Everything Else
Despite being primarily for challenges and solutions, there is still a lot more to the site. This post addresses some of the more common questions about aspects of the site aside from asking and answering.
Who moderates this site?
We all do. Unlike the vast majority of sites on the Internet, Stack Exchange sites are moderated by their communities, barring a few exceptions. There are three "categories of users":
- Stack Exchange employees. These are the users who work at the company Stack Exchange. You'll very rarely see them around the site, and if you do, they'll likely be on Meta.
- Diamond moderators. These are democratically elected users who handle the rare circumstances where standard users cannot moderate. Typically, this involves flags or stepping in during disagreements. You can see if a user is a diamond moderator as they have a
♦next to their name at all times. Despite being moderators, they are still members of the community and should be treated as you would treat any other user. - Everyone else. These are the 99.999% of users, and the vast majority of the users you'll interact with on the site.
So how does the community moderate the site? Through privileges, which are directly tied to your reputation score. There are a lot of different privileges you can get, ranging from needing 1 reputation to 25000, but the ones involving moderation are:
- At 1 reputation (so from the start), you can create posts.
- At 15 reputation, you can flag posts and upvote posts.
- At 20 reputation, you can talk in chat. This applies to your total reputation across the network.
- At 50 reputation, you can comment.
- At 125 reputation, you can downvote.
- At 250 reputation, you can see and cast close votes on your own challenges.
- At 500 reputation, you gain access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues.
- At 2000 reputation, your edits no longer require approval and you gain access to the Suggested Edits and Low Quality Posts review queues.
- At 3000 reputation, you can vote to close any challenge and you gain access to the Close Votes and Reopen votes review queues.
- At 10000 reputation, you can delete challenges, see deleted posts and view moderator tools.
- At 20000 reputation, you can delete any post and edit tag wikis without needed approval.
What is the Meta site?
Meta is a separate but related site where users can discuss the site itself. Topics include our Language of the Month series, policy decisions (either on specific languages or in general), our Sandbox for Proposed Challenges and much more.
Keep in mind that Meta is not a place to post your closed challenges, and doing so will lead to the Meta post being closed as well.
What is commenting, and what is it for?
Commenting is an ability you get when you reach 50 reputation. It allows you to leave "comments" underneath users' posts. Note that you always have the ability to comment on your own posts. Comments are short (between 15 and 600 characters) and exist so that users can talk about questions and answers without posting new answers that do not make an attempt to answer the question asked. Comments are often used to ask for clarification on, suggest corrections to, and provide meta-information about posts. The post author is notified of new comments to their post.
You can also notify one additional user in a comment by including "@username" in the comment. You can notify anyone who has commented on or edited the post this way. See How do comment @replies work? for more information.
What should I do if I see a mistake in someone's post?
Edit it! Underneath every post is a link saying Edit. Click this link and you'll be able to edit the post. However, until you reach 2000 reputation, your edits will be reviewed by higher reputation users before they're applied. Vandalism is not ok on any post, even your own, and can lead to a temporary edit ban if done repeatedly.
Do not use edits to golf solutions. Edits that try to improve an answer's score will be rejected. You should leave these improvements as comments instead.
See When it is and is not acceptable to edit someone else's post for more guidelines on editing.
What are the gold, silver and bronze icons next to people's usernames?
These are badges. They are awarded when users perform certain actions. Aside from being nice, shiny icons next to your name, they have no effect beyond telling other users that you did a specific thing.
How do I use chat?
Chat is the place users can go to talk about more or less anything they like. It is made up of rooms, each with a specific topic. You need 20 reputation across the Stack Exchange network to chat in public rooms, 100 reputation to create your own public rooms and 1000 reputation to create gallery rooms.
The Nineteenth Byte is our site's main chat room. As said in the room description, it is for
General discussion for codegolf.stackexchange.com
This is deliberately vague; "General discussion" means exactly that. However, we do have a Chatiquette that we ask you follow while chatting in the room. Please read through it at least once before chatting in the room - don't worry, it's short.
CGCC? TIO? TNB? VTC? What are all these acronyms?
What are our specific abbreviations and terms?
A full glossary of terms can be found in that post, along with more general ones here. The most commonly used are:
- CGCC: Code Golf and Coding Challenges, the name of the site
- TIO: Try it online!
- TNB: The Nineteenth Byte
- VTC/VTRO/VTD: Vote to Close, Reopen and Delete, respectively. Various different moderation votes available to users.
- PPCG: Programming Puzzles and Code Golf, the former name of the site, still used by the older users.
For more questions about various aspects of the site, browse through the recently active Meta questions, or ask in chat.
