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@Joseph: We've seen worse, but yes, this morning we have an unusually large quantity of closed questions on the front page.
Of your three choices, I would pick "aberration".
"Aberration"? I think not. It cannot be just a coincidence that around the same time, the Brits took 600 in one innings and the Ozzies are praying for (and likely getting) rain in Adelaide Oval. My hunch is that real mathematicians are all cricket fans, and what Joseph is observing is not an increase of noise but a decrease of signal. :-)
Isn't that the game with the tiny racquets, the high net, and the balls with feathers on one end?
Ok, I know that some people disagree with me about the use of [tag-removed], but this is ridiculous. People are abusing this tag in the name of "cleanliness", but are actually creating a mess on the home page.
There are currently 12 closed questions on the home page. SEVEN of these questions would not be on the home page at all right now if it weren't for people retagging them [tag-removed]. FOUR others are higher up on the list than they would be were it not for this practice, and the original tags that were removed weren't even very bad.
You should just block tag-removed!
I think I'm swaying toward Anton's point of view. As long as the tags are accurate, I'd think I'd rather just scroll through some closed questions when I do a tag-search. I think the tipping point for me is that filtering out tag-removed does not actually do a good job of making the home page more aesthetically pleasing -- quite the opposite.
Hey Anton, is there any way you could add a javascript or css thing that lets us completely block out closed threads (like we can do with ignored tags)?
Hey Anton, is there any way you could add a javascript or css thing that lets us completely block out closed threads (like we can do with ignored tags)?
I have a philosophical objection to this, and it's crufty, but I'm completely willing to do it if it gets people to stop commandeering the tagging system to filter out closed questions.
You should now see a "Hide closed questions" checkbox on your preference page (you may need to clear your cache first). As usual, it just sets a cookie, not a server-side preference. Right now, it just hides all questions containing the string "[closed]" in their titles.
Nifty! I noticed a minor bug: It blocks closed questions on userpages as well. It's not a major problem, but I figured I'd let you know.
Ah! Thanks Anton. That's a nice workaround.
Oh, my manners!
Thanks, Anton!
Though after trying it out, I am not sure completely hiding closed questions is the best idea. Like you said in the preferences, this is counter to the community moderation spirit of the website. Also is a problem since some useful big-list questions have been closed, not as off-topic, but since it has grown too big and less relevant.
Hey, an idea: is it possible at all to either
Instead of hiding the questions, apply the "ignored tags" style to them?
Make it not something you set in the preference, but something you set when doing searches? (Or in general, make it apply to only certain pages?)
I think I should be able to apply ignored-tag styles to them. Lemme see what I can do.
(Edit: I've changed it, but it doesn't seem to be working properly. Still debugging.)
Hey, everyone!
This is lame. Please don't use Anton's new preference option. The whole point of having closed questions visible is so that community moderation actually happens. I would be really sad if most people turned this on, and no longer looked at what was happening to closed questions.
Also, it seems that several of the moderators are now against retagging things as [tag-removed]. I propose that we explicitly forbid people from manually retagging questions to this tag, and return to its intended use.
@Scott: Your comment
This is lame. Please don't use Anton's new preference option. The whole point of having closed questions visible is so that community moderation actually happens.
surely applied to the first version of Anton's option, not the modified version he is working on now that just grays-out the question, rather than hiding it completely?
Also
I propose that we explicitly forbid people from manually retagging questions to this tag, and return to its intended use.
Acknowledged. Until told otherwise, I shall stop abusing [tag-removed]... just one question: what about closed questions that actually has a completely incorrect tag? Should I retag it to [tag-removed], the correct tag, or leave it alone?
Personally I'd prefer that we don't even use [tag-removed] for completely incorrect tags. We're already unfriendly enough in the closing process, and I fear that [tag-removed] is just adding insult to injury. I'm happy to defer to others' judgement on this, however.
@Scott: What's wrong with Anton's original preference thing? The only time I ever look at a closed topic is when somebody posts on meta. Having them visible on the main page is just an annoyance.
@Scott: I think I agree with you philosophically, but I don't see the harm in people applying ignored-tag css to closed questions. It's true that MO is self-moderating, but that self-moderating must be voluntary if it is to work well. We can't force people to vote, for example. If somebody decides not to vote on anything, that's slightly greedy because they're benefiting from the energy others put into voting, but it's far better for them to not vote than for them to vote thoughtlessly because they're forced to.
The premise of "web 2.0" sites is that there's enough joy in volunteer work (appropriately pitched) that nobody has to do anything they really don't want to in order to keep things running smoothly. Many different people on MO get fulfillment from helping out in different ways. If it turns out that we really need more people to look at closed questions in order to keep MO working smoothly, I'll disable this preference cookie thing, but I'll be pretty surprised if that's necessary.
@timdok: hmmm, that's kind of weird. I guess that when you have that option enabled, questions with ignored tags just aren't served to you at all. I can't duplicate that with a preference cookie. You can get the behavior you want by adding some custom css for MO:
.tagged-ignored{ display: none; }
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