SE Podcast #26

No guest today. Moot had to postpone his appearance on the show. But David Fullerton is here to hang out with us

• Jeff is packing up to go on an international trip. He's going to Øredev in Malmö via Copenhagen and London on British Airways. He will take the train from Copenhagen to Malmö - good choice! Joel is full of handy travel tips. Among them: The chip-and-PIN credit card system is vastly superior to the one we use, which is why it can be tough to get cash overseas! Joel also has packing tips for the cold Swedish weather. Also, freezing eyeballs

• Per a chat room question: there's no news on DevDays. Though we did have a vendor offer us a refund on money we didn't pay, but Producer Alex is too honest for his own good. Also, Future iterations will be closer to the original conference.

• Stack Overflow is accepting nominations for moderators for the next 6 days (at time of recording). So far, the nominations are civil and intelligent (unlike in the real world of course). The gang talks about other sites/forums/chat rooms from years past that have held elections like ours. There aren't many! Jeff & Joel discuss what moderator elections mean for a community, why communities need moderators, and what makes a good moderator.

• David Fullerton is here to provide some insight on what makes a Hot Question on the Stack Exchange homepage... and we realize that an algorithm can never replace a good old-fashioned human moderator. Moderation is incredibly important.

• Jeff & Joel discuss previous elections, and the lessons learned from them which have turned into requirements for this new round of nominations.

• There are real-life elections today, too, but the weird off-season ones. "Dogcatcher" and "comptroller". Leave it to the professionals who read the newspaper and listen to NPR every day! (If you were informed enough to vote in your local elections today, good on you!)

• The Gaming Stack Exchange is having a massive competition in honor of the launches of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We want to see which game gets the most views on the site in the week after it was released. There are sweet prizes! Jeff will be shocked if Call of Duty wins this particular contest. David thinks Skyrim is going to win, too. It seems that many people feel this way. Can Call of Duty pull it off? Maybe, if we discover The One Question that gets a million views from Google.

  • Also, we're having a launch party on Friday! If you're a gamer in New York and you want to come, send an email to team+gaming@stackexchange.com! We will also be livestreaming the party, where there will be 10 consoles playing MW3 and Skyrim. Stack Exchange and Fog Creek employees will be playing games, having snacks, and asking and answering great questions on the site.
• Spoiler alert for the first Modern Warfare game: it's a video game where you die! In the campaign story, you die. You have to, and there's no way around it. You die! That's sort of rare.

Jeff is off to the airport! Go see him at _Ø_redev! We'll be back next week at the normal time (Tuesday @ 4pm ET) when Dave Winer (the Podfather) will be live in the studio with us.  See you then!

Episode source