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I support this.
(Vote here if you support this, too.)
As a computational chemist I am clearly biased, but currently cannot find any good reason to not have code highlighting. I have seen enough other computational chemists here and questions dealing with cheminformatics approaches that I think for a growing subset of questions it will become beneficial.
I ...
21
"... for scientists, academics, teachers, and students in the field of chemistry."*
"scientists of chemistry" and "academics of chemistry" are awkward compositions, so I think that simply "... for scientists, academics, teachers, and students of chemistry" isn't the best formulation.
17
This is literally the most asked question on the meta history of SE. Almost every per site meta gets it and the mother meta – meta.SE – well.
Just as I said in my comment:
Votes are meant to be anonymized and you shouldn't be to find out who voted how on what.
People would post useless comments to just bypass the requirement.
I don't want to be ...
16
No. I don't think this should be required for the reason of revenge downvoting.
I do think people should be more aware of what content should be downvoted. Yesterday I saw a chemistry homework question where the asker showed an image from their book (a homework question) and shared their reasoning as to why the answer was one of two options. While at first ...
15
I'd definitely like to see an improved editor (i.e., with the $\ce{}$ buttons and help) added. Anything that makes it easier to write out formulas will be highly appreciated by new users.
I wouldn't mind some notion of "alchemy" since that's where chemistry started. While I do quite a lot of computational simulations, I still like images of test tubes and ...
13
Please no, that is a bad idea.
I have multiple reasons why I do not like the idea at all.
First and foremost, I don't like comments very much. I regard comments as obsolete by default, especially when they are old. All relevant information should be contained in the question or the answer itself. Editing things mentioned in comments into the question will of ...
12
I am against it.
While the implementation is already present as it is used on other sites, it will add considerable load time to the page itself. We are already loading one of the heaviest extensions possible, i.e. MathJax. For especially heavy MathJax sites loading already takes a very long time. Adding to that an implementation that further increases ...
12
TL;DR: Google may understand the difference between sulfur and sulphur, but gives better rankings to pages (and entire sites) with better spelling, grammar, and mechanics. Also, it's easier to read a post with better spelling and grammar.
I have been doing copious editing. However, I do not typically edit for American v British spelling unless I see a post ...
11
This is, unfortunately, just how the system works: when an account is removed, so are the votes. This is probably not the last time you'll see this - fixing it would require some pretty massive changes to how voting (and user accounts) are implemented.
That said, we do have a system in place to preserve some votes when a high-ranking user is removed. As a ...
10
SE isn't starting any new blogs at the moment:
We've learned a lot by creating these per-site blogs for any site
which asked for them. However, we at Stack Exchange have not been
doing enough to make blogs work - neither for the contributors nor for
the communities that are associated with them.
On our network, any site will have generated some ...
10
This should be a (hopefully) simple style sheet change. Meta is already doing it, and other sites are also. The effect is generally subtle and I approve of subtle:
$\color{magenta}{\text{I fully support subtle variations of hot pink}}$.
10
This is enabled, but not by default - lots of existing posts use code formatting for things that don't benefit from syntax highlighting, and I don't see any pervasive language tags that would be useful here...
So you'll want to rely on language hint comments to specify which (if any) highlighting you want to apply.
10
The best way to combat this is to reject the edits. If you see an edit that was accepted and is as poor as the one above, please flag it for a moderator to take a look at. We have a means to take action on these type of cases if necessary. Rolling back is okay in this type of situation, too, but that can lead to "rollback wars" over contentious edits.
...
10
"We need more members"
Personally, I'm not sure this is necessarily true.
What we need is good quality questions and good quality answers to accompany them.
StackExchange generally has quite a high attrition rate— people come here looking for an answer to a specific question they have, no matter how ‘nice’ or ‘friendly’ we are towards them, there is ...
10
The current description implicitly excludes laymen from our target audience. Surely our site welcomes anyone with a good chemistry question or a good chemistry answer. SE Earth Science does not exclude laymen, by using "those interested". Therefore I propose the following short description, which is clear and concise, and does not exclude anyone:
"Q&A ...
10
I don't really see the necessity for this, to be honest. You can already flag the post for moderator attention, which accomplishes the same effect. If you additionally want to make the "flag text" public, then you can leave a comment; even a copy-pasted one is fine. Or you can comment first and then flag the post and ask us to look at the comment.
9
ChemDoodle Web Components
link: http://web.chemdoodle.com/
licence: GPLv3
This library looks like it has enough features for us, the documentation for developers on the site also looks nice on first glance.
It has support for curly arrows to draw mechanisms, which seems pretty nice.
SE might have to get the commercial licence, though.
9
I'm all in favor of starting a community blog. It's in the spirit of "we're graduating and we're a major site" and will allow discussion of cool chemistry news that doesn't fit into the Q&A format.
I'm definitely willing to post about once per week, and I'd keep the topics indicated above.
Here's the SE page describing community blogs.
9
The biggest problems with this, in my opinion:
What you're proposing is sheer charity. People are occasionally awesome, but I can't imagine a person that is always in a good mood and always charitable Not even Mart. Related to all the mentor thingy: Opt in "mentor" privilege at 7.5k
What you're proposing is adding more complexity to this weird ...
9
What you are describing is essentially what the "First Post" review queue is there for. It's not a bot that reviews the posts, but users who have been part of the community for some time (500 reputation).
This review should of course be substantial, but the majority of regular reviewers use the "No action needed" very often. In many cases the question has ...
9
It's not a bug.
I don't know how the system determines what suggestions to show there, but it is completely different for me (logged in/out, different devices). It almost seems to be random.
[...] it's been deprecated for a long time [...]
Let's not forget, the homework tag is deprecated as a result of our meta discussions. The system itself doesn't ...
8
Badge Design Ideas
Being fully aware that these brainchilds of mine might be outright ignored, here are two ideas for the badges:
This is a more traditional, "chemistry is all about the lab" kind of take on it: Erlenmeyer flasks! Just colour them gold, silver and bronze.
This is, however, also more of a cliché; we now have the opportunity to strive to ...
8
The tag was on the question "Photoisomerization of Azobenzene", see the edit history here.
I am responsible for making this tag an orphan, meaning as soon as I saw it, I substituted it to the proper tag. I do things like this at least once a week and I outlined the procedure somewhere on meta before. Unused, they are called orphaned, tags will be removed ...
8
Migration should only happen when the site on the receiving end actually wants the question; that is, the question should be good enough so the only thing wrong with it would be where it's asked. Needless to say, that is rare.
Community Managers could set up a migration path between two sites which works like a teleporter, and only then you'd have an ...
8
There's been a lot of discussion about this network-wide. The summary of it is that SE is changing the layout of every site, for reasons which I don't fully understand yet. It has generated a lot of controversy, but I do not think there is much that we can do about it apart from voicing our opinions. If you are interested, please see Chemistry's updated ...
8
I think erratum already fulfills this purpose. From the tag info:
For questions that deal with possible errors in a specific statement of a specified book, article, website, etc. These questions should always include a complete reference.
8
There are two layers to this problem. The first layer is based on individual actions: is it OK for any single person to continually downvote posts?
The answer is that habitual downvoting is not against the rules, as has already been explained, so there is no real action to be taken here. However, I will agree that consistent downvoting is highly ...
8
If you want to draw the attentions of the moderators, do not flag comments, flag the post and include whatever the comment says there.
There is in principle only one action for flags on comments: delete. And whatever the comment was about, further investigation into what additional steps need to be taken.
With custom flags on posts there can be communicated ...
7
Okay, I gave this some thought and here are some initial images i could think of.
In terms of an image at the top and center This old image that illustrates combustion is really rad. Something done in this style might be cool.
Another possibility is the Bucky-ball, which is thought provoking but might also be confused as a football.
In terms of an "...
7
Physics Overflow isn't an SE site, they have their own processes.
Yes, we are allowed to suggest designs, some other sites have done this in the past.
I recommend use of the jelly benzene as our logo!
I had a theme I was working on here, but I'm not so sure it still works. I planned to use charged cyclopropanes for the vote buttons, and green benzenes to ...
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