Launch!

After almost a year in beta, we now have over 3000 users and an active community of science fiction fans (as well as a few users that are actively working in this area) providing input, answers, moderation, blog posts and their own time to make the site a global success.

Congratulations to all the members – your effort has paid off, and today scifi.stackexchange.com has graduated from a beta Stack Exchange website to a full-fledged member of the Stack Exchange family.

What does this mean?

New design.


Be sure to check out the error, CAPTCHA (human verification), about, and 404 (page not found) pages, and check out the different look of meta (and, while you’re there, take a look at some of the hot meta questions).

Privileges have changed.

Now that we’re not a beta site, the privileges required to do certain things have increased. That means there are fewer people to do them, and you might not be able to do everything that you could yesterday.

If you see something problematic, please comment and flag. Your moderators will be happy to close, reopen, migrate, protect or delete questions or answers that need it, especially if there’s comments and/or flags from multiple users saying that’s what needs to happen.

Remember that anyone can edit.  Even if you lost the edit privilege, you can still edit any answer or question – it’ll just go into a moderation queue to be verified first.  Again, there are fewer people to work through these suggested edits now, too, so it might take a little longer for the suggestions to be processed, but generally our moderators are super fast, so you probably won’t wait long.  If your edit is approved, you get reputation, so it’s another way to build up to the privilege level that you used to enjoy.

Vote Early, Vote Often, and Vote Some More. Voting builds reputation, which will help more users earn the privileges that let the site be more user-run than moderator-run.  When you’ve run out of votes, find an unanswered or poorly answered question and answer it, to gather more reputation for yourself.

We’re linked in the footer of regular Stack Exchange sites

Hopefully we’ll get some new visitors as a result.  Please take care to be even more friendly and helpful than you already are to help out our new members.  In particular, if you down-vote or vote to close, please make sure that you leave a comment (or upvote an existing comment) explaining what’s wrong with the question/answer, so that we encourage better participation by these new users, rather than scare them away.

Let your friends and fellow fans know about the site (and the blog!) – we get around 1500 visits a day, but the more people who come, the wider the pool of expertise we can bring in.  This is just one giant leap towards becoming the authoritative site for science fiction and fantasy questions – we still need to work hard to get the rest of the way.

Movies Sister Site Launches

The Movies StackExchange site is now available to the public.  If you’ve got questions that need answering by a film expert, then this is a good place to ask.

There don’t seem to be many sci-fi or fantasy movie questions yet, but if you’re particularly interested in or expert in film, then you might want to keep an eye on the questions there (if you’ve got an account on our site with at least 200 reputation, then if you associate the two accounts – you’ll be prompted to do this if you use the same OpenID – then you’ll start off there with 101 reputation).

If you’ve got a question about a science fiction or fantasy movie, where do you ask that question, now that there’s both sites?  Consider who you would like an answer from: an expert in science fiction / fantasy, or an expert in movies in general; different types of questions will suit each site.  Some questions will be perfectly acceptable on both sites, and in those cases it’s up to the asker to decide where they’d like to ask (in general questions won’t be migrated between the sites, and duplicates may exist on both sites, as long as they are not exact duplicates).  You should definitely not post the same question on both sites, however.

Also, don’t forget that there’s a similar site for the written word, Literature, where there continue to be a reasonable number of science-fiction and fantasy literature questions, aimed more at a literature audience than a sci-fi/fantasy one.

SciFi.StackExchange in Practical Use – In what order should the Star Wars movies be watched?

This question was posted on Feb 1st, 2011 inquiring about what the is the best order to watch all six of the the [tag]Star-Wars[/tag] saga movies.

After receiving my own copy of the newly released Blu-ray version of the epic tale, I brought it upon myself to actually do what the most popular, and accepted answer to this question was as a test to see if the answer to the question has merit, or just looked good on paper.

The sugested reading order given by user Mike Scott with graphic by neilfein

56 of the users of SciFi.SE voted the answer “Watch the movie in this order: Episode IV -> Episode V -> Episode I -> Episode II -> Episode III -> and finally Episode VI.” I even upvoted this question. But alas, I haven’t actually watched this series in order (any relative order, in fact) ever. The last time I watched a Star Wars movie was when Episode III came to theatres in 2005. And before that I watched Episode II and I. I never actually watched all 3 of the original trilogy in order either. I only ever watched it when it was on the TV in passing. I did see the re-release in theatres in 1997 but before that, I don’t think I ever actually saw the whole trilogy.

I always considered myself a fan of the series, but when I look back on what I have actually exposed myself to, my main viewing of Star Wars has been mostly the New Trilogy.

This got me thinking about more than just how I voted on that one question, but how I vote on a lot of questions. I fully support ever answer I upvote, but in all honesty, most of the answers that I have given the “big up arrow” to were ones I just believed were right.

But I wanted to change that. I wanted to actually use the information given to me on this wonderful site and put it to practical use.

So, lets get started…

Read more

Sci-Fi Stack Exchange at New York Comic Con

A hurricane of nerdery made landfall in New York City from October 14th to 16th, and Stack Exchange was in the thick of it. For readers who have not experienced the pop culture colossus that is New York City Comic Con, I’ll do my best to explain it. The con (colloquially referred to as NYCC) is where the past (yesterday’s coolest trinkets and treasures), present (big celebrities, writers and artists) and future (upcoming films, games and TV shows preview here) of a mess of genres and mediums (sci-fi, fantasy, horror and action comic books, novels, television shows, films and video games among other things) come together in a huge building to entertain over 100,000 people. It’s big, crowded and full of enough people in costume to populate a hundred Party Cities. Stack Exchange’s CHAOS team (which, full disclosure, I am a part of) made New York Comic Con its first foray into the epic world of comic conventions. And we came prepared.

CHAOS Agents Seth, Lauren, Abby and Katey pose with our mascot, Bubbles

Bubbles, the Stack Exchange mascot, has been spotted in the wild before (most notably on the video feed of a Stack Exchange podcast or two), but she made her big debut alongside thousands of people dressed as their favorite sci-fi/gaming/anime characters (and at least a hundred Matt Smith Doctors). For more about Bubbles big outing, and to see the awesome swag created just for New York Comic Con, check out this Blog Overflow post.

The NYCC swag included Gaming stickers and limited edition Sci-Fi shirts and stickers

We were there on behalf of Stack Exchange in general, and the Gaming and Science Fiction & Fantasy sites in particular. Attendees who ran across some of the Stack Exchange agents received swag, some of which were exclusive to the con. Yep, the Sci-Fi site (currently still in Beta and sans design) debuted a design (possibly the design) at the con on two pieces of merch: a sticker and a t-shirt. These items were limited to the convention (note how they say “NYCC-SE-2011” on them, which stands for New York Comic Con – Stack Exchange) and are now totally gone. Limited editions are the best editions!

Overall we had a blast at the con and were successful in spreading the good word of the Stack. Our involvement in New York Comic Con was a test run for the future. We hope to go to as many gaming and sci-fi cons as we can, mostly because Bubbles loves to travel (even though we have to buy her three airplane seats) and also because I have to complete my run of Uncanny X-Men somehow.

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