generations to come.

New users on our sites need some extra TLC. Without them we can not grow our communities. However, often they are not aware of the rich formatting capabilities and various rules we enforce. Occasionally, they post “answers” that are not really “answers”. Sometimes they simply do not belong in the community they are trying to participate. Sometimes we are lucky, they are awesome and need to be enticed with a few upvotes.

In general, most of the “problem content” our sites is created by brand new users. More than 44% of the flags on Stack Overflow are raised on content created by users with less than 10 reputation. In comparison only 11% of the content is created by these users.

Together we can help shape up the problem content, upvote the great new answerers and askers and create a site we are all proud of.

There is one big problem though. Janitorial work can be boring. To make it more fun and productive we created the review section.

When you gain the privilege to downvote a new review link appears in the header.

This new section will allow you to track your review progress, but first you will need to unlock the right to review by gaining the Strunk & White badge.

As your suggested edits get approved or you edit posts, we will track your progress towards Strunk & White.

Once you have this badge you will be allowed to track your review progress and be a candidate for the new Reviewer badge.

You will also be able to track progress towards the 2 voting badges, Civic Duty and Electorate and track progress towards the epic Copy Editor badge.

The reason we unlock this section is to ensure all questions and answers are viewed by at least 2 users who are good at editing. This means that we are less likely to get flags stating “please sir, edit this for me” and gives new users a better chance. Once two users with the Strunk & White badge review a post the post will “vanish” from the list.

The review section focuses on 3 areas.

1. Questions and answers by users with 10 or less reputation.
2. Questions and answers that are caught by our “low quality” heuristic, this heuristic is not perfect but it finds a fair amount of posts that need editing, voting, commenting and flagging.
3. (10k only) Questions that received close votes. More about this on meta.

In the review screen you can choose to filter by tag or time frame. You can also vote, flag, comment and edit without leaving the review section.

We have had a very noticeable increase in editing and reasonable increase in voting in the last few weeks.

If you have a chance, review a few posts in the review screen. Help us create awesome, clean and useful sites we are proud of.

Our track record on email notifications has been mixed at best. Since early 2009, we’ve had some forms of email notification, including:

• A checkbox under each question you own, asking if you want email notifications for that specific question.

• A long since removed “oh, you’ve been away for 7 days, so we will mail you any new comments and answers to your questions as a courtesy” feature.

The one remaining option, an email opt-in checkbox at the bottom of every question you’ve asked, seemed more and more nonsensical as time went on and the network grew from 4 sites to 60+ sites. There’s no sane way to remember if you have ticked this checkbox on every question on every Stack Exchange site.

So we’re simplifying. Email notifications are now tied to your global inbox.

To turn on email notifications, open your profile page by clicking your name as it appears at the top of any Stack Exchange site, and look for the “preferences” option at the top.

In the settings, you can confirm your email address — we’ll validate it in this case to make sure the emails will arrive — and specify whether you want emails delivered daily, weekly, or every 3 hours.

Bear in mind that we will only email you if you have not checked your global inbox in that time interval. Meaning, if you select the default of “daily”, and you don’t click to expand your global inbox on any Stack Exchange site for a full 24 hour period… you’ll then get an email delivered to you with the contents of your global inbox. And if you don’t check for another 24 hours, you will get another email, and so forth.

(This also offers a more aggressive “every 3 hours” option which satisified a major outstanding request for our previous email notification support — which was not only per question, but at best sent every 24-36 hours, and often much later depending on the timing.)

If you’re worried nobody will be able to find this link buried in their profile, fret not. There is a reminder at the bottom of every single question you own, if you haven’t enabled global inbox email notifications yet:

Clicking that will expand the same settings inline, letting you opt in without visiting your preferences. (And no, we did not turn this on by default for anyone, even if they had previously enabled email notification for some of their particular questions; global inbox email notifications are 100% opt-in.)

One big advantage of this approach is its simplicity. If the message goes in your global inbox for any Stack Exchange site, you can be notified of it via email. That means:

• Answers to your questions
• Comments on your posts
• Comment @name replies to you
• Chat room @name mentions
• Some careers notifications, if you are participating on careers
• Meta posts for community moderators

… and so on. No more worrying about per-site email options; everything is handled at the network level across all Stack Exchange sites.

We’re still tweaking the layout of this mail a bit, but we believe it’s a big step forward over what we had in place for email before. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Oh, and if email is your thing, don’t forget we have a set of nifty “best of the week” email newsletters you can subscribe to for any Stack Exchange site, too!