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Jack Douglas

This post is meant for you, if you are or have been a regular in "The Heap" [chatroom on SE](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/179/the-heap--consultancy-), and have already read our post explaining our [reason for building TopAnswers](https://topanswers.xyz/meta?q=1).

I'd like to say a few things to you in particular about my intentions when inviting you here:

* First of all, thank you for dropping in!
* If you are happy on SE, I don't want to try and persuade you to come here to chat and/or contribute to the Q&A. We want to build this site for primarily for people who are *already looking* for the kind of things we are trying to provide (things like open source, a non-profit model, a pure focus on Q&A etc).
* It doesn't have to be either/or anyway, at least as far as we are concerned — you are welcome to contribute in both places in any ways you chose.
* One of my main reasons for posting here is because I don't want anyone from The SE Heap thinking we've been deliberately excluding you from TopAnswers. Even if you are not looking for what we are offering, you may like to know that it is offered, and that I would value your participation because you have been [such a great community](https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/52459260#52459260) on SE. I just wanted to have something concrete to show you first 😊.
* I think SE underestimated how much influence the community in The SE Heap have had on shaping [dba.se](https://dba.stackexchange.com). I suspect this is also true of other sites on the network. These groups, and the platform that enables them, shouldn't be second-class citizens on the site.

In short, if TopAnswers is something you are looking for, or looks like it has the potential to be, please join in, especially by asking and answering interesting questions (and starring good answers), to 'seed' the site.

If things look like they are heading in the right direction, our next step will be to add a prompt on [db<>fiddle](https://dbfiddle.uk) along these lines:

> Need help? Ask [a question about this fiddle](https://topanswers.xyz/question?community=databases&fiddlerdbms=postgres_11&fiddlehash=71940aadda50f55bfede87606cd1dc2c) on TopAnswers.xyz — the focussed Q&A site for expert answers that [is building](https://topanswers.xyz/meta?q=1) a library of knowledge.

I'm currently looking into adding a markdown extension for fiddles, which the link above will use when it is ready.

I can't say for sure how many questions we'll get from db<>fiddle, but usage has steadily increased to the point where we have reached about 1,000 unique visits per day, so there is at least the chance it will be effective for bringing them in. If a question comes from db<>fiddle there is also a good chance that the OP has already tried *something* to solve their problem, which is a great start!

Thanks again for dropping by and for reading this post. Please feel to use all the tools here (chat rooms like [The Heap 2.0](/databases), meta etc), to let us know what you think.

just make it react the same to click in notifications panel, and optionally add "reply" button there too, to make one save few seconds. That way, dismiss icon can be moved to the right side right above the reply icon. It would also start resembling MS Windows [x] close button then.

and replying i did in the end... Dismiss icon was hard to see somehow. Perhaps it feels out of character for the site. After one finds it it is obvious, but ntot before. And clicking on comment in the question panel is impossible to guess after clicking that very comment in the notifictions pane did nothing at all. Perhaps notificaiton pane should also react on comment clicking

BTW, Jack, are DB-Fiddle related questions are always meta ? https://topanswers.xyz/databases?q=1510 If so . then perhaps DBFiddle tag either removed from databases section, or yet better modified to become a sto-tag, a one to display a warning and redirect user to meta and prohibiting posting the question on databases.

You can not enforce this dream, except for few exceptions no one would do regular and boring housekeeping for free. Comments did contain important pieces in USENET and maillists, they did so in SO, they will do it in TA. Unless you hire people to sieve comments for information they would deem useful and uplift it into other's answers. Some forums do have scheduled purge and public countdown on comments, but they are rare and that is opt-in even there. When you implemented comments highlighting you already tacitly admitted it. Just extend the highlighting-only to highlighting-or-visibility and extend parents concept to include left panel texts

Well, DB scheme is under your steering. Also, when i click your comment it is highleighted orange, and somewhere above (maybe so far above they are invisible!) there are parent cpmments that get highlighted too. So there already is some data to link them.

> How do you know which ones to filter Comments "know" where they originated, what was commented upon, what is their parent. It is either question itself, or specific answer, and some prior comment. So, basically it is traversing a tree when giving specific parent.

Let's get it from the other side, what would be adverse effects in making comments sidebar filtered? one change in CSS and instead of changed background colour you have them invisible. One change in JS and instead of mouse hover (which anyway does not work on touch-screens) you have stateful "select/deselect article" user action.

Looks a binary world-view, anything that is not upgraded to full-fledged answer is to be considered worthless. SO even keeps chatrooms logs for quite long :-) And it was useful on less techy communities like world-building

i do not think you would be able to enforce that ideal. Especially if comments are insightful but questionable, offering opetions, different angles of thought and other such thing, that would require hard or expensive to do testing to prove/disprove it

What are "comments rooted in that answer"? If useful info from the comments is edited into the answer then you don't need them either, and the philosophy here is that *all* comments are ultimately extraneous — it's the same philosophy on SE they just unfortunately muddy the waters by showing the comments in the stream of the answers.

exactly, if i am focusing on some specific answer in-depth, then all comments related to other answers and most comments related to the question itself - are garbage for me. So the mode when they just disappear and let me one single answer and only comments rooted in that answer

there isn't really any need — that's the major bonus of keeping them off to the right in a sidebar over SO, they are easy to ignore unless you particularly want to trawl through them. On a room with any sort of traffic they rapidly disappear off the screen too.

My bad, ended up editing, instead of adding new one. Laconic UI is confuding at times. @Jack, One more thing, perhaps this kind of comments better be deleted after they were acted upon (outlived their usefulness). To reduce garbage ratio. Maybe they can be set on some countdown, like automatic purging in 120 day, 119, 118

@Jack, One more thing, perhaps this kind of comments better be deleted after they were acted upon (outlived their usefulness). To reduce garbage ratio. Maybe they can be set on some countdown, like automatic purging in 120 day, 119, 118