text:
Should we feature Bitcoin receiving addresses for contributors?
There is another Bitcoin forum called witcoin and they have implemented an interesting system: You have to pay bitcoins to post and cast votes, and you get a revenue share on replies and upvotes.
That is probably taking it a bit too far for a "general public" site, but how about allowing optional donations for good answers by encouraging everyone to associate their profile with a Bitcoin receiving address?
The same idea was brought up on Stackoverflow (with Flattr), where it was received very negatively. But I think on a Bitcoin site, such a system would be very topical. And of course, it is opt-in on both ends (for receiving and paying).
And to those who oppose the idea of encouraging or supporting this behaviour, would you be offended if people gave a receiving address on their profile anyway?
Or is this even against the Terms of Service here?

As of now, witcoin is dead (or at least has changed address)

Removed signature, due to no signature policy. -> "Please don't use signatures or taglines in your posts. Every post you make is already 'signed' with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you — fill it with interesting information about your interests, cool stuff you've worked on, or whatever else you like! " -Jeff Atwood in http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5038/232061

I'm not offended if people put an address in their profile, but I don't want to encourage it either. I very much think expecting or asking for "tips" for answers goes against the spirit of the stack exchange site. Plus when you introduce money into the equation, it greatly complicates things like who answered first, or who answered better, or this person stole my answer, etc. I vote no for many reasons, those are just a few. (Also, it might go against TOS)
Honestly, bringing just a titch of politics into things for the moment, I think bitcoin as an open-source project got a lot less interesting when it suddenly became about bitcoin as a way to make money. I would really like to see this site bring back some more of the "community" vibe that open-source projects tend to take on, and less of the huckster/marketplace vibe that the forums shifted to rather quickly

"Also, it might go against TOS". That would be a most important point... I'll add it to the question.

"project got a lot less interesting when it suddenly became about bitcoin as a way to make money". That seems to be a bit of an ugly situation with Bitcoin. I see this more from a "Flattr" point of view. I don't want to or expect to be making money of these systems, but I feel a real need to spend money that way. Every time I listen to a podcast, or incorporate some open source code into mine (especially if it is paid work), then I want to give a little something back. And I am not social enough for retweets or Like buttons. That is why I want to see these donate buttons everywhere.

@Thilo I agree with lemonginger and the accepted answer at SO is also valid here: if I earn money from writing here, I might not be able to post here from work. Adding an address in your profile is optional and I don't have anything against it.

I'm relatively certain that the rules permit you to put a Bitcoin address in your profile, and I have one in mine. If you want to encourage people to put one in theirs, say with a note in your own profile, you are welcome to do so.
If you're talking about some kind of integration with the site itself beyond that, that's not a good idea. SE sites are fundamentally built around a reputation system.
I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about a neutral note in the FAQ mentioning that you are permitted to put a Bitcoin address in your profile if you wish to do so. I personally have no objections to something like, "Please do not include anything but answers in your answers. Every answer you write includes, right in it, a link to your profile page, which is yours to say what you wish. You may list a Bitcoin address, or addresses for other crypto-currencies, there if you wish".
But I think other people do have strong objections to anything that could be seen as an official encouragement. And I'm sympathetic to the argument that anything that could be seen as even slightly pressuring people could be detrimental to the site.


text:
Should questions about programming Bitcoin applications be on topic?
One Area51 example prohibits qusetions such as "Should I use urllib, urllib2, or something else to communicate with bitcoind from Python?". Still, I think more specific question such as this one should be on topic. What do you think?

The Area51 example seems like kind of a gray area to me.  The questioner wants to interface with bitcoind, but the question itself could apply to any JSON-RPC interface.  It's unclear whether those who voted it off-topic meant "all questions involving programming are off-topic" or "this question is off-topic because it's only tangentially related to Bitcoin".
I think actual Bitcoin-specific programming questions (such as the Scala one that you linked) should be allowed.  We should still disallow general programming questions that are merely masquerading as Bitcoin questions.

I think the main distinction is whether the question is about Bitcoin either as a piece of software and protocol, or if it is an actual implementation detail that would be better off on one of the numerous programming flavoured Stackexchange sites. Protocol questions are central to the understanding and evolution of what bitcoin is as a whole.

I agree, this was a very Bitcoin-specific question. Just like questions about Bitcoin-specific crypto belong here and not on crypto, questions about Bitcoin-specific programming belong here, and not on programmers.

Bitcoin SE is an end-user site (much like Apple and Android SE). It should not become a support forum for developers.
There may be an edge case where a developer can ask about particular use case of Bitcoin to implement a client, but  technical support questions will need to go to one of our technical forums (such as Stack Overflow).
It will become harmful to this community if you try to combine end-user questions about  Bitcoin with the technical, programmer-y jargon of a technical support site for programmers. If there is a big call for such content, they will have to establish their presence on a site like Stack Overflow or Cryptography.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Should we standardise some terminology?
In the spirit of this question, I thought it might be a good idea to standardise some terms that get used in a lot of different ways.  Some examples:

block chain or blockchain or block-chain
double spend or doublespend or double-spend
etc. (feel free to edit and add more)

For reference, Satoshi used "block chain" and "double-spend" (which is also the wider usage of the term).

Vote by one-standard-per-answer.

how do you plan to enforce a standardized terminology? New users are not going to know some arbitrary standard on how to say block chain or double-spend. Is the community suppose to edit every question and answer that uses the incorrect terminology?

Just use tag synonyms. We're not going to be able to enforce how these words are used and in any sense a community consensus of bitcoin users will converge on terms over time.

I though that this was a perfect oppurtunity to make use of the whole StackExchange network so I asked our friends on English language & usage for advice. They should have some good answers. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41281/blockchain-or-block-chain-double-spend-or-doublespend

Mostly I want to create some consistency in my own posting.  New users will of course use whatever they want.  But this way at least "veteran answers" can have some consistency.

Suggested standard: "block chain".

(Non native speaker) but maybe the tag should be renamed as "block-chain" too.

Suggested standard: "double-spend".

For the verb ("he attempted to double-spend some bitcoins"), the noun ("he attempted a double-spend attack"), or both?

Hadn't thought about it.  Do you have any input regarding that?

I personally like "double spend" in all cases. But I think I'm in the minority on that. Whatever we decide, I think it should probably be the same for all cases. (At least for no other reason that it's bad to force people to think about how they're using a term in order to use it.)

Just to be pedantic, your second example is an adjective.  But I agree it makes sense to keep one convention all the way around (barring some further grammatical insight someone has to offer).

I'm not an expert on grammar, but I don't think so. "He attempted a double-spend attack" is like "He attempted to get a dog license", and "dog" is certainly not an adjective.

lol, yep it is.  It describes "license".  Many nouns can be used as adjectives in this way ("a purple car" or "a jalapeño sandwich").

That's not what Steven Pinker says.

It all comes down to whether you refer to the function of the word or the identity.  To continue the pedantry contest, you can most accurately refer to such words as noun adjuncts which are typically described as "a noun functioning as an adjective".

blockchain
because we want it to be a tag, and I don't think tags can be two words. Already, the blockchain tag has 19 questions. It makes much more sense to use that as a standard instead of having people write "block chain" but then tag their questions "blockchain"

Two word tags like mining pools are simply hyphenated.  Since people don't have to type the whole tag before it shows up with a description, I don't think this is a problem.

@eMansipater one of the options you gave as standard for blockchain is block-chain... notice that block-chain and block chain will map to the same tag. I think this will be confusing.

I don't think that deciding how to write a word should be based on some limitations of a tag system on a web site.

Suggested standard: "double spend".
(As suggested on SE site for English language & usage)

Just a note that the accepted answer there is just someone's suggestion.  They didn't seem to be aware that double-spending has an existing background in academic cryptography.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Who should the moderators be? [Nomination]
Since the other "Who should the moderators be" question turned out to be more of a discussion about what makes a good moderator I thought that we'd start this topic that is just for nominating and voting.
Each answer here should be in the format below. The name of the person is also a link to his/her profile. Votes determine who we'd like to see as moderators. It is OK to nominate yourself.

Jane Doe
This is a little text about Jane Doe. What we know about her, why she would be suitable as a moderator. Just a few lines, not a novel.

Is the process as simple as the top M users according to answer score at a specific date/time will be selected as the M moderators?

No, it's not that simple. "Shortly after the public beta starts (1-2 weeks, generally), the Community team chooses 3 pro tem moderators. They're selected (versus elected) based on a number of factors, one of which is community input from a "Who should the moderators be?" meta post—assuming one exists." See this question: http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7/how-were-the-initial-moderators-for-bitcoin-stack-exchange-chosen

David Schwartz
Very active during private beta, has lots of high vote answers. Frequent editor. Active here on meta. Also an active member of a number of other StackExchange sites.

David Perry
He has been very active during the private beta, has good answers and questions and wants to be a moderator according to the discussion thread. He has also been active here at meta so he seems to care about the site.

D.H.
He may not be the user with the greatest reputation, but he has been fairly active on the site. Besides asking and answering questions, he frequently edits other users' posts to add tags and improve readability. He is also very active here at meta with 7 questions asked and 300+ reputation.

nmat
Very active during private beta. Active here on meta and also on a few other StackExchange sites. Very frequent voter.

eMansipater
Has been helping Bitcoin newcomers for a while now, and is an active StackExchange user.

If anyone comes up with a better description, feel free to edit.


text:
What is too basic to ask?
What questions do we consider too basic to ask? This question of mine had 5 upvotes but was closed by Robert Cartaino (who is a StackExchange employee so there was no "vote to close" action). Robert obviously has his opinion but I think that we as a community should come to some sort of decision on this matter.

I find the close reason a bit strange as well. He says:
"[I]t can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information".
That would be what? Wikipedia? The Bitcoin FAQ?
I punched "how did bitcoin start" into Google, FWIW, and most of the links didn't actually answer that question. I checked the Wikipedia entry on 'Bitcoin' and the 'History' is only recent history. The 'Creator' section has a very brief description of the Bitcoin paper, when it was published, and that an open source project followed. That's about it.
So it seems, at least to me, that a very good answer to this question is pretty hard to find and requires following links and scraping details from multiple locations.
Maybe I just missed the perfect link, but if I did, so will other people. And it's actually an important question because understanding the source of something is the first step to making a decision whether to trust it. (It's not always an important deciding factor, but knowing it is the first step in order to decide how important it is.)

+1 I also like the question

voted to reopen

The Meta.SO FAQ has seems to indicate to me that it is not acceptable to deride users for asking easily Googleable questions (see here and here).  As such, it seems to me that no question is too basic to ask on an established SE site.
That said, while building the community, it is important to build content that will attract experts.  Novices might come to a community of experts, but the reverse won't happen.  As such, it might be that such a question, while appropriate for a public SE site, might be too basic for a beta SE site (or at least a private beta SE site).

note that "no question is too basic to ask on an established SE site." is not true. cstheory.SE only allows research level (or interesting to researchers) questions. Any basic question is closed or migrated. Thus, it is completely upto us to decide what is too basic.


text:
Can we add an IRC channel to the FAQ?
We have setup an IRC channel on Freenode. At #bitcoin-stackexchange.
Nanotube has set up a bot there that echos new questions, so that people in the room can see whenever a new question is posted.
Would anyone be opposed to adding this to FAQ?
EDIT: This channel allows its users to see whenever a new question is asked, or answer is given. Pretty much any site activity is echoed to the chat. This is ideal if you run IRC, and can idle in the chat. Since using the channel, I have been frequenting the BE site more than the other exchanges I'm a part of.
It's basically a non-intrusive way of having BE alerts.

not me, sounds cool!

Retagged 'support'

I don't oppose it. Just wanna mention that there is also the chat here on StackExchange. http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1233/bitcoin

The SE chats work very well - try them out - lots of convenient features.

I agree the SE chat works really well, but I prefer to use IRC.

@Dori: Well, I think one issue would be whether SE has any policy that forbids this or any position on the issue, since they also provide chat.

@Dori - this should be tagged 'support' because it's a request to change something in the FAQ ... or is there another way to edit the FAQ? It's besides the point that the change request points outside of SE.

Reaching critical mass is a major hurdle to the success of this site.
Considering that this site includes a capable chat system, I'd rather not see the FAQ used to draw resources away from this site.

Hi Robert, if you check out the channel you will see that it is used to direct people to the site whenever a question is asked or topic replied to. I would stake my UI, metrics, and A/B experience to bet that it would increase traffic no matter what stage the site is at.

Also... looking at the existing rooms on stack chat, I see there are three, and nothing has been said in any of them for over two weeks.

As a fan of IRC, I like this idea :)


text:
Some PR for Bitcoin SE
Can we link to Bitcoin SE from the wiki?
Where would be appropriate to link from?
Can we get a link to be a sticky thread in the forums?
Any more ideas? OnlyOneTV?

bitcoin.stackexchange.com is now listed as the first community site on the very bitcoin.org frontpage. What more can you ask for? Almost feels like they have high hopes in us to bring back some sanity and seriousness into the community after all the recent craziness, hacking and drama.

@herzmeister - I didn't know we were first, awesome! I have high hopes with Bitcoin SE - for a long time it was very difficult for outsiders to understand what is going on with this crazy internet currency. No more!

Can we link to Bitcoin SE from the wiki?
Where would be appropriate to link from?

We've currently got a link from the forums page.  Do you think it should be somewhere more prominent?
It's worth noting that we've already got a link on the front page of bitcoin.org.  I believe Gavin added it the same day that we hit public beta.

Can we get a link to be a sticky thread in the forums?

Might be worth asking the mods about it.  Or eMansipater could edit his already-stickied introduction post to include a link.

Any more ideas?

Maybe ask the owner of weusecoins.com to put a link in the "getting started" section?

OnlyOneTV?

I am strongly opposed to letting Bitcoin.SE have any association with Bruce Wagner.

OK, let's not turn this into a "Bruce good or bad thread". If he does an episode about Bitcoin SE, that doesn't mean we're associated with him.

@ripper234: Seeking promotion on OOTV is a bad idea.  I'll leave it at that.

Anyone contacted weusecoins already?

Once this site matures a little I plan to link it from this post, which has over 40,000 views.

Is that offer still standing? ;)


text:
Who should control the bitcoin discussion?
The bitcoin forum was recently hacked and the forum will now be hosted by Tibanne, a japanese company and owner of the largest bitcoin exchange. Is it better for a third party such as stack exchange to host bitcoin discussions or for a bitcoin company to do so ? I feel this is also related to the discussion about the domain for bitcoin.stackexchange.com as bitcointalk.com would be a great choice for that.
See the discussion at https://bitcoin.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25/what-should-our-domain-name-be

The domain name question you refer to was closed, see the comments there. We will most likely simply use http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com.

I've read this question three times and I still can't figure out what it's asking. Are you asking for SE to host a Bitcoin discussion site? That's just not what SE does -- why would they do it for Bitcoin?

The existence of Bitcoin.SE should be independent of whether or not there are Bitcoin discussion forums out there.  For one thing, Bitcoin.SE is not a discussion forum (it is a Q&A site).  Furthermore, there is no "official" Bitcoin organization that this SE would even be competing with.


text:
What is worth preserving about this question?
I'm not a fan of this question, or any question where all the answers are going to consist of "My predictions are", "I think", and "It seems".  But others don't appear to feel the same way.  What is the enduring value to the internet of this question?  And who exactly are the experts we believe are on the site now, ready to answer a question like this authoritatively?

One important thing for a Q&A site is to avoid baseless discussion since it chases away serious expert contributors. Questions that encourage uninformed speculation can either be closed, or can be edited so they have factual answers.
On StackExchange sites it is generally best to first ask the poster to rephrase the question. But if it remains off-track, remember that all content is licensed Creative Commons Share and Share alike, and the consensus of participants and moderators on what best serves the site should be followed.  So submit edits, or flag posts.
In this case rephrasing it to discuss technical and legal attacks by well funded governments would make it more factual and less speculative.

The question could easily be saved by changing it very slightly. I agree that as asked it just invites speculation more about what the US would be willing to do than about what systemic weaknesses crypto-currencies have against well-funded or well-connected adversaries.

I am having problems asking holistic questions. The holistic question I attempted to ask was: "What are the systemic weaknesses of crypto-currencies?" (thanks to the other answerer here). However, asking the question like this will often attract closing votes, therefore I often attempted to make the question more specific by adding things like the "US government". If you believe that the question would be better if changed to the other question, then I would be happy to edit it.
Specifying that I am only interested in technical or legal risks, will severely reduce the value of the answers, as the question might be focusing on risks that are neglectable, while ignoring bigger risks.
As for whether there are anyone on the site who are experts on answering the question, does not matter, as long as the question is relevant. Not asking questions that one guesses are too difficult for the experts on the site is a bad solution.

Thanks for the reply.  I think "holistic" questions are hard since they are by design all-encompassing and it is hard to agree on a single right answer, and it is easy for the right answer to change over time as we learn more.  I see the site as a whole being "holistic", but the individual questions being sharp enough to admit "right" answers based on facts

@nealmcb I have updated the question somewhat now. See if it is better now.


text:
Is there a way to resolve the ‘client’ and ‘developement’ tags ambiguities?
client (26 occurrences) has currently several uses related to:

(~15) the main bitcoin client
(~9) a (possibly alternative) bitcoin client
(~2) a generic client (networking term) for various web and misc. APIs

development (15 occurrences) has also several uses:

(~6) the core bitcoin development
(~2) alternative bitcoin client development
(~5) web and misc. bitcoin programming
(~3) related to building the client from source. (wrongly tagged maybe).

Which of those uses should be distinguished, and how?

I certainly think that we should split up the client tag to distinguish between Satoshi's original client and other clients. I don't think that we need to split the development tag then since you could use the development tag + one of the client tags.
Not sure what to call the tags though.

For Satoshi's client: main-client? original-client?
Fot other clients: client? alternative-client?

plural “clients” might be considered for other clients maybe.


text:
How much detail on questionable content?
We all knew this one was going to come up eventually:  someone has added detailed instructions for accessing Silk Road to this question.  I'm against it for two reasons:

Detailed info about specific businesses that happen to use bitcoins feels off-topic to me, and
I'm not at all interested in this site becoming some kind of free-for-all, or introducing liability issues.  Questionable content should be out, just as a matter of professionalism.  No porn, no drugs, no inappropriate language, etc.  Seems like a pretty clear way to maintain an environment appropriate for everyone.

But rather than just have this answer and/or question disappear because I flagged it, I thought we should reach a clear community consensus on it first.  Feedback?

I agree that was a bad question that should be closed -- it had very little to do with Bitcoin. But I think if someone specifically wanted to, they could legitimately have gotten the same content in just by asking a better question.
Should a better question, as far as topicality goes, come along that raises the same questionable content issues, we should defer to SE's policies on crime-facilitating speech.
Remember, not all users live in the same country and laws can be diverse. It is also not illegal to violate a contract. Some people can be very quick to jump to "that's illegal" when that's not appropriate.
Use down votes and close votes, of course. If you find it offensive or off-topic, definitely mark it as such.
See this post for more.

In my opinion, the question is relevant and should not be deleted because many people associate bitcoins with silkroad. We shouldn't dive into too many details about silkroad, but we should clearly state that Bitcoin is simply a payment method.
As for the answer, I think that the only thing really wrong about it is the onion address for two reasons:

It is always changing. Probably next month it will no longer work.
Pointing people directly to site is a little too much (here I agree with you)

The rest of it may be seen as off-topic, but it is related to the question. So I vote to keep the answer, but edit out the address.

agreed on all that. Given that the Silk Road story is how many people at this point in time heard of bitcoin, I think we need to have at least one open searchable question on it. I'm agnostic about whether it should include an address or not.


text:
Website performance after two weeks
I have been checking the website statistics and here is what I have noticed:

There were a lot of questions asked in private beta, but the number is slowly decreasing. The last time we had 15 questions in a day was 5 days ago.
Nearly all questions answered - great performance here.
The answer ratio is usually 2.2 or 2.3. It is below 2.5, but I think it's OK.
The number of daily visits and the amount of users have been steadily growing.

I created this topic just to raise awareness and discuss possibilities to invert the "number of questions" trend. Do you think we need more promotion?

Interestingly, it now shows 443 visits/day with 15 days in beta.  If my understanding is correct, that means there were 2361 visitors in the last day.  I don't know how to see more detailed data to see if this is unusual or part of some type of trend.

Hmmm using the same logic though means that the site had a net loss of about 3 questions in the last day (14 days at 13.4 Q/day means 187.6 questions, 15 days at 12.3 Q/day means 184.5 questions).  Either there were a lot of deleted questions or the meaning behind those numbers is not as obvious as it seems.

"Visits/day" is actually displaying the median number of visits per day for the past 14 days.  I assume the jump was due to the median shifting from the last day of the private beta to the first day of the public beta.

@Michael McGowan During private beta we had ~200 users and ~200 visits per day. When the site went public those numbers increased a lot so the average visits/day isn't stable yet. The number of questions is going in the opposite direction: we had around 40 questions/day during the first days of private and now we have around 10.

My secret fear is that the well of good questions is quickly running dry. I hope that's not true. If promotion is going to be effective, it's going to need to hit people who are actually using Bitcoins and running into real-world issues, not just people who think Bitcoins are interesting.
Please read this.

Interesting point. I hadn't made the (potential) connection with the same "I'm merely curious" problem we had with the AI site: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/no-artificial-intelligence-in-area-51/ As such, the committer roles break down as such: 51.0% Enthusiast, 20.6% Expert, 17.8% Beginner, 5.9% Academic, 4.7% Just curious. My advice still holds: "Make sure you are asking about actual day-to-day problems you encounter in your use of Bitcoin." We will have to see how that pans out.

I included a link to that in my answer with about the strongest encouragement the markup allows.

A fair amount of the actual bitcoin developers have been active here. That implies a certain level of expertise. There aren't all that many bitcoin "experts" in the world at the moment, since it is such a new technology. Certainly from my brief exposure to SE sites questions here seem generally better than even some of the large SE sites like apple.SE where many of the questions could easily be answered with a simple google search.

@llemonginger: Sure. Tou don't need many "experts," per se, but hopefully you can find enough actual practitioners/users to continue to ask interesting questions. But I concur; I've been impressed that the site has produced a decent amount of quality content. I just hope the content thus far brings forth a significant portion of the actual users to keep the the momentum from falling flat.

I definitely agree with this fear. Having 99% of the questions answered suggests that we are not asking hard enough questions (or if we are asking hard enough questions, we are not taking them seriously and giving hard answers).

This site was proposed and created on a somewhat precarious (and experimental) premise.
Bitcoin is a new technology with very little mainstream exposure. As such, a lot of these questions are what you might call "general reference," mostly just trying to figure out how all this stuff works. Indeed, if Bitcoin were already a more mainstream subject, many of these questions would like have been closed literally as "general reference". But there are no mainstream references covering the topic; hence, no source to cite as general reference.
Once you get through all these "what does this thing do?" questions, we'll have to see if you have anything left to talk about. The site may not go much beyond a user-generated FAQ and really never evolve into an actual Stack Exchange-style Q&A.
The only way to rescue this site from that fate is to ask about actual day-to-day problems you have while using Bitcoin … and stay away from the mind-numbing trivia and really basic, curiosity-seeking questions that some feel belong on this site.

Note that there is no SE-wide consensus regarding "general reference."  There is not even a consensus among the founders; Joel thinks general reference questions are just fine and I tend to agree with him.

I don't think we have to be worried about it too much right here at the start. I would expect the questions to dip significantly after the initial "newness" of the site wears off, and a lot of the low hanging fruit gets asked. I also note that in some sites, like apple.stackexchange, they have a lot of questions, but many of them are terrible in terms of not being researched at all, and many questions get answered without votes, etc. I would like to see people stay engaged in voting and answering questions that come up rather than worry about number of questions. I feel like as the popularity of bitcoin grows, as more clients are released, as more people are actually using them etc, questions will grow again.
Quality over quantity I guess, even if it means dipping towards 5 questions/day for a few months and then climbing back up.

the 99% answer rate suggests to me that the questions/answers aren't that well researched. We should be concerned about this, and really push to try to ask hard questions and crack down on bad answers.


text:
The 'technical' and 'configuration' tags
I believe these two are meta tags. If they're not, then I don't know how they're supposed to be used.
For (technical), it's got to be a technical question about something. Whatever it is, that's the tag that should be used. Does this just mean a hard question?
For (configuration), it's got to be the configuration of something, and again, that's the tag that should be used.
These tags, at least as I understand them, neither clarify a question nor indicate the area of expertise a question requires to answer. Those are the two things tags are supposed to do.

I agree. They are too broad and not really useful.

A quick summary about the different usages of a problematic tag would be useful here.

I just put in an edit request to remove technical from the only question with that tag.

configuration is still or again around, and it should be removed for the reasons mentioned by David Schwartz.


text:
Questionable Threads - Are these on-or off topic?
Post questionable threads here, using one reply per thread. No need to vote on each one (as then the people that reported the thread get down voted), but please add comments to each thread reasoning why on or off topic.

Voting on meta doesn't affect reputation, so we could vote on them.

fair enough - though I suppose people ould vote by just going and voting to close them ;) as long as there is some discussion around some of this "grey-area" questions to figure out where we are headed...

Effect on World Economy if Bitcoin Was Adopted
What would the effects be on the world economy if several million people around the world would utilize the Bitcoin currency for their daily transactions? Would you expect the GDP to grow faster or slower and why?

my vote: off-topic, way too speculative and subject to debate. I have no idea how a case could be made that this is a good SE-type question with a verifiable expert answer.

Is Performance Really Important When Choosing a Language for a Trading Bot
The C programming language outperforms interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby, but when it comes down to programming productivity, it is much easier/faster to write a Python program than a C program.
Considering that I want to write a trading bot, what would be the most appropriate language? If I use C, will I see a noticeable performance difference, or would the latency from HTTP calls make my decision time irrelevant?

my vote: off-topic. not specific enough to bitcoin as a technology, could be answered in a general programming question.

The thing is, the reason it's off-topic is that there's nothing special about Bitcoin trading that impacts the question. But the fact that there's nothing special itself is on topic.

Writing a trading bot for a high-paced market is very different from trading at MtGox. A 100ms difference between decision times is important there (not to mention the fact that their APIs are much more solid - MtGox's API is awful to deal with...). So if I asked this question anywhere else, I would have to refer Bitcoin specifically. That is why I thought it was appropriate to ask here.

maybe those assumptions could be spelled out better in the question? Something like "What are the issues (performance and otherwise) I need to be aware of when writing a trading bot for the MtGox API?"

Yes, I agree that I should have spelled the question better. It was late and I wrote it in a hurry. Anyway, I got the answers I wanted.

Why Did Paypal Ban bitcoins when Google Checkout did not yet?
Beyond conspiracy theories (that my or may not be true), Paypal claimed they were not allowed to sell Bitcoins, while currently it seems Google Checkout is a viable option (at least two sites I know that use GC and a Google employee explicitly allowed virtual currencies in a reply to a Bitcoin question.).

not sure. my thoughts I guess so as far as topicality, but this seems like if there is an answer, it is easily researched (looking for an official statement by the companies in question) and if there isn't an answer, it is just going to speculation on the part of whomever is answering.

I think the only problem with this question is that, as phrased, it invites bad answers. It is trying to ask a fairly simple factual question that is Bitcoin related.

I tried to rephrase it and make it more appropriate.

Costing arbitrage between exchanges
I'm currently writing something to script arbitrage between two exchanges to test the concept.
I know I can determine the difference in prices by using
(ExhangeA_sell - ExchangeB_buy) <- this will give me the price difference. i.e. gross profit (before fee's)
My question, how do I take the fee's into account when calculating net profit?

[this seems like a basic math question, not a bitcoin question]


text:
People upvoting incorrect or offtopic answers
In a way, I'm happy that our community has taken to heart the "vote early, vote often" maxim.  But it's starting to be a real problem that answers which do not answer a question seem to be getting upvoted because people like what's being said.  This is not how stack exchange is supposed to work.  Two examples:

The answer that begins "Parties can agree..."  from Could a futures market be included in the Bitcoin protocol? just talks about what a futures market is, while the question clearly asks about incorporating a futures market into the Bitcoin protocol itself.  Why does this answer have two upvotes?  It seems like the person either didn't read the question properly or just wanted to post even though they didn't have an answer.
The top two upvoted answers on What unique business models has Bitcoin enabled? are off-topic.  And they have 4-5 upvotes, too.

Questions to which people don't know the answers should go unanswered.  This alerts skilled users to the fact that an answer is needed.  Can we get some tough love on the off-topic answers around here?  (feel free to post others in comments and answers).

I think we should encourage users to use the comments feature and edit features instead of giving weak or off-topic answers. I've expressed my concern about this, in the comment thread of this question.
However, the only way to encourage this is to have moderators migrate weak or off-topic answers to the comments, and for the users to downvote off-topic answers while leaving a comment on them like "this answer belongs as a comment".
If the question is off-base, then it should be closed, or the comments should be used to improve the question. If you think a question is off-base, then downvote it and comment on how it could be improved. Don't give an off-topic answer to an off-base question if you want to generate quality content.

Is no answer really preferable to the best possible answer to a question? I certainly agree with you about incorrect answers -- we would certainly like to see those not be upvoted. But if someone has expertise in the area of the question and knows that there won't be a perfect answer, but gives the best possible answer, what's wrong with upvoting that to indicate your agreement that no better answer is possible?
Here's an example:
Q: "How can I get the demons out of my grandmother's head with a jackhammer? If you don't know the method, please don't answer."
A: "There are no demons in your grandmother's head, and a jackhammer is not a tool you should even be thinking about."
That is perhaps the best possible answer, it is valid to give it, and valid to upvote it. If you think the question is bad because it asks for something that doesn't exist or no on-topic answer is possible, downvote the question. Oh, wait, you asked both of these questions.
I do agree with you about some of the answers you cited. We should definitely avoid upvoting incorrect answers or answers that completely miss the point of a question. I would amend "vote early, vote often" to add if you know the answer is correct and are confident it answers the question. Otherwise, you may discourage people from posting better answers, and that would suck.

Questions to which people don't know the answers should go unanswered. This alerts skilled users to the fact that an answer is needed.

True, but that's not the same as the case where a person knows there is no answer. Having no answers just makes the site look unhelpful.

I strongly disagree that either question is misguided in what it seeks.  In the first example offered the scope is very clear--inclusion of a futures market in the protocol.  The answer referred to does not even mention the protocol.  In the second there is a request for specific, unique examples--but only general categories are suggested at in the upvoted answers.  If I asked on a zoology stack exchange for examples of "specific bird species unique to the country of Ethiopia" and someone said "sparrows live in Ethiopia" I would want that answer to be downvoted.

Its not clear to me that your examples of answers are either incorrect or off-topic.
In general, I don't see the problem with upvoting answers which don't quite answer the question as stated, but which nevertheless contribute to the general topic of a question and thus might help the reader, or might help other folks who can't quite answer the whole question by themselves.
I'd of course hope that complete and valid answers would get yet more votes, but as David notes, sometimes the question itself is off-base.  E.g. you seem to be splitting hairs about how to define a "unique business model", especially one that is "unique to bitcoin".  What would that even mean (how specific is your definition of bitcoin), and why would it be important to make black-and-white distinctions between categories of business models?

I'm definitely not splitting hairs.  The word 'unique' is very well-defined, but it seems people don't know what it means.  There are certainly degrees of unique--it's not a black and white thing at all--but none of the answers offered were even arguably unique to Bitcoin.  I realise some people use the word "unique" to mean "interesting and attention-getting" but I think I clarified pretty carefully that I mean "solitary in type or characteristics, limited in occurrence to a given class, situation, or area."

@eMansipater: well, currently Bitcoin is unique in its ability to drive micropayments, so answers that leverage that ability seem on-topic to me.  On the other hand, would you want folks to not give advantages that would accrue to bitcoin but not to solidcoin?  Overall you're welcome to use your votes as you see fit, but I don't see a reason to complain about others giving kudos to other people, just because it doesn't fit your definitions and viewpoint.

I don't think that's a fair characterisation, Neal.  What I'm trying to do here is raise the standard of precision for which the site will function, and thereby attract a higher degree of expertise.  In actually fact I agree with many of the viewpoints these answers can be said to hold and I'll thank you not to make unwarranted conclusions about my perspectives.  As the one who asked the questions I know what I asked, so there are exactly two possibilities--either I didn't explain well enough what I meant, or we as a community are upvoting answers that don't apply.  I approached the first.....

.....possibility with edits, and the second with this meta-post.  Give me a little credit here--you're sounding pretty confrontational.

@eMansipater I mean no offence.  To put it in more neutral language, I'm simply suggesting that the viewpoint of the person asking a question is not the only viewpoint to consider.  The community owns the interpretation and content (via Creative Commons), not any particular person.  I also note that the StackExchange guidelines suggest that comments not be used for discussion, so at this point I'd suggest that we discuss this further in the chat room.  It has been remarkably quite for 8 days - come on over :)


text:
Bitcoins Day Destroyed - 9K Views
I noticed that the What are “bitcoin days destroyed”? question has 9K views. It is indeed a good question, but why is the view count so high? Is it a bug? Most questions, even the highest voted ones, are around 300 views.

It isn't a bug.
The question was posted on Hacker News which has brought in the majority of traffic on that question.


text:
How to review questions with votes to close?
Is there a way to see all questions that currently have votes to close by someone? Seems like it would be useful to have community members be able to look through any questions with close votes all at once to weed out bad questions/spam/dupes quicker.

If you have access to moderator tools, there is a button in the upper bar named "tools" that shows you which questions have close votes.
If you don't have enough reputation, that button is named "review" and it doesn't show that information as far as I know. You can, however, see a list of low quality posts, which might help.

thanks. good to know. another couple weeks and i'll be there I think ;)


text:
Should [attack] and [attacks] be synonyms?
There are two distinct tags [attack] (with 2 questions) and [attacks] (with 5 questions).  Should we merge these?
Update: Tags have been merged

Yeah, I think we should merge them. Can't see how they could be used for different things.

Yes. Definitely. There is no imaginable difference. (I just submitted a merge request.)
Update: Please vote on my tag synonym request!

Where can we vote?

With sufficient rep, you should be able to vote on on the tag synonyms page.

According to the privilages page, I already have sufficient permission - yet I didn't find anywhere to vote in the page you linked to.

Ahh, you have to click on attack and then vote up attacks.

Ah, I see. I don't have the required score on the tag page to vote. Also can you please tag me (@ripper234, no pun intended) if you want me to see your comment, on a question that I didn't ask?


text:
How come the tag excerpt doesn't match what's in the wiki?
I was scanning through tags and noticed that the excerpt for protocol says "transfer cryptocurrencies" which is just horrible.  But when I clicked in to edit it I found "Questions relating to the protocols used to transfer crypto-currencies" as the actual excerpt, which is perfectly appropriate.  What's the deal here?  Is this an edit that hasn't been approved, or are excerpts just wonky here?

Maybe it was recently updated? Here it seems to be fine.

By "here it seems to be fine" do you mean that when you go to this list the excerpt is something other than "transfer cryptocurrencies" for the [tag:protocol] tag?  Because that's still what I'm seeing.

Sorry, you are correct. I was talking about the tooltip shown when you hover your mouse over the tag or when you type "protocol" in a question inside the tags section. These are both correct. Inside the tags list the excerpt is wrong.

Still hasn't changed. Seems like an SE bug.

okay, I'm going to cross-post to meta.so

Okay, a search on meta.so revealed this question, which points out the existence of a script that tries to automagically remove unnecessary text from a tag excerpt.  In this case, apparently, the script was detecting the phrase ending in "...used to transfer cryptocurrencies" and assuming everything before "used to" was simply a description of the tag.  I've rephrased the excerpt to avoid this pitfall, and as soon as the edit is approved it should show the correct excerpt (assuming I don't trigger a new form of script-magic).

Done. Problem solved.

The protocol excerpt was last updated on Sep. 6.. The revision show that it never stated "transfer cryptocurrencies" which is very odd. I have made a minor change to the tag excerpt, maybe it fixes also the description on the "tags" page.

Just approved your edit, but it stayed the same :-(


text:
Should we allow foreign-language questions?
With Bitcoin enjoying world-wide interest and support, should we allow foreign-language questions, or should we limit questions and answers to English?
How can this site support others in asking questions using a foreign language? Do we need a separate StackExchange site, or can it be done within the existing site?

I don't think that it's a good idea to mix languages on the site, i.e. letting people ask questions in the language of their choice. Also, we don't have enough interested people to be able to have separate StackExchange sites for different languages. What we can do if someone's english is bad is to edit the question to help them make it clearer and more correct.
So, don't instantly downvote a question if the language is really bad but there seems to be a legit question hidden underneath. Instead, edit it! If they don't agree with your interpretation they can re-edit it or let you know in the comments field. Remember, this is a collaboratively edited Q&A site.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Is it important that a title is phrased as a question?
Many questions don't have their titles phrased as a question. Some examples:

Strange transaction (block 71036)
Best GPUs for Mining
Business-grade Bitcoind implementation
Push notification of incoming transaction

I'm tempted to edit them but I thought that I should check what the community thinks first. Is it important? Should the title always be a question or are there exceptions?

Related question on MSO: How can we get more people to make their title a question?

It's far more important that the title clearly explain what the question is and, together with the tags, allow a person to determine if they're likely to be able to answer the question. Putting the title in the form of a question helps to ensure that, but if you can do it another way, there's nothing wrong with that.
Your first example shows, I think, the opposite of your point: "Strange transaction (block 71036)". The most obvious ways to turn this into a question make it worse: "What is the deal with the strange transaction in block 71036?"
Yes, you can come up with better ways to put it in the form of a question. But that's basically because you can always come up with a better title. I'll bet I can take the first five titles that are in the form of a question and come up with better titles that aren't in that form.
So it's a good guideline because it makes sure you don't forget to ask a question and it does help to make the list of questions look better. But slavish devotion to it is not a good idea.

Good point, I agree completely.

You should feel free to do any edit that you think improves a question. If a title is better as a question, edit it - the op shouldn't mind.


text:
Too localized questions
I read somewhere that StackExchange sites aim at creating a knowledge base that will last for years, maybe decades. Asking "intemporal" questions at Stack Overflow is really easy because the answer to a programming question is unlikely to change significantly during the next 5 years. However, other topics do not always fit this model quite right. I believe that Bitcoin is an example of a topic that is constantly changing over time, at least for the time being.
A lot of the questions asked here will have a different answer next year. Here are a few examples from the highest voted questions:
How can I accept bitcoins on my website?
Can I send bitcoins with my mobile phone?
Is there some way to merge two wallets or to import/export addresses?
I decided to ask this now because I stumbled upon this closed question:
How do you obtain bitcoins?
This question has 10 upvotes, no downvotes and no close votes. I understand that this subject is likely to change, but so are the questions I posted above and a lot of other questions asked here.
So how do we deal with this? Is bitcoin simply wrong for StackExchange? Or should we keep updating answers, like D.H. did here and here?

This is a very good question. It would be great to get some input from StackExchange representatives here since I think that this question is relevant also for other new SE sites. If anwers change every 5 years I think it's pretty clear that it should be allowed. If it changes every week I'm pretty sure it shouldn't. But where do we draw the line?

Our earliest sites were based on very rapidly-changing technologies, so your concerns are a bit unfounded.
The PURPOSE of this site is to build a lasting canon of knowledge. The "timeless" aspect refers to questions being relevant long beyond the author and contributors getting their specific issues resolved.
Have you ever wondered why questions are closed as "too localized?" Asking questions that have little relevance beyond "a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation …" sort of misses the point.
We are building a site for those who come after — a lasting canon of knowledge.
When you ask a question, very quickly, the best answers rise to the top. Users who come after should have a reasonable expectation that the answers they see are the best possible answers to that question. That does NOT mean only asking questions which cannot change. That does mean is that, if the community becomes inactive and fails in their upkeep, the site risks becoming irrelevant.

So if the question is essentially timeless, it's okay even if it's not possible to give a timeless answer? (Because the answers can be maintained.)

@RobertCartaino: The problem that I see is that when the answer of an old question gets an new answer much later, it is hard to get that new answer to rise to the top, even if it is the correct one. For example, look at this question on StackOverflow where the accepted and highest voted answer is obviously out of date. What is the proper action there? Should I downvote the accepted answer? Or should I edit it? That would mean totally rewriting it, which seems like a weird thing to do to someone's answer

@D.H.: This has come up a lot of times on meta. I see a lot of good suggestions, but no real consensus. Possibilities include: edit the question to warn that some answers are obsolete, edit the answer to say it's obsolete and so people can down vote it, and flag the answer for mods.

@DavidSchwartz: Thanks for the links.

@David: you can also just edit the answer to bring it up-to-date. There's some controversy about editing an incorrect answer to be correct, but considerably less about editing a once-correct answer to be again-correct.

Robert Cartaino, thank you for the answer and @David Schwartz thanks for the links. I am voting to reopen this because I think it is important.


text:
Can we have question migration to other stack exchanges?
I would like to be able to vote to close a question to Crypto SE or Money SE.

The question that spurred this feature request: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1305/what-features-of-scrypt-make-tenebrix-gpu-resistant

I've seen questions get migrated to other (existing) SE sites in the past, but I either don't have any such option in my mod menu or I am just being blind/can't find it. I think this may be something a SE employee might have to do, since they are cross-site mods.

@DavidPerry - on other SE sites, there are options to vote to close as "Off Topics (belongs on XYZ.SE)". This feature request is to enable this option here for the specified sites.

There's also the Economics SE that's gearing up for beta. Once it's live I can foresee needing to move questions there as well.

@DavidPerry You do close -> off topic -> belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network

@DavidPerry: As a moderator, the migration option is hidden in the menu to vote to close as off-topic. Normal users don't see this text box.

Found that just as you were posting it :)
Thanks for the info Paŭlo!

Migration paths aren't added to sites still in beta, so you'll need to revisit this after you launch. When that does happen, mods need to demonstrate that you've had a good number of posts that should've been migrated to Crypto and Money; devs won't add a migration path unless there's a clear need for it, to avoid opening the door for bad migrations

Migration vote paths are only added (by developers) when there are a quite big number of migrations from one site to other sites.
But this should not hinder you from initiating migrations to other sites (and please, don't simply repost questions):
♦ Moderators (for your site, your new Moderators Pro Tempore, as well as quite a number of SE employees) can moderate questions everywhere.
They will often (other than in really obvious cases) consult with moderators of the target site before doing so (since the target site's moderators have a better grasp on what is on-topic there).
So, the way to go would be to flag the question, and put the appropriate message for moderators:

You can additionally vote to close as off-topic, then your vote will appear in the "migrated by ..." list on the closed question after a moderator migrates it.

This doesn't really address his request, which is to add migration paths

You are right, I added some sentences about this.


text:
The tags [development], [programming], [source] and [code]
The development tag is widely used but lacks a description. The programming tag has been made a synonym of it. There is also the source tag that has the following description:

Specifically refers to the source code from which applications may be compiled or the process of said compilation. Do not use to request a source of information or to determine the source from which Bitcoins originate, etc.

and the tag code that is only used in one place. To me it seems obvious that "source" and "code" are synonyms and should be renamed "source-code" to make it clearer. I'm not so sure about the other ones though. There is a merge request for "code" -> "development" that I'm not sure is right. Any suggestions of a description for the "development" tag?
Also, have a look at this older question and give your input there:
Is there a way to resolve the ‘client’ and ‘developement’ tags ambiguities?

I'm all for renaming to [tag:source-code] and merging with [tag:code]. I agree that [tag:code]->[tag:development] is probably not right. Let's get a little more input first but I'd feel comfortable supporting the premise here. Make sure to throw something in the tag wiki for whatever you end up merging to prevent future confusion.

I have changed source to source-code. Both code and source are now synonyms of source-code.

I agree that code and source should be merged into source-code.
As for development, I believe it is different from code, as it might involve non-coding development, for example creating ASICs or the like. I already created a stub description of the tag as follows:
"Related to creation and ongoing work for different existing and future Bitcoin-related projects and source code."

I think that all of them are meta tags. They are all broadly defined, mean different things to different people and hardly ever used as the sole tag for questions (outside of questions that were shot down anyway).
[source-code] could become meaningful, if it referred specifically to the source code of one program such as for example bitcoind, however, then it should rather be used as [bitcoind-source-code].
[development] could be meaningful if it were used to tag questions that scrutinize the development process of the bitcoin protocol and standard client, however, we already have tags for those. As it is, it is being slapped on any question that deals with development of any bitcoin related software and as such does not narrow down the content of a question by itself without other tags.
Similar things can be said [programming], [value], [currencies], [alternates], [services], [software], [statistics], [exchange-rate], [accounts], [logging], [monitoring], [graphs] ...


text:
Economics migration criteria
The Economics SE is now in private beta (link might not work yet) and before it goes public and we gain the ability to migrate to it, I'd like to discuss the criteria we use to determine if an economics question is on-topic for Bitcoin. Certain questions are obviously Bitcoin-centric enough to remain here, but what specific criteria do we think a question should meet to be kept or migrated?
For example, here at Bitcoin we recently fielded this question about financial analysis tools and Economics has already had 2 or 3 Bitcoin-related questions that might belong better here. Should we offload all econ questions to Economics? Are econ questions directly related to Bitcoin better addressed here with the Bitcoin experts or there with the econ experts?

Migration paths are only enabled for fully graduated sites.  In extreme cases the moderators can migrate a question and users can flag them so mods see it.  But keep in mind that a migration path is a ways off.

Wasn't talking about a full-blown migration path, I was talking about guidelines for moderator-based migration which it's my understanding can happen the moment Economics hits public beta. A lot of things are a ways off, but I already know that we'll be sending quite a few back and forth and I just wanted to establish guidelines beforehand :)

So I suppose think of it less like "migration criteria" and more like a careful definition of scope that will someday be useful in migration.

I would draw the line this way: If the question is specific to crypto-currencies, it belongs here. If not, it belongs elsewhere, once there is an elsewhere.
For example, belonging here would be questions about whether crypto-currencies will deflate, what effects crypto-currencies will have on an economy, whether a fractional reserve crypto-currency bank could exist, what affects the price and stability of crypto-currencies, and so on. Belonging elsewhere would be questions about whether a fixed monetary supply leads to deflation, whether a deflationary currency is bad, whether you can have a fixed monetary supply in a modern economy at all, and so on.

I think it's important to determine what the actual subject of the question is. Simply because it involves Bitcoin (or one of its forks) doesn't necessarily mean it's about Bitcoin. For example, Ripper's question got migrated to crypto because even though it mentioned Tenebrix it was about sCrypt.

@DavidPerry - yeah, it was a good migration.


text:
How do we handle legal advice / questions on legality?
This question was closed almost immediately since it asked for legal advice. I think that the decision was correct in this particular case since the quote in the question is probably already as good an answer as you can expect to get without involving a lawyer.
I don't think that this means that we should automatically close all questions asking for legal advice. We did for example allow this one, asking for legal status of Bitcoin around the world. Some legal questions may have a very clear answer even without involving a lawyer ("Is theft illegal in the state of New York?"). I believe that we should judge questions like this on a case-by-case basis depending on how good of an answer you can expect to get. Thoughts?
Here's  a similar question on Meta SO for reference.

I agree that it's a case-by-case basis. What drew the line for me on the question linked above is the overall complexity of the case. Bitcoin's legalities are fuzzy to begin with, there are simply no precedents set for most legal questions one could ask. As you've said, though, we've allowed a few legal questions in the past, which had more clear-cut answers.
For example, asking about the legal status of Bitcoin around the world is simple: in most jurisdictions things are legal by default until they are declared illegal so in this case we're asking if a law exists which explicitly outlaws virtual currencies. In the above question it was being asked whether an existing law applied to Bitcoin which is a far fuzzier realm.
Just as I'm appreciative that crypto.stackexchange is available to migrate purely cryptography-based questions to and economics.stackexchange will be out of beta and migrate-able not long after we are, I sincerely hope that either Software Law or Laws & Legal Questions make it out of Area51 in the near future as they would also be invaluable resources, if not for migration at least for consultation.

I agree that it's going to be on a case-by-case basis and it's going to be subjective. The questions to look at are: Is it really about Bitcoins specifically? Are constructive answers possible? Is it really just asking for an opinion in an area where almost nobody is qualified to give a useful one?

I have updated the tag wiki for legal in order to capture the results of this question. Please feel free to improve it.


text:
Should operating system related tags be all synonyms?
We have [ios], [osx], [windows] and [windows7], most of them have not been used at all. Should there be a tag [os] created and have all those other tags be synonyms for it? If someone discusses some issue with a specific system, they usually refer to it in the title or the body anyway.

I would argue that each major platform deserves its own tag - i.e. merge windows7 into windows but leave osx distinct. ios should probably remain distinct along with android


text:
Should [pools] and [mining-pools] be synonyms?
The tags are basically the same anyway.

Yeah, seems like an obvious merge. And someone's done it already. :)

Then where would questions about swimming pools, tidal pools, games of pool, and people with the last name 'Pool' go?

To the forum, as they are off-topic?;)

Ok, it looks like Dori♦ has already started the process to deal with these synonyms.


text:
Synonyms concerning [osx] and [mac]
Should [mac] be synonymous to [osx]? Rarely would one refer to a mac machine without referring to the os, so they are pretty closely linked.
Should [osx] be renamed or perhaps made synonymous to [macos], as that is a broader term (similairly to [windows7] and [windows])?

I went ahead and merged [tag:osx] into [tag:mac]. If anyone starts (mis)using them more in the future we'll consider a synonym.

Good move @DavidPerry, I think mac is the better choice.

So far as I can see, there's only one mac question. And only one osx question. There aren't any macos questions.
So I don't think we necessarily need synonyms at this point. Just pick a tag and re-tag the other question to be consistent.

True enough. If the tags aren't in heavy use, it's probably easier to make the questions conform to the existing tags than to tweak the tags to fit the questions. Also, since folks use the existing questions to base their tag choices on, retagging the question might prevent future misuse of the tags.

Agreed.  The purpose of tags it to quickly find a solution or related solutions.  The current volume of solutions doesn't warrant that level of tag specialization.  It provides no benefit is there are only 10 mac solutions spread across 7 tags.  If in the future there are 8,000 [mac] solutions splitting tags and creating synonyms is more useful as 8,000 solutions becomes difficult to navigate.


text:
Should questions phrased in future tense be changed once event has occured?
As an example:
When did merged Namecoin-Bitcoin mining start?
The event has already occured thus the question seems out of place.  One option would be to simply close the question however there is a good chance we will eventually get a past tense version of same question.
I was planning to change the question to reflect that fact that the event is in the past however I wasn't sure on the protocol for this type of change so I thought I would check with the community first.

I think it would be better to close such questions as "too localized" since they obviously reference a narrow window of time (which has passed) and post a new, now timeless question "When did Namecoin get merged mining with Bitcoin?" My only concern is that we'd end up closing a LOT of questions as "too localized" because of the constantly-changing nature of a project so early on. Also, this particular question was valid and does have some up-votes, so I don't know if I feel right closing it when it's obviously valid...

I'm also worried about the pandora's box we may be opening by allowing edits. Retconning may work in this specific scenario, but I'm not sure if this is a good precedent to set. It certainly deserves some community attention and discussion to say the least.

If the answers still make sense after you change the question I think that it's alright. But if changing the question make answers look strange it doesn't seem fair to the authors of those answers.
Closing questions that contain good information is also not right. I'd say that if changing the question is not an option you could instead edit it and just add a note saying that it refers to a past event.

If there's no value to keeping the question around - if it pertains to an event that has passed and no longer matters to anyone - it can be closed and then deleted.
If folks will still want to know the answer for historical purposes, for instance to verify that the event did indeed happen, then editing the answer to reflect this seems like a fair idea. So for the example you gave, edit the answer to note that it has occurred and record the exact date when this occurred.
Whether or not you want to edit the question will probably depend more on if folks are missing it. There's no reason why you can't close a future question as a duplicate of this one even if the new one asks about the past while the old asks about the future. But if you find folks are getting confused by this, editing the title may help.


text:
Bitcoin Meta tags descriptions
Is there a way to write tag descriptions in the meta part of this SE? I tried doing that just now and I don't seem to be able to (whereas on the main SE there is no problem with that).

Unfortunately, tag-wiki creation / editing is not supported on the meta sites at present.

Can you make that into an answer? When I tried copying yours, the SE claimed it was a trivial answer and moved it as a comment.

Heh... Oops - that happened to me as well. ;-P

Unfortunately, tag-wiki creation / editing is not supported on the meta sites at present:

We're not currently allowing tag wikis to be edited on metas, as we plan to push out the shared meta tag wikis from meta.so.
This may change in the future.


text:
Moderator workload
How much more work does on average a moderator have on this StackExchange, compared to a higher ranked user? Is it just having to have some last word on some close/flag/ban disputes, or is there more to it?

I don't know if you're going to get a usable answer to this. Even calculating an "average" workload has such a wide variance as to be meaningless. It depends wildly on the moderator, the scope of the site, the involvement of the community, where the site is in it's development, the alignment of the planets, what's on TV tonight, etc.
Moderators are there to be human exception handlers. Diamond moderators participate as volunteers when and where they see fit. It's not a "job," either full-time or part time. So the amount of extra work for a moderator varies from "none at all" to "I can't handle the load; need help."
Sorry, that's the best I've got.

Speaking for myself, the load has been pretty low, near zero. I would say my normal participation on the site is at least ten times the amount of stuff I do with my moderator hat on. I think I've taken, maybe, ten moderator actions and spent maybe two hours actively coordinating with the other moderators.
There just haven't been that many issues. 99% of a stack exchange site is the site running itself. Half the things we do would have done themselves in a few more hours had a moderator not intervened.
I know certain other moderators (who will not be mentioned, but are getting married this weekend) have done more, doing things like actively promoting this site on Twitter and Facebook.

Pretty much the same for me.


text:
Bitcoin SE Chat
Are there some guidelines of what people should be using the chat for, like discussions strictly related to Bitcoins, or is it more of a free chat with people from this SE, so some off-topic is allowed?

Chat doesn't have a strictly-regulated purpose, per se. It's a "third place".

The third place is a term used in the concept of community building to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. In his influential book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

Chat is the coffee shop you hang out at with colleages after a long day of work at the Q&A factory. Sometimes you bring work from the office into the more casual social surrounding, but sometimes you want to talk about other things of interest to those you work with.
It's and informal public gathering place. A space for people who love the topic to meet, discuss, and collaborate in a different way than you typically see on the main site. It's there to complement everything from the strict Q&A and meta discussion, to the desire just to hang out with the people you see on the boards everyday.


text:
Are tag badges created automatically?
The reason I ask is because we now have 100 mining questions but the wording of descriptions on tag badges is vague.
Per this answer:
What are tag badges? How do they work?
A tag must appear on a minimum of 100 questions to be considered for tag badges.
To be considered implies it isn't automatic.  We have 100 mining questions (our first 100+ tag) but no tag badge.  Does the badge need to be created manually, will it happen automatically, or is there some bug preventing its creation?

The badge is created automatically. However, all requirements must be met, and we don't check these at every hour. You don't need just the tag to have 100+, you also need someone eligible for the badge.
In this case, there is a user who is eligible for the bronze badge, with over 100 score across answers to over 20 non-wiki questions.
However, as the 100th instance of the tag has only shown up today, it will probably not be until the end of the day that the tag badge is awarded to David. It is typical to allow for at least 48 hours before any badge with complex requirements. Usually doesn't necessarily take that long, but it has been reported to take that long.

Looks like you are right.  The tag badge has shown up and David was the first to receive it.


text:
When should questions be deleted?
What should the policy about deleting questions be? When does a question "migrate" from from being closed to deletion?
As a specific example, I asked this question about the legality of raising money using GLBSE (deleted, only viewable with enough reputation) about a month ago. It was closed as "off topic", and then subsequently deleted. There were inbound links from Quora pointing at this question, which now became dead links.
Is it a good practice to delete questions simply because they are "slightly off topic"? (I'm not talking about clear spam or questions about cooking, but things that might be interpreted by some as marginally on topic)

Here's what Jeff has to say about it (from this blog post):

Why would you delete a question? Isn’t closing it enough?

Some questions are of such poor quality that they cannot be salvaged. They’re literally nonsense. Not every byte of data that is created in the world is infinite and sacred.
Some questions are so incredibly off topic that they add no value to a programming community.
The mental cost of processing these closed questions is not zero, particularly for users who are actively engaged and scanning questions to find things they can help answer.
If users see a lot of closed questions, they’ll note that we don’t enforce the guidelines, so why should they? Without any final resolution, asking questions that get closed becomes something we are implicitly encouraging — a broken windows problem. If this goes on for long enough, we’re no longer a community of programmers who ask and answer programming questions, we’re a community of random people discussing.. whatever. That’s toxic.
If enough of these closed questions are allowed to hang around, they become clutter that reduces the overall signal to noise ratio — which further reduces confidence in the system.

Obvious spam and extremely low quality posts will be deleted instantly but I'm not sure what our policy should be about questions like the one you linked. Jeff's point that we don't want closed questions to clutter up the site is important but I don't think that's something we need to worry about right now (there aren't a lot of closed questions on the front page).
Personally I won't delete questions that are "slightly off topic".

Besides whatever is deleted by user action, there is a script that automatically deletes questions that have no upvoted content after a while:

Questions without answers and -1 or lower score are deleted after 30 days.
Questions without answers and 0 or lower score, with low viewcount, and a maximum of 1 comment are deleted after 365 days.
Non-duplicate closed questions with score 0 or lower, no upvoted or accepted answers are deleted after 9 days.

Full details can be found on Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year?


text:
What's the problem with syntax highlighting?
Any reasons for syntax highlighting not working on main and meta?
(Even when specified explicitly with <!-- language: lang-cpp -->)
// small test
bool this_is_awesome = false;

Code syntax highlighting is a per-site option since there are some sites for which it does not make sense (like movies). Since Bitcoin is a highly technical concept still in its alpha/beta stages and code sharing does occur here with some regularity I've officially petitioned for the option to be set for our site.


text:
Code Syntax Highlighting - Is Code In-Scope For Bitcoin.SE?
Stéphane Gimenez asked this question earlier today and it would make sense to me if the code syntax highlighting option were enabled for Bitcoin.SE. Granted we're nowhere near SO levels of code-sharing, but we do have development, programming, source and code tags and a fair amount of code-sharing does occur (mostly PHP and Python but some other stuff) for which syntax highlighting would be quite helpful.
The real question is one of scope: if a question is sufficiently about coding that syntax highlighting would be that helpful should it have been asked on SO instead or are we willing to discuss things like the Bitcoin (and related projects') source code here? If the latter, we should probably get this feature enabled. What does the community think?

Should this question be retitled as "Code Syntax and SE Site Scope" or similar?

The site-crossover tag is commonly used on SO, so I've added it here.

@HighlyIrregular: good point, my title wasn't really phrased as a question. Fixed.

I think it would make more sense to include it in the Bitcoin site when the question about the code is Bitcoin (or cryptocurrency) specific.
There may be cases where a question turns out to be more of a general coding issue, in which case SO is probably more appropriate.
The scope question will also be relevant for the SuperUser and ServerFault sites. Those users who are familiar with the other sites should have a feel as to where each question is more appropriate. For example, this question on ServerFault is much more appropriate there than in the Bitcoin site.


text:
Are crackpot ideas for attacking Bitcoin on-topic?
I have a question, but I'm not sure its topical for this site.
In brief, I think I've thought of a way to commit fraud against the whole bitcoin network with significantly less than 51% of hashing power at the attacker's disposal.
If I posted it, the only answers would either be "Yes. That would work. Well done, you've told the world how to destroy bitcoin." or more realisticly "If anyone tried that, it would fail because of an incorrect assumption you've made."
I suspect someone comes up with a crackpot idea like mine every week. Is the main site a place for crackpots like me?

Few crackpots I've ever met in real life have the presence of mind to consider where the most appropriate venue for their ideas is. Hence you've failed to convince me that the term applies at all.

Please do it. Security through obscurity doesn't work anyway.

In case anyone wondering, my crackpot idea needs to be developed a bit more before its ready to publish.

I think the main site is a perfect place for a question like this.


text:
Is it worth creating tag synonyms for seldom used tags?
Eg donation and donate have currently been used once each.
If they were to be set up as synonym, it's not clear which would be the "master" tag (if it matters).
Should such cases be left until they've been used more frequently, or should the synonym be created immediately?

It really depends on the tag.
If the master tag would be obvious, say having "Windows 7" and "Windows XP", the master tag would be "Windows", one should either create the synonym immediately.
If the master tag is not obvious, one probably should wait and see which tags are used and which aren't. If a tag is not used more than once over a certain period of time, it is automatically deleted, and then the problem solves itself.


text:
Can we create the tag bitcoinjs?
The system refused to let me create it, because bitcoinj already exists. These are two distinct libraries.

Done. Since you seem to know more about the libraries than I do, care to add to the tag wikis for bitcoinj and bitcoinjs?

Done and done - thanks.


text:
Do we have too many unanswered questions?
25 open questions with no answer with an upvote or acceptance.
Should we try harder to answer these questions? Or is it normal for the community at this stage?

Having 96% of your questions answered is commendable, but nobody likes to see questions unanswered. It provides a bad experience for the author and anyone who finds this site seeking the information.
So, yes, that is always a good place to put a bit of extra effort; to get those unanswered questions answered.

Well, seeing that our answer ratio is 2.2, whereas 2.5+ is a desired ratio, giving more answers in general is useful. The open questions in particular are a good place to start, as any additional input would be appreciated by the authors of the questions.


text:
Can we open the "How to buy BTC" question?
How do you obtain bitcoins?
This was closed because:

This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only
  relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an
  extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to
  the worldwide audience of the internet.

I don't understand the reason for its closure, I don't think the above text is correct. I've already voted once to reopen it.

Voted to reopen - I think the author's comment is right on the mark: "It's not even dynamic: you can obtain bitcoins by charging, changing (just like any currency) or mining"

Reading the comments, HedgeMage closed it for two reasons. One was that it is too localized (in time) and the other was that it is too basic. I know that we have a lot of other questions that are just as localized and just as basic as this one so I agree with reopening it.
I think that it is important though that the answers should not just be a list of popular exchanges but rather an explanation of different ways to get bitcoins, where exchanges would be one of them. If the answer is written in a good way it doesn't have to change that much over time.
The community should decide what to do with it so I won't reopen it until I get some feedback though.

Are 6 votes enough cause to open?

@ripper234: I've reopened it now and made a comment linking back to this discussion.

until finally, congratulations


text:
"alternatives" tag

Possible Duplicate:
Should questions that are about a specific alternate blockchain be tagged alternative-blockchains?

I think the "alternatives" tag is pointless and harmful, and it would be better to have specific tags for each currency.
This is because it encompasses both currencies with a sane goal that makes sense, like Namecoin, and stupid currencies with no other reason than to "play" like tenebrix and the like.
I don't think it's fair to put them in the same bag.

Quite disappointed (unsurprised, though) Stack didn't bother to notify me of the closed post.

posted it here: http://meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/9/should-questions-that-are-about-a-specific-alternate-blockchain-be-tagged-altern/222#222


text:
How should questions that function like reviews be handled?
There are a few questions popping up every now and then that want to get the answer about reliability of services based on the rating of the answer. For example:
"Please list one service per answer (not multiple services in the same answer) so that the votes can decide on reliability (use comments for testimonies, if there are any ;-) )."
"I think I won't accept an answer for a while ... I'd like to see some upvotes before we can conclude an online wallet is really "trusted"."
Is such answer-picking going against the rules or the spirit of Stack Exchange? Shouldn't one provide some external data regarding service reliability, user testimonies, etc, instead of using SE as a review website? How should such questions be handled?

related: Why are “shopping list” questions bad? [Meta.SE]

Questions like that are generally discouraged across Stack Exchange.
The Q&A model here isn't really built to handle recommendations well. This is why you tend to see requests like "please post one [thing] per answer". Another issue is that questions like this tend to attract answers that are often just links and don't offer any additional information. This is not useful to future visitors, especially if any of the links ever go out of service.
Some sites are more tolerant towards questions like this than others and it is up to you guys to figure out whether or not you want to keep them, but here are some tips that might help increase their quality.

Try to rephrase the question to focus on the how instead of the what. The blog post linked above goes into more detail on this, but the gist of it is that instead of asking which site or tool you should choose, ask how to make that choice and then apply the answers to whatever options are in front of you. In many cases, good answers to how will include informed recommendations of the what anyway.
Provide specific criteria to evaluate the answers by. This helps others to actually evaluate the responses and upvote ones that are helpful rather than simply "best" for some unknown value of "best". (The second question you listed does this better than the first.)
Edit answers to include more information than just a link or a short sentence. Encourage others to provide more information, share their experience with the thing they're recommending, etc. Don't be afraid to downvote or convert to comments answers that don't do this.
Encourage the use of chat for recommendation questions. Bookmark the best ones. You could make a meta post with links to the best ones.

Of all these, #1 is by far the approach that results in the most constructive questions that remain useful long term, but you may find all of them helpful to varying degrees.

Good advice, however here's some more:
Refrain from drawing conclusions to your own questions that call for yes or no answers, when clearly there is no constructive basis to this approach, as the conclusion should be left to the reader, unless it's absolute fact(s) and or truth! Otherwise there is no point in asking the question in the first place... especially if the information is readily available elsewhere and providing an honest answer by way of a genuine link, and not links that further compound an unproven question or answer... This is NOT helpful to anyone!
Moderators I would expect to be un-bias, and hold no favoritism - this should go without saying, but obviously is not the case from what I've experienced here on just one thread^ Especially when you can't respond to some voting up or down for lack of points?! This is completely unfair and defeats the purpose of an honest debate, when some are subject to edits and others are not?! Rewarding for contributions is one thing, but limiting responses to others, simply because some are more active on site than others? Again defeats the purpose...
An open source subject - should not be restricted or limited due to participation requirements or rewards... this only negates the validity of Q&A, and losing yet more credibility as such - It's like saying "you can stand here - but if you stand there you're not allowed to speak!" And limiting edits to 5 minutes is also ridiculous, if mis-spoken in the real world, there's no limit to retracting your statements!
Free speech has no limits, unless it's a dictatorship or promotes slander in any form/forum!

Shared on facebook^


text:
Which time zone are the statistics based on to calculate badges?
eg for the "Suffrage" badge ("Used 30 votes in a day"), when does the day start?
(Alternatively, it could be based on a rolling 24hrs, but I doubt it because that would seem unnecessarily complicated!)

I believe it starts at 0:00 GMT. To find out if that is correct for you, try voting 30 times and see what message you get. It should specify the time until you can vote again, +-1 hour. Check back again around then and see how many minutes until you can vote again and there's your answer.

Stack Exchange runs on UTC time.  You can see this by hovering over your name at the top of the page - the time is at the bottom of the  profile popup.


text:
Should specific hardware problem questions be closed as "too localised"?
Should questions about specific hardware problems be close as "too localised"? For example, a question like this:
Help locating bottleneck on new mining rig
Seems to be a quite specific problem. Should we redirect such problems to the forum instead, or try to answer them here?

The important question to ask is: "Is this question likely to ever help any future visitors?". If not, it should be closed as "too localized". I don't know that much about hardware and mining but it seems to me that this question could actually help future visitors. It already has 4 upvotes too so that's an indication that it isn't too localized.

I don't think this is a good question to ask. On Stack Overflow it is full of questions about very specific snippets of code, which most assuredly won't help anyone besides who is asking... but are allowed anyway.

Questions should be made as generic as possible. Instead of closing, how about suggesting an edit, or editing it yourself, to make it a general question, unrelated to specific hardware (whenever possible)?
Even if the specific hardware details are in the crux of the question, I say it's on topic.


text:
Can we establish some sort of policy about slander?
An increasing number of questions on this forum focus on specific individuals or organizations within the bitcoin community, rather than bitcoin itself.
Some of them border on slander, like this question "When did Eligius cost MtGox many thousands of bitcoins" by ripper234.  To summarize, this makes about as much sense as asking "When did Linus Torvalds cost me all of my data because I typed rm -rf / while logged into my Linux box as root" on StackOverflow.  The problem is that people who don't have a deep understanding of bitcoin don't realize the bogosity going on here and are likely to simply associate "Eligius = Stolen Coins" and move on.
Could we please have some sort of policy about questions not mentioning specific individuals or specific organizations unless the question (like "who is Satoshi Nakamoto?") cannot possibly be rephrased in a way that avoids doing so?  Or maybe agree to hold questions that do involve reputations to a much higher standard (maybe only two votes to close)?
Bitcoin is a young technology and a "wild west".  Many reputations are being formed and hierarchies established.  People are abusing this site to carry out political campaigns, and I am quite certain that does not fall within the charter of "Q&A site".

I think that this is an important discussion so let's try to keep it civil instead of starting some sort of edit-war. Here are some of my thoughts:

The title of the question make it sound like Eligius did something wrong so if we keep the question we should try to improve it.
eldentyrell's edit of the title to "When did MTGOX lose many thousands of bitcoins?" is not a good one since it instead makes it way too general
The question should probably had been asked in the forum thread instead, with a quick reply to the linked post, asking "When was this?". I don't have a big problem closing this post since it is sort of a Bitcoin trivia question.
eldentyrell is out of line accusing ripper234 of trying to "carry out political campaigns". There is nothing in his posting history suggesting that he has a political agenda and he is a great contributor to the site.

I tend to ask all my Bitcoin questions here and not on the forums. SE is a superior medium for asking questions, as we all believe, I hope. What makes this specific question different? The original meaning of my question really was "did Eligius cause Mt. Gox to lose money", and @eldentyrell's edit changed that meaning. Do you have another edit in mind, that would still preserve the original meaning of the question? Bitcoin Trivia is on topic here, btw, last time I checked.

Right now I don't want to edit the question myself, or I might be accused of "tampering with an existing pending edit by @eldentyrell". How about adding quotes? When did Mt. Gox "lose many thousands of bitcoins"?

@ripper234: After reading the question again I agree that it shouldn't be closed. The title made me think that it just asked about when it happened, so that the answer would just be a date. But we need to come up with a good title that doesn't sound like Eligius screwed up. Perhaps something like "Explain the incident where Mt.Gox. lost yada yada...".

we could drop the "when" entirely.

I did not accuse anyone of anything, but was just quoting a claim on the forum. Asking a question to explain something you read on the forum is entirely on topic and not slander.
Do you really think I have / am part of a political campaign?
I do think out-right slander should be closed/deleted, but haven't seen examples of this yet.
This is off topic to the stated title of this meta question, but the changing the title on my question changed its meaning, and this is why I reverted @eldentyrell's edit.


text:
David, why did you edit my question's title?
Not trying to start a flame war, merely to understand.
You apporved @eldentyrell's edit, that I have reverted and he then re-did.
You didn't post anything about this, not as a comment and not on Meta (that I've seen anyway).
Why did you do it? (Really, not blaming, just asking) Could you/we try to be more informative in the future in similar cases? (flame/revert wars ... if they're edited by admin, at least explain it somewhere ... and better yet, wait for community consensus before "judging" in a flame war).
I explained elsewhere why I reverted his edit - I really wanted the original title.

Oh, for the record, all 3 Bitcoin.SE mods are "David" so you might want to be a hair more specific in the future ;)

@DavidPerry - right, forgot about that particular piece of trivia :)

That would be my fault for not reading meta before responding to a flag. I edited out of concern for potential slander/libel issues. Now that I've done my research and it's been clarified that you were directly quoting a statement from an outside source (and even cited that source in the question body, how'd I miss that?) I've reverted to your original title, but added quotes to emphasize to any lawyers in the crowd that we were not the origin of the accusation.
In the interest of preserving sanity, I've made the "middle road" edit and locked the question to prevent further edits, rollbacks, etc. This should be a non-issue since you've already got an answer and some upvotes.


text:
Is Open Transactions on topic?
It's not exactly a derived crypto-currency, but it's an enabler technology that seems to be getting more integrated with Bitcoin.
Are questions on OT on topic here?

I would say occasionally
Using an analogous situation, if this site was about HTTP and someone was asking questions about HTML then the question would be clearly off-topic. HTML has little to do with HTTP other than using it as an efficient transport mechanism.
What is making OT appear on-topic is that it currently sees Bitcoin as being the most efficient method for value transfer. This gives rise to useful questions about how Bitcoin can  better serve OT requirements (where appropriate) but care should be taken to avoid questions that are just about OT without a Bitcoin angle.
Drawing again from the HTTP/HTML analogy, a question about HTTP URI formation and it's use within HTML anchor tags would be relevant, but one about CSS styling would not.

I think that some basic questions about OT, even those that have nothing to do with Bitcoin, might still be on topic. People need to understand what it is, and how it works. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2772/how-does-open-transactions-solve-the-double-spend-problem

I'd agree with that - let this site serve as a gateway to deeper knowledge. But we cannot allow Bitcoin SE to become OT SE.

I'll agree with @GaryRowe so long as nobody actually makes an OT SE. I don't see any proposals on A51 for it so I think we're safe for now.


text:
Why was this duplicate question reopened?
I believe this question was closed as a dup (I voted to close it).
Who reopened it? Why?

It was never closed. Clicking the "timeline" link on the question shows its entire status history: this is available to all users regardless of rep.
Here is the timeline of the question you linked: nowhere in the history does it show closure. For reference, here is the timeline of a question that actually was closed. Specifically you're looking for changes to the "state" of the question, like this:

Your linked question has no such state changes in its timeline.
Also, simply voting to close does not appear on the timeline (or history) - only actual status changes that are completed (by community vote or mod vote, for example). I believe closure votes expire after a time if closure is not completed, though I'm not 100% sure of exactly how much time must pass.

Where is the link to the timeline in the question? I never noticed this SE feature!

Thanks, followup: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120896/why-do-close-votes-expire