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In general, the downvoting here is a very good thing. I even think that there isn't enough of it. It is important feedback. Keeping back important negative feedback out of fear to hurt someone's feelings is a terrible strategy, here and everywhere else. It makes the non-critiqued person feel nicer in the short term, but makes learning impossible, effectively ...
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Statistically, our site receives about 40 upvotes for every downvote, a figure which seems to be loosely applicable across most of the Stack Exchange network.
That means two things:
Chances are, you will receive some downvotes, eventually. Somebody is going to disagree with you for reasons that may or may not be clear at the time. So don't sweat it if you ...
8
Please see the help page on reputation:
Users have to give up one of their own rep points when they downvote a post.
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The salient instruction for when to downvote an answer is "This answer is not useful". Since you raised your answer about frying potatoes as an example:
I love fried potatoes and have been making them for ages. I usually use red potatoes and never pre-cook them; I just chop them, add them to a large saucepan or wok with 1/4 - 1/2 cup of heated vegetable ...
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Sure, that's what the budget-cooking tag is for.
Please do note, however, that all of the usual expectations around specificity and constructiveness still apply. So questions of the form recommend me some cheap meal ideas/restaurants will be closed, not because they are off-topic but because they are polls.
I point out the above because the budget-cooking ...
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It's one of the choices in the revision history of a post. There's a full description in the global meta FAQ.
The most obvious time it's appropriate to roll back an edit is when it's purely detrimental - some kind of vandalism, something that changes the meaning of a post, and so on. You can also use it for less drastic edits that you disagree with, though ...
5
Fermented foods are on topic. You are welcome to ask about miso, and also other fermented food such as sauerkraut and pickles.
I guess the confusion may come from the point
Wine-making, Brewing, Distillation and Fermentation
This means that the site doesn't cover the making of alcoholic beverages from scratch, such as making your own beer. The "...
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Moderators do.
These "post notices" can be added to any post. The one you've observed is generally used when a post isn't quite bad enough to be immediately deleted, but is clearly borderline and may need a fair bit of work to be useful.
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I think this is because review tasks require more than one reviewer to leave the overall queue, and the number there shows how many tasks there are overall, including ones that you've skipped or have already done. Presumably there are very few people here doing the reviews, so if they stop, the tasks will start accumulating.
I went and reviewed ten or so ...
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Fun fact: three questions had both tags, so only two just had refrigeration.
Anyway, maybe "refrigerators" is the right tag for equipment questions and "refrigeration" is the right tag for food storage questions, but I sure don't want to retag everything and push boulders up hills, so... done.
(And as for "why" - probably either because of carelessness or ...
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Much of what's on meta.stackoverflow applies here, but not necessarily all of it. Communities of individual sites can make their own decisions. A lot of meta discussion is at least a little subjective, and since it's all about making the sites work well, it does also depend on the kinds of things that are asked and answered on the site. While general ...
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Note that only downvoting answers lowers your reputation, you're free to downvote questions as much as you like.
In a nutshell - although downvoting is a useful and necessary part of the system, it tends to elicit hurt feelings and hostile reactions at a more individual level, as I'm sure most people have noticed. It's also prone to abuse. We want people ...
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No, that kind of questions is very clearly off topic.
We are primarily cooks here. Our common interest is food. We can not give medical advice, in fact, many questions of the “Is X healthy?” type are not answerable for medical professionals.
The types of questions we will accept here are:
Questions with a limited scope and measurable, scientifically ...
4
You click on the number once. Then you see not a single number any more, but a green number and below it a red number. The green number is the amount of positive votes, the red is the amount of negative votes.
The default view still shows the sum. You have to click each time you want to see the up and down counts on a single answer or question.
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StackExchange sites are mostly community-moderated, so in general, "can somebody look at this" is reserved for really egregious cases - answers that don't actually answer the question, things with no conceivable value, spam, offensive content, and so on. If you do see things like that, you can ask a moderator to look at them by flagging.
Otherwise, voting ...
4
Every Stack Exchange site has it at the same relative URL:
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer
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You're probably just reading too much into one example. Plenty of other questions do rank for the relevant queries, and we do get the vast majority of our views from search. The fact that this particular question doesn't appear to rank doesn't really mean anything about SEO or our ranking in general.
Really, this isn't a question I'm super worried about ...
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One small correction: this isn't a moderator thing. We have plenty of users with enough reputation to help close questions, and the site scope was decided by users, not just moderators. We moderators also contribute in this regard, but we're not in charge of site scope.
Generally, the details have been refined over the years, but we haven't added a lot of ...
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See the FAQ on main meta. There are a lot of possible reasons, but most likely the only one that applies to you is having five suggestions pending. People don't tend to be as active over the weekend so I'm not surprised if the reviews piled up.
It does look like you had several reviewed a couple hours ago so you're probably already able to suggest again.
3
There is no sharing button for the whole site. Instead, each post has its own sharing button. It is hidden in the "share" link below each post, on the left side. This question from our parent meta explains it with pictures.: How do I "share" a link for the new badges?.
You can also share the whole site manually. You have to select the URL of our ...
3
sorry about the mixup. I thought that you are able to view comments on your own deleted answers.
I was the one who deleted the answer, and left the comment as an explanation to why it was deleted. Here is the full text:
Hello Jon, you are discussing the health effects of iron leaching into food. Health discussions are off topic here. If the OP has his ...
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It's an April Fools joke. You can chat with an "expert" (a bot) if you'd like, or just dismiss it permanently. See What is "chat with an expert"? on meta.SO.
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Ordinarily you would in fact see flagged posts and have the opportunity to flag, disagree, or (in the case of a question) vote to close.
I can verify this on Stack Overflow, where I have the reputation but am not a moderator.
My guess is that your flags don't show up in your view, precisely because you cannot act on them. The number icon, I'm also guessing,...
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I'll post a copy here for posterity, and to explain why I deleted them. But I absolutely stand by my position that they don't add value to the question or answer. I appreciate that you spent a lot of time writing them, but that unfortunately doesn't make them relevant to future readers.
Here are the original comments I deleted:
@SAJ14SAJ - Think it ...
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I appreciate the vigilance on food safety issues, but I don't think the question is off topic, although it might not be a very smart question.
The first two answers are quality information, and have received the upvotes.
The third answer from Violapadrile has not received any upvotes.
My opinion is that no action is required here, although some comments ...
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Links to additional resources are basically always helpful, though sometimes they may be overkill. On many questions, optimal answers would probably provide more support than average answers do, but it's not something we can really make a policy to change.
So there aren't really specific, universal rules. Sometimes writing about your experience is ...
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This means that there are items in your cue to review. In the example shown, there are late answers for you to review and provide feedback on. Click, and the questions/answers will appear, along with action items, so that you can contribute to maintaining the site.
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There is no way for a community member (or a moderator) to edit a flag once it has been submitted. A moderator (or a 10k user for some kinds of flags) has to handle the flag.
This handling does not have to be negative for the submitter or the flagged-answer-poster. If a moderator feels that the post does not deserve the flag, he can just dismiss it (so ...
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Select your username at the top of the page.
Select Activity in the menu bar.
Select Comments in the sub-menu.
2
"Will dry ice be too cold for my fesh, unfrozen steak?"
"Do fresh vegetables belong in a meat freezer?"
"Do those bowls of ice really keep milk cold enough?"
"I've been fishing for days, and finally caught the big one. It will take me all day to sail back to Santiago. Should I keep it in the nice cool water, or haul it up on the predator-free deck?"
I'...
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