Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Proposal authors can cause disruption by deleting their proposal
There is one specific issue here with one emergency solution. Because of this specific situation, we have discovered a flaw in our system. This flaw needs to be discussed further, and eventually resolved.
A few days ago, a new member with no prior experience here, created a new Movies & Literature proposal. Several people flagged interest, myself included. There were also concerns that the proposal was far too wide, and would not work out in practice. More on that later.
Following this, the author of the proposal has engaged quite a bit on Proposals Codidact, with a generally low level of success, resulting in frustration for both themselves and other users. There have been a lot of misunderstandings, and the author has now come to the conclusion that the best option was to delete the proposal. That would have been fair if it was an awful proposal with no activity in the incubator. That isn't the case. I have a question in the incubator belonging to that proposal, currently having multiple upvotes, and no downvotes.
I am quite sure the author meant no harm by deleting it:
Don't worry about the Movie&Literature/Anime question thing. I deleted the proposal. I should do so with the question as well.
I think it's a problem that the author of a proposal can single-handedly delete their proposal like this. I had no idea it had been deleted after they told me in a comment under another post in the meta category, that I was actively commenting on.
We can take away the author's ability to delete their proposal if there are incubator/meta posts using its tag. However, a well-meaning author acting correctly, simply cleaning up, would run into issues because of this. What else can we do instead, or additionally, so we don't end up in this situation again in the future?
What do we do about the now deleted proposal? Undelete it? It was a very wide community proposal, and I am confident there are better ways to organize a set of communities covering the topics. My incubator question also happens to be in the fortunate situation that it does not only suit a community for movies, but one for fantasy universes.
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
Thanks for pointing this out. I think this is a broader problem than just proposals: wiki posts are intended to be community-owned, so the original author shouldn't have any special privileges on the post. Ideally, wiki posts would be ownerless. Edit 2024-10-02: posts with the "freely editable" setting (wiki posts) can no longer be deleted by the original posters.
In this specific case, we should restore the proposal because it had activity, and honor the original poster's request to disassociate it. The UI doesn't support disassociation right now, so I'm going to have to get help on that for a direct database change.
0 comment threads
Since I am the proposal's author I'd like to give my two cents:
The original idea to create that proposal was, because I figured Codidact is missing such a community. I proposed that with the intention of "attracting" more users with it. Because I thought this would also be beneficial to other communities. Actually, I thought the proposal would rather quickly lead to the creation of the site as they are shown on the main page.
Instead of gathering supporters who get "hands-on" by building something, I only got feedback on what was wrong on the first steps I tried (like open-ended opinion-based posts deemed unfit for Q&A, tag or topic being too broad with Movies+Literature). So I lost interest in establishing the topic here on Codidact because apparently, everyone else knows better how this community-to-be should be like, while I was the one conceptualizing it but have had no chance in establishing it like this right from the start.
By deleting the proposal I wanted to prevent that anyone approaches me for feedback on that again. If the only thing a proposal gathers is negative feedback, well this implies not too much interest in the proposal. If there is someone who would like to be responsible further on, then that someone should take over.
As a quick solution I offer to undelete the proposal. If possible I would like to have my name removed from it as being the author. I am okay with it if the text is copy&pasted by someone who wants to nurture this proposal further and re-posts it.
As for the future handling of such a case, I do not really have a helpful hint right now (except that forbidding an author to delete his own post would rather be not the best thing, imho; also if considering that a user could delete the whole account taking any posts with it).
I'm sorry for having caused trouble. I assumed the proposal and my question are the only posts on this.
1 comment thread
0 comment threads