

Dear PG: Please post a canonical list of editorial guidelines for HN. - asciilifeform

Is there a clear explanation posted anywhere of why: one is sometimes unable to reply to a comment; the title of a submission is often changed arbitrarily; down- or up-voting is sometimes disabled. And why does a thread sometimes turn up locked, with no explanation? (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=716546) Is HN now Wikipedia?
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pg
Title changes are explained in the guidelines:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Up- and downvoting depends mostly on karma thresholds, though there are also
some protections against karma-bombing and voting rings. You can't post
comments on items that are dead or over 45 days old.

Most of the details can be found in the source:

<http://www.ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar>

------
frossie
Well I haven't been around that long so let's see if I can pass the test.

 _why one is sometimes unable to reply to a comment_

There is a cooling off period when there is vigorous activity on a subthread
to avoid flame wars. I think this is a recent change.

 _"the title of a submission is often changed arbitrarily"_

The guidelines are pretty clear on this one: "You can make up a new title if
you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may
rewrite it."

 _"down- or up-voting is sometimes disabled"_

I've never seen that. Downvoting for comments is only available to logged in
accounts with a karma of 500 I think, and not for stories.

 _And why does a thread sometimes turn up locked, with no explanation Is HN
now Wikipedia?_

I don't know what the dead-ing mechanism is, but it certainly not Wikipedia -
HN is a private site and I expect the editors to do what they like.

[Edit: Thanks to rms and tokenadult for the corrections below]

~~~
ErrantX
> I think this is a recent change.

It is - I think it's one of the best (the algorithm apparently scales too - so
longer waits the deeper the thread). it's stopped me posting a rash response
once or twice.

~~~
frossie
I find it a bit annoying (sometimes there is a rapid-fire _good_ debate) but I
can sure live with it if it really helps the S/N of the site. I concede there
is a certain logic in "If you can't wait a few minutes to say something maybe
you don't need to say it _that_ badly".

------
RiderOfGiraffes
When I first saw this post I thought "Another clueless Newbie", but I checked,
and it isn't. That gave me pause for thought.

Most of these questions are answered in the FAQ, or turn up sufficiently often
that I would expect a casual reader to know them. Clearly I'm wrong.

So this goes for other sites as well: How can you arrange information such as
this, so that both new and experienced users can find it easily, instead of
being driven to ask questions?

Can we create a really useful question answering system of which questions
like this can be asked, and which mines a database for the answers?

There's a start-up waiting to happen ...

~~~
mahmud
Instead of an "expert system" for posting guidelines, the UI can expose and
explain functionality.

Can't upvote or down vote a story? white-out the arrows and put an alt="can't
(up|down)vote story, you don't have enough foo".

Can't reply to a post? remove the link but leave a white "reply" text in a box
with gray sunken borders. Hovering over it should show the reason why.

Each deactivated post can also log its status and reason for disabling right
in the title, or somewhere in the header area; maybe the top-color can change?

People shouldn't be sent to an Information Desk; instead, the system should be
self-documenting, if not self-evident.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I agree with most of what you say, and I certainly agree that most interfaces
- this one included - can and should be more transparent than they are. It's a
good objective for which we must strive. Expose reasons where they exist, give
explanations as a part of the UI, this is all good.

However, and this is where I wish I were more eloquent, and more of a writer
than doer, because I'm sure I'm not going to say this as well as I want ...

I can't help but feel that there are cases where the ideals of instant
obviousness and total transparency actively prevent the potential for power
use. Insisting that everything is self-documenting is, I feel, inherently
self-limiting.

I feel sure that in some cases it's right to have a learning curve, and some
effort required to be expended. Insisting that everything be instantly obvious
to everyone who stumbles across it is, I think, creating the expectation that
everything should be like that.

It's a gut reaction. To paraphrase an old, hackneyed and much criticised
observation: Everything should be as obvious as possible, but no more.

Perhaps there's a place for the unobvious.

~~~
mahmud
FWIW, I too gave this a little more thought, and from an engineering
prespective, found that my proposed solution would tightly couple UI with
business logic if greater care isn't taken. I am sure it isn't much overhead
in simple news.arc to selectively render UI elements based on the status of a
post, for example, but in larger applications, feature-requests could lead to
a lot of conditionals creeping into display rendering.

What we need is to study and consolidate "Adaptive User-Interfaces" (a well
stablished field of study, btw) with software engineering, and specially the
web (and even more specially, with respect to dynamic programming languages
and in my case Lisp and CLOS.)

Something I have been doing lately was reverse-engineering a few google apps
from their rendered HTML and minified JS. I don't wanna throw speculations
around, but I think Google has some sort of a "learning" engine which adjusts
the shown content to the estimated level of user expertise. They do this with
a "newbie cookie". See the sources for any google apps help pages, for
example, and you will see this:

    
    
      var global_newbie_cookie = "newbie_11";
    

Here is one:

<http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003>

Your global newbie cookie should be different than mine.

Regards.

~~~
ErrantX
mine is newbie_11 too - on all the computers I tried in the office.

~~~
mahmud
I would kill to know what that variable does. Maybe they're ranking the
technical expertise of the user based on what section of the help pages he is?
Say, asking for help on gmail SMTP relaying is different that asking for help
on how to use the calendar.

