Codetown

We’re removing “Hot Meta Posts” from Stack Overflow's sidebar for now; moderators now fully control [featured]

tl;dr: We're removing the "Hot Meta Posts" from Stack Overflow's sidebar while we work on looking at how Meta can better meet its goals. To ensure that moderators are able to bring important posts to the community, we'll be giving them exclusive access to the featured tag. "Featured on Meta" will remain. This only affects Stack Overflow.

What are we doing?

We're removing the "Hot Meta Posts" section from the right sidebar on Stack Overflow:

Where and when are we doing it?

This will only affect Stack Overflow / Meta Stack Overflow. Network sites other than Stack Overflow (or sites that otherwise have this functionality disabled) will continue to show hot meta posts.

We'll be doing this at some point in the very near future.

Why are we doing it?

For a mixed-bag of reasons. Way back when, we took a platform that we said wasn't a very good fit for discussion and subjective questions and, as is our style, put it to work just for discussion and subjective questions and called it meta. And it was glorious.

It hasn't scaled very well since then, and we want to evaluate ways that we can make it more deliberately serve the purposes that we hoped it would serve. One of those purposes is helping to make sure that urgent communication from moderators stands a very good chance of being seen, which is why we're giving them exclusive access to the featured tag.

But, "Hot" on meta can mean vastly different things than it did when we originally rolled out the list feature, and in quite a few cases, questions on the list aren't really ideal discussions to entice new people to come to meta, which was a big purpose of the feature. Lots of things are taking attention away from tag requests, moderators explaining actions taken, and similar things.

Employees will be posting updates on our blog, or sometimes coordinating with moderators to make use of a featured slot. But, it's going to be totally up to the moderators. In fact, I'm not even featuring this one, but a moderator can if they want to (wink, wink).

What's the plan going forward?

We're going to start discovery on how each major function that meta serves could be made more deliberate instead of inverting and contorting our Q&A format a little differently to serve each purpose. As this goes forward, we'll start some discussions about ideas.

Meta is still a great resource, but we need to make what it does and how it does it more clearly-defined and deliberate. While we do that, just think of your favorite "under construction" animated gif. Everyone's welcome if they bring a hard hat, but we want to be more careful with the context and expectations folks bring as they arrive here (or run very quickly away, in some cases).

Questions? Please leave an answer.

Can we make a way to allow new users to comment on other users posts? [duplicate]

New users don't have the privilege to comment everywhere. I understand that this is to prevent comment spam; however, new users end up posting non-answers instead of comments because that is what they do have permission to post. Perhaps the problem would be better solved by giving allowing new users to comment, but that leaves the problem of preventing spam.

Here are my suggestions to limit spam:

• limit how many comments a new user can make other than comments on their own posts (perhaps only comment on 1 question per reputation point, or even just one comment outside their own posts per reputation point)
• add a new user comment review queue similar to the other review queues (encourage reviewers to upvote useful comments and provide a way for reviewers to provide private feedback about non useful comments)