I joined for one answer and stayed for a year — what changed my mind

One thing that took me a while to notice: the search box indexes maintained documents as well as topics, and documents carry a review date. If a document and a five-year-old topic disagree, the document is the one somebody has looked at recently.

Worth one more sentence than it usually gets.

First week here. The thing I would tell someone arriving behind me is that the answers are slower and much better than anywhere else I have looked, and that trying to hurry one does not work.

On the reading order question specifically: start with the how-to-ask materials in this category, then read the one to three subcategories where your main questions live. The rest will be discoverable by tag once you understand the structure.

The evidence for this is thinner than the way I have phrased it suggests.

The compound pages are the fastest way to find out whether a question has a published answer at all. If the page says the trial is ongoing, that is the honest state of it and no thread will improve on that.

The compound pages are the fastest way to find out whether a question has a published answer at all. If the page says the trial is ongoing, that is the honest state of it and no thread will improve on that.

Nothing above should be read as advice about what anyone else should do.

The Lounge is a real category rather than a dumping ground. The sourcing rule still applies there, which surprises people, but the register is looser and nobody minds a digression.

The claim is narrower than it sounds, and deliberately so.

Useful. I had the fact and not the reason, which turns out to be the important half.

Your introduction is well framed. You have given enough context that people can actually answer. That is rarer than it sounds and it matters more than it sounds.

If anyone has run this properly I would rather read that than my own guess.

Bookmarking this. I will come back when I have something worth adding.