Meta forum needed?

I’m missing a Meta forum, something like meta.stackexchange.

And is there some way to clean up all these threads? There are sometimes pages and pages of “Me-too” posts, and “I have this totally unrelated problem” posts – I guess I’m missing the voting mechanism of StackExchange.

*sigh*

Done, your post is now in the new meta category !

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A voting-mechanism like at StackExchange sounds like a good idea. Would it be possible to introduce it here too?

See this discussion about down-voting, where they raise good points :

https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-down-voting-be-core-functionality-in-discourse/40

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Could we have just an upvote on threads/posts that are deemed “useful”? Then we would just need a way to see threads in vote-order, like we now have for “latest topics” for example.

In that thread Jeff Atwood suggests that overgrown topics might get cleaned up by vigourous use of the “off-topic” flag, and I think he might be right. There is such a flag in our forum as well, but how does it work? Are there forum mediators or admins here who delete off-topic posts, or move them into a new thread?

I think that Discourse might be the wrong tool for this forum: we don’t need a place for discussion, for hashing out ideas, for a civilized tête-à-tête to illuminate different viewpoints and to arrive at a mutually satisfying conclusion – we just need a place to ask questions and get answers. Maybe this entire forum should be a StackExchange community instead, with the necessary tools in place to upvote good questions and helpful answers, and to downvote, edit, delete or move the less helpful stuff.

Hi there,

I’m new here - but I a longtime user of both Discourses and Stack Exchange. I have participated in a few Area 51 launches, all of them have failed. This is the main problem with Stack Exchange where small communities exist. I find that one can customise Discourse to turn it into a Q&A site for a community, and still use it for [quote=“ChristianSeverin, post:6, topic:1944”]
civilized tête-à-tête to illuminate different viewpoints and to arrive at a mutually satisfying conclusion
[/quote]

As a new member, and not an earth-scientists, but e-Infrastructure guy, I’m going to need some discussion and different viewpoints, before I can start asking questions and get answers. I guess the point is, it’s easy to underestimate who your community is :slight_smile:

Hope I can contribute in some small way.

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I understand both points.
On the one side you need a solid understanding in order to discuss about methods. I see this forum not only as a platform to report bugs but also to talk about how the tools in SNAP can used best.
On the other side, some won’t be interested in stuff that is not related to SNAP at all, which is totally legit. And I also noticed more of those kinds of topics in the last weeks. And there are surely forums for these kinds of questions, too.

How about a further category called “SAR topics” or any other name that indicates that it’s for stuff with don’t deal with SNAP in the first place? Users could chose if they are interested in common talks or the technical part only.

A few examples from the last weeks which are not related to SNAP but rather general SAR/remote sensing topics:
Do you guys see a problem with those kinds of topics as they kind of distract from the questions concerning SNAP?



http://forum.step.esa.int/t/g-pod-platform-from-esa/3420


It’s true that some of the posts on these forums are more about remote sensing than SNAP. This is not necessarily a problem provided that the community is active enough to reply to those kind of queries (the SNAP developers & ESA should prioritize responding to SNAP-related posts, which there are many).

ps. Thank you @ABraun for your valued contributions on these forums!!

thank you as well for your response.

I also do not consider these topics a bad thing in general.
I can only speak for myself and I love talking about SNAP and how to use it properly. I feel rather tired talking about general stuff, but maybe others won’t. In the end, less or no replies to certain topics mean that there is no big interest in them. And surely no one has to feel obliged to answer questions that seem unnecessary or uninteresting. So the whole thing is kind of self-regulating.