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Assuming from the discussion tag that this is also a best practice question, and being unfamiliar with any rules that would prevent the following suggestion, I would suggest a simple solution to this and similar issues that I have seen:
If it is readily apparent what the OP is attempting to and failing to ask (particularly if they themselves express it in a ...
11
Summary: the asker's selection doesn't and shouldn't mean much on our site, but on some sites it makes sense and there's a lot of resistance to changing it, so let's pursue per-site exceptions.
From the beginning, the claim has been that accepted answers convey signal that "this worked". As you point out, that's not really meaningful on some ...
10
I do not think that the issue at hand is that absolute power be taken away from moderators (that isn't going to happen). But I do think that some more sensitivity from moderators is definitely in order.
The first moderator comment (preceding the mod closing the question) was "Insight into what?", in response to the unclear question given by the OP: "Any ...
9
Ok; 6 of these couldn't be done automatically as they contained search parameters that broke with a simple search-and-replace. I edited those manually to fix the links.
The remaining posts were re-written en mass to fix the links, and won't be bumped to the homepage. https://judaism.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Achabadlibrary.org%2Fbooks%2Fdefault.aspx
9
I am happy to share some of what I am using, feel free to leverage as is or modify as needed. I believe I copied some of this from @Isaac Moses who originated the practice of welcoming new users.
Standard welcome for a new user
[Welcome to Mi Yodeya](https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3887/11501) and thanks for this first question. Great to have you ...
8
A related question came up some time ago about the difficulty of earning Enthusiast and Fanatic (for consecutive days of site activity) in a Shabbat-observant community. At the time a community manager answered thus:
You're right. If we were designing this system specifically for a Jewish community, we probably would not implement the Fanatic and ...
7
Certain gold badges do give you more abilities. If you have a gold badge in a tag, and a question is asked with that tag as one of the original tags, you can mark it as a duplicate with a single vote. The theory behind it is, if you've got a gold badge in a particular tag, you know the content well within that tag and are likely to know where things have ...
7
I've destroyed the tag, and I'll blacklist it, but I need a more succinct chunk of text to show to folks that attempt to use it.
Something like:
Please don't use the 'torah' tag, as it's not very descriptive or useful for searching. Instead, use torah-reading, oral-torah, or torah-study instead. Don't worry, tags can be changed later if needed.
What ...
7
For halacha, how about the existing wording?
NOTE: Like Wikipedia, this site makes no guarantee of validity, and does not offer professional (particularly rabbinic) advice. Treat information from this site like it came from a crowd of your friends.
7
I see now that two other SE communities, Health and Law, have professional advice disclaimers in the top-right corners of their front pages:
This would seem to be the right place to put our disclaimer.
The text of our disclaimer should be what we already have in our Tour, as that's the product of years of slow evolution and community scrutiny:
Like ...
7
hebrew:
Questions about the Hebrew language are not on-topic unless they are also related to Judaism.
Based on the close reason.
7
If a question received no new answers during the bounty period, then no bounty points were auto-awarded. The bounty simply ends forever. There's no way to "restore" an old bounty. Once the period is up, it's done.
You can add a new bounty to the question. The answerer does not need to repost his or her answer. You can award the bounty to the already ...
7
According to a a Stack Exchange employee, there is no way for non-moderators to view deleted comments, nor will Stack Exchange implement such a feature. Sorry.
As a piece of device from Shog's answer:
For most intents and purposes, deleted comments are gone - you should
try your best to put anything of value into an actual answer. As you
note, you ...
7
There's a Best Answers contest because one community member (me) volunteered to run it and to "donate" bounties as prizes. So, if there's a "you" to address here, it's me. However, if the question is about what features the community should have, the correct address is "we."
1) We could have and could benefit from a Best Questions contest. You are welcome ...
7
How many questions are asked on different topics?
You can look at the tag overview page to see how many questions are tagged with which tag. That should give you a rough idea under the assumption that questions are tagged correctly. Obviously not every question will always have the right tag and it depends on whether the granularity is enough for you.
...
7
This doesn't seem so necessary or practical.
You state:
But if we want to please the OP so she can choose an answer that suits
her, we can't mark similar questions of other OPs as dupes as they
might not be consent with the answers.
This premise is not really correct. The point of an answer is not to please the questioner. The point of an answer is ...
6
One small step we've taken in this direction (heh) is offering an integrated virtual keyboard which includes a convenient ‏ key. (You can thank HodofHod for the idea.) As I mentioned on the network-wide request, we don't have any immediate plans to go further. However, internationalization is an important part of our strategy. Please give us ...
6
purim-torah-in-jest:
This tag should only be used in the few weeks leading up to Purim. Please read the info page for more details. Remember to include the required footer and not to add other tags.
6
sexuality:
Please respect that in the Jewish tradition certain questions, especially certain questions relating to sexuality, are discussed only in private. Such questions will be closed or deleted at the discretion of the moderators or community. See here.
6
Comments are second-class citizens and are always subject to removal. Any important information should be in a proper post.
This I feel confident is not going to happen.
6
I agree with practically all of Alex's answer regarding special treatment.
I would offer, though, that short of that, you could create a question catalog here on Meta for collecting "national interest" or "key" questions, and then use that as the basis of projects for maintaining and improving them.
6
There's an important usability problem with that: you remove user control. You can open a link in a new window (or new tab) right now, by clicking the scroll wheel on your mouse, using the right-click menu on your mouse, or long-pressing on your touch device. So today you can either load the page in the current tab or launch a new one. If you make "launch ...
6
We do have a help center.
Whether there should be an ad for it on the main page is a separate question. You can propose community ads here.
5
The idea of the 'poking' is to churn content that didn't receive much attention back to the front page, and there's no technical reason to favorite one tag or date range over another when it comes to that, at least as far as the purpose of the feature.
The point is to have folks look and see why those questions never received much attention, because in many ...
5
It wasn't enabled on meta because the developers did a cursory look and saw that, well, Hebrew isn't really used here.
If you can provide me with some examples where it would have been beneficial to have it available here, I can certainly ask them to reexamine that decision. From what I understand there's a bit of a trick to getting it up and running ...
5
Starting in the next build, 10k+ users will be able to see all of their votes from the appropriate sub-tabs of their profiles.
From the Dave Haney, the dev who implemented this:
I've modified the code so that 10K users can see votes on (un)deleted posts under the appropriate tabs (deletion, undelete) of the votes section of their profile. This will be ...
5
Absolutely!
Just a little URL magic gives us:
http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/mi_yodeya/tags/#!halacha+minhag+food
5
You can run this query with a list of tags that you choose, e.g. 'shabbat', 'minhag', 'history', 'tefilla', 'parshanut-torah-comment' (the top five that aren't halacha, which dwarfs everything).
5
I always thought that biblical Hebrew was on topic. You know, if you have a question about what a word means in a certain Pasuk. I'm pretty sure such questions are left open all the time.
Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic as well.
5
In my opinion (and others', as shown in the comments on the question), the Jewish date would be unclear to many site visitors. Arguably, one way around that is to display both the Gregorian-calendar and the Jewish dates. But I think the technical difficulties are insurmountable, or nearly:
Date issues: The Jewish date changes at sunset, which time varies ...
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