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A word of warning for all who have to venture into the realms of Meta Stack Exchange: That site does not resemble the friendly, relaxed environment you experience here.

  • The site is (despite the name) rather a main site with its own rep accounting.
  • They have a very strong policy against duplicates, to the extent that questions get closed as duplicates even when the original question has no answer.
  • Asking two duplicate questions (even if upvoted) already leads to a warning about a possible question ban.
  • The same may happen if your feature-request gets (massively) downvoted - post quality and acceptance of opinion are not clearly separated.

So be careful, search thoroughly for possible duplicates and maybe test the waters first in chat for opinions about the SE system.

This is not a complaint (I came out of it unhurt) but a warning not to start any activity there unprepared possibly because someone here suggested "take that to MSE.

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    Yes, I am fortunately unscathed too but I saw the warning. I was quite shocked, enough to go and find out what I'd done wrong. (2 dupes).
    – Tim
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 17:33
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    Why are we warning people about meta.stackexchange.com ? Most people won't even know of its existence let alone ever need to go to it.
    – Marco Ceppi Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 17:42
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    The "take it to MSE" stuff is mostly nonsense. You will get more attention (for good or for worse) but there is no "need" to post anything on MSE vs your local meta. And of course they close dupes even if the master doesn't have an answer. How many duplicate feature requests or bug reports do we need? Otherwise, this is true. Ask Ubuntu is very laid back compared to the rest of the network :-)
    – Seth Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 17:48
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    Don't worry, I'll always love ya man!
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 18:17
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    Don't forget to bring unicorns ;)
    – Mateo
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 20:35
  • @MarcoCeppi MSE publicity stunt! It's such an attention whore!
    – Jason C
    Commented Jul 31, 2014 at 2:01

2 Answers 2

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  • They have a very strong policy against duplicates, to the extent that questions get closed as duplicates even when the original question has no answer.

  • Asking two duplicate questions (even if upvoted) already leads to a warning about a possible question ban.

  • The same may happen if your feature-request gets (massively) downvoted - post quality and acceptance of opinion are not clearly separated.

Meta Stack Exchange is not a child meta site. It's a full-fledged stack exchange, just like the Ask Ubuntu main site. As such, yes, it has its own reputation system, along with all the same mechanisms for post bans that you'll find on the main site.

Just like any other Stack Exchange network site, all the same rules about doing prior research, not posting duplicate questions, etc., all still apply. Heck, those things are supposed to apply to child metas as well, so I don't understand where your apparent surprise is coming from.

Also, Meta Stack Exchange actually has less strict parameters for getting post-banned than on other Stack Exchange sites (it's supposed to be about 6x less strict, it's in an MSE post somewhere). You'd have to work pretty hard at being awful in order to earn a post ban on MSE. Here's a tip: before you start making unpopular feature requests, go answer a few support questions, so that if your request does get downvoted, then you won't be so close to a question-ban.

Finally, just like on a child meta, Meta Stack Exchange's voting combines post quality and agreement/disagreement into a single upvote/downvote.

See also Get rid of the question ban on Meta; suspend actively harmful users manually.

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I have completely the opposite experience about using Meta.SE. My most upvoted question in the whole network is a MSE question. Half of my top 10 network wide questions are on MSE. Only 1 of my questions is net negative. I don't even have downvoted answers.

Yet, I can't say the same about meta.AU, and I'm here, participating. That you had a bad experience with a site doesn't mean that a) everybody will b) you will continue having one.

If you think your concern is of the entire network, or that impact the whole network, afraid not, any meta will do.

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