Questions tagged [feature-request]
You have an idea for a new feature, or for a change to the existing functionality.
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UPDATED (APRIL 14): Design for Academia.se
I’m Stéphane, senior product designer at Stack Exchange. First, I wanted to congratulate you because this site is now starting the process of moving out of beta to become a fully-graduated site! Well ...
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Do we want a canonical question for general journal workflows?
We often get questions from people who are not aware how a journal works and do not understand some step in the editiorial process¹, think some step takes too long² or are just very worried³. We also ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Do we want a canonical question for how to react to long paper-handling times?
We get a considerable amount of questions, where the asker submitted a paper to some journal and gets impatient because it appears to be stuck at a some stage:
What to do when you have not received a ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Should we make country tags visually distinct?
Higher ed systems differ quite substantially between countries, and we have country tags like united-states or germany, which serve to indicate questions that are specific to certain countries.
...
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Keeping track of our stats
Moderators have a view of the site's statistics, but they cannot share the specifics. So, I'm starting this post to keep track of the evolution of our statistics over time. Please feel free to update ...
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Text shade is too light
I don't know if I share this experience with other members of the Academia.SE community, but for me text shade is way too light. For me, it makes it harder to read (and focus on content) plus, after ...
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Do we need a post notice for possibly controversial questions?
According to this meta post, the SE staff has implemented for a couple of communities a post notice for sensitive, possibly controversial topics.
The notice recites:
Controversial Post — You may ...
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Is there something more radical than "protecting" a question?
As you probably have noticed, the question What to do with a student coming to class in revealing clothing, to the degree that it disrupts the teaching environment? has attracted 16k views and 19 ...
- 45.9k
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Not enough contrast for link text
I like Academia's site design. It is very pretty.
I don't like the link text color. It does not stand out very well. Perhaps it is my computer so here's a snapshot Tell me if you can see the link ...
user23776
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2
answers
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MathJax on Academia?
Should we have MathJax support on Academia?
I think it would be useful if questions about math in academic writing are common here.
I just asked this question and there it would have been nice (but ...
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Can we hint to OPs that their question might be overly long?
Maybe it's just me, but I have the feeling that there is an increase in very long, very, very detailed posts, often not even formatted but wall-of-text style. I often stop reading midway through ...
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Highly-voted comments have less contrast than low vote ones
The current CSS rules for the main site have highly-voted comments appearing in grey, while low-vote comments are displaying in bright red:
Not sure what the standard is, but I'm pretty sure that'...
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For which tags (if any) do we want tag warnings?
Introduction
In another discussion, a Stack Exchange employee indicated that we might get so-called tag warnings, if we want them.
These warnings are meant to provide users with just-in-time ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Can we improve advice to those asking questions?
Quite a few questions asked generate comments that the OP doesn't answer.
Let me suggest adding a bit to the Help Center advice on asking questions to say that responding to such comments will likely ...
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Should we have a canonical question about degree revocation?
A first draft of the requested canonical question is now live here. Please help us out by editing the wiki and adding information.
Can public political criticism of my alma mater result in my BA being ...
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Customize the information window for the first-time askers
It happens quite often that new posters are confused about the scope of this site, for instance mistaking it for a "you can ask about every possible study topic here" site, or a "here's ...
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How can we encourage posters to mention their country of study/work?
Academic systems and cultures vary widely between countries, and answers will depend heavily on this context.
I have come across many questions, where the country has not been stated – presumably ...
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Updating our "What topics can I ask about here?" help center page to be explicit about what **not** to ask
When recently voting to close an off-topic undergraduate question, I saw this screen:
with the phrase:
Questions about problems facing undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also ...
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How can we better react to askers who are having a mental health crisis?
We regularly get questions from people who describe symptoms of depression or anxiety. These are very common mental health problems. Some askers explicitly say they are depressed or anxious and it ...
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My advisor is using and reading academia.stackexchange, how safely I can ask questions?
Few days ago my advisor shared on social media this platform, and also recommended for everyone at my uni to use it as a source of information and how something should be done in academia.
I am ...
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What happens if there are too few candidates for moderator?
At the moment there are fewer candidates for moderator than there are slots. What happens if this remains so?
There are, potentially, a few members here that others, including myself, would not like ...
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Make list of saved questions accessible during "Duplicate" dialogue
The new feature of organizing saved questions into customizable folders came online a few days ago, and I think it is great. I started a folder of "duplicate targets" for questions that are ...
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Academia's question listing is taller
The entries in the question listing on Academia.SE are much bigger vertically than other SE sites. There appears to be a lot more spacing above and below each question entry.
Is there a reason ...
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Shouldn't the deleted questions always be visible to their authors, regardless of the author's reputation?
I have a question about my Academia Stack Exchange post: Circumventing the funding limitations of my potential supervising faculty for Master's project
I'm used to IRC & various other ...
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Do we want a canonical question on "what to do if accused of misconduct"?
There are a number of questions on Academia.SE from students who have just been accused of cheating, or of some other form of misconduct. While the specifics of the allegations and circumstances ...
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Burninate the [study] tag
The tag wiki excerprt for study reads:
Selecting a field of study, preparing for exams or assignments, or pertaining to designing research studies
With other words, the creator of this excerpt ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Are upvotes skewed towards the first answer to a question?
We often see that upvotes are skewed towards the first answer to any question. I have observed the following reason in this regard:
There are many random visitors -- They just click upvote for the ...
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answers
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Better use of the chat room: Discussion groups proposal?
I noticed that there are quite a few users with questions that are little open-ended, which is not a good fit for the Q/A format that we have on SE sites. I suppose a lot of us, grad students, would ...
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Notification for edits on questions I downvoted?
I ask this question here, since the downvotes on this answer triggered my question. However, although it is a general issue with the stackexchange site, the issue has already been discussed in ...
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Create a predefined closing reason for questions about the contents of an academic discipline?
Since I obtained closing priviledges and can thus use custom close reasons, I find myself typing the following sentence on a daily basis (and before, I flagged questions to which this would have ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Closing questions that are not questions: what to pick?
It happens regularly that a user complains about something but does not have a question.
When voting to close, would it make sense to have the option "not a question", or otherwise at least ...
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Replace “undergraduate” with a more general out-of-scope close reason
Statistical background
The following is extracted from the question close stats (10 k only).
In the last three months:
the undergraduate close reason¹ was used 18 times (that’s only about 3 % of ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Do more to encourage questions tagged with [conference] to tell us if they are in CS
On some large portion of all questions about conferences,
it becomes important to know if the
conference is in Computer Science, or one of the other fields, that takes conferences seriously as a ...
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Questions with "assignment" in them should have automatic warning
On the main SO site, any questions with the word "best" in them have a warning automatically displayed:
Based on some recent questions [1][2], I want to propose a similar warning for our site if ...
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Reorganising research-related tags a bit
Proposal
I would like to implement the following tag structure as already suggested and reasoned in this answer. An arrow means that the respective tags are merged and synonymised, with the right tag ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Removing emphasis from blockquotes
Currently, quoted text (paragraphs starting with > in Markdown) is displayed with a wider margin and a very visible yellowish background in the main site. This has led some users to think that it ...
- 45.9k
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How to get the notification when someone edits their answer?
Yesterday I posted a post here. I saw that @Buffy edited his answer but I did not receive the notification about the edited answer.
Is there any way to get the notification in the inbox when an answer ...
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Creation of a Wikipedia tag
sorry to bother you for this little thing, but I would ask you if it is possible to create a "Wikipedia" tag.
I see 71 results querying for Wikipedia in academia.SE questions.
I don't think it's ...
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Rename [errors-erratum] to [errata] with respective synonyms
Currently we have a tag errors-erratum with erratum being the sole synonym.
I see no reason to have tag with such a convoluted name and not use the synonym system for this.
I thus propose to:
Rename ...
WrzlprmftMod
- 59.7k
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Why is there no way to vote on a post in the "Review Low Quality Posts" review queue?
In the "low quality" review queue:
Most of the time what I really want to be doing is downvote the answer. Look specifically at this example. The post is (sorry to the poster) just bad. I don't want ...
- 135k
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Contacting/Referring to another member of SE outside of a comment thread
I've noticed that it's only possible to mention another SE user using the "@" symbol in a comment thread where the user appears, and I was wondering if it was a feature or a bug. In particular, I ...
user102
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1
answer
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Can the predefined off topic reason for closing please link to the on topics description?
I'm not sure who is actually responsible for the 'reasons for closing' choices when voting to close so I don't know how to get it edited. One of the options is that it is off topic. But that reason ...
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Sorting according to the score introduces an unwanted bias
I noticed that:
answers on this site usually get sorted descendingly according to their score,
in general, answers are either upvoted or left untouched rather than downvoted, and
I (and, presumably, ...
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Is it possible to get usage data from SE?
After having gone through some old questions that I have participated in, I have come to think what we are accumulating here is pretty useful data on demographics and usage of the site. I was hoping ...
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Why no link in the header of the main site to our 'About' page?
On the main site, we have a lovely new About page. Five of us have found it (it's linked from the footer of the main site) and read it, and so got the Informed Badge
All the other sites I've seen, ...
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How should we deal with "cross-cutting" questions?
With more and more "soft" Stack Exchange sites popping up, it feels there is an increasing amount of questions that "could" in principle be on-topic in multiple sites.
A recent example is this ...
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Low upvote contrast under the "Linked" and "Related" headings
This is my first meta post, so if I have done anything wrong, please alert me.
While browsing a question, I noticed that the upvote counts for the links under the "Related" and "Linked" heading have ...
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Edit/Delete timeout on chat
I was in an awkward position a few weeks ago when I tried to introduce a colleague of mine to Academia Stack Exchange. This colleague has a neuro/muscular disorder that makes typing quite difficult. ...
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Saying thanks to comments and answers?
Hope that my question fits to this site (as it is the first time that I ask a question here.)
I feel guilty when I don't say thanks to a very good comment or answer given by users on academia....
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Closure while writing an answer – can it be delayed?
I have fairly frequently been in the situation of being in the middle of providing an answer to a question when it is closed, leaving me no option but to discard my contribution or hope that the ...
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