Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
A milestone for Software Development - congratulations!
When we launch a community on our network, it starts in "new community" mode to ease bootstrapping. This means that all users start with the Participate Everywhere ability, which lifts new-user restrictions (mostly rate limits).
The Software Development community is doing well -- you have a lot of active community members, questions get answered, knowledge gets shared in the form of canonical Q&A, problems get addressed -- you all are making this a great place to learn about software development! We've talked with the moderators, and we agree that this community has outgrown the "new community" bootstrapping.
From now on, new users will start with only the Participate ability, which means:
- 3 questions per day (as opposed to 20)
- 5 answers per day (as opposed to 30)
- 3 suggested edits per day (as opposed to 20)
- 10 flags per day (as opposed to 30)
- 5 votes per day (as opposed to 30)
- can comment on your own posts or answers to your own questions, but not elsewhere
- links in profiles will not be shown to anonymous users (spam mitigation)
(I think a day is a rolling 24 hours as opposed to a UTC day, but I am not certain.)
All of these limits can be adjusted upon request from moderators, so if you think something should change, please bring it up here on Software Dev Meta. (The help pages for abilities are, alas, static, so they can't show the current values.)
But wait, you might ask, what if these restrictions get in the way of a valuable new user? If you've got someone who's ready to contribute a lot of good content and is being hindered, moderators can grant abilities directly. They can also revoke abilities if needed.
Thank you to everyone who has helped to build the Software Development community here on Codidact! As we enter 2025, I look forward to even more growth (suggestions welcome).
1 answer
It seems fine to me to restrict new users in this way - most of them probably weren't getting anywhere near the old limits, or even the new ones, anyway. (It's unfortunately common on sites like this for someone to make an account to ask a single question and then disappear into the ether, having never had any intent to become part of a community - and I doubt that anything could be done about it.)
However, I would like to see it become easier, not harder, to establish curators. In the long run, the resources needed to curate a successful (both active enough for the outside world to be broadly aware of Codidact, and maintained well enough to promote the site's vision) should not be underestimated. It's important for new users to see a front page full of questions that meet the site standards, rather than one full of posts that could be found on generic technical discussion forums; and it's important for all users to be able to find top-quality, relevant material as easily as possible.
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