No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
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Yes, I understand how web servers work (I have implemented them) ;-). I've also been involved in abuse investigations that involved crunching of 100s of GB of raw logs. If I wanted to figure out what posts you had read based on raw http logs, it would be a big pain in the neck involving matching your user ID with IP addresses, and trying to match HTTP queries with posts, where the relevant log entries were scattered through billions of similar entries from other people. Last time I did something like that, the analysis took about 15 hours on a quite big server, though that particular task also had to find groups of queries corresponding to login sessions. While if there's a database table that identifies every post that has been read by every user, all I have to do is type some SQL and the info comes up immediately.
As for the invasiveness of that info, don't you have any private life at all? Are you pro-XYZ about some political question while your boss is rabidly anti-XYZ? You probably don't want him to know what you're reading. Same if you're getting sued by someone trying to dig up dirt on you, or if you are running for some kind of office (look at all the NSFW content aski3252 reads on Lemmy! Sinner!!!, etc). Or say you are in a country where some dictator gets into power and decides to round up all the Star Trek fans. You suspected something like that was coming, so you carefully avoided posting in the Star Trek communities, but unfortunately you were reading them and now you have been found out. Just use your imagination ;).
Re voting, let's say there is a poll "Is Spez an idiot? Vote yes/no, poll closes on July 1", and you vote in it. To stop you from voting twice, the server must remember until july 1 that you voted, but not how you voted. After July 1, it is impossible to vote again, so the info that you voted at all can be deleted. What currently happens instead seems to be that "aski3252 voted yes" is retained forever. There are some minor UI benefits to that, so I described it as iffy rather than outright evil. If it were up to me though, I would minimize the amount of info kept.