Alas – looks like I accidentally made what was supposed to be a hidden, internal-use-only field publicly accessible. (Upon reflection I'm actually sort of okay with users having the ability to toggle the flag, but if we were going to go down that route obviously I'd want to make it much more clear what it does, and build better UI for controlling it).
Over the past few weeks we've been quietly rolling out and trialing the Related Questions feature. It's been publicly available but we haven't announced it and mostly it's being used by members of the LessWrong team as we attempt to answer some complex questions, to verify that the Questions feature can be used the way we're hoping.
The basic idea is this: when answering a hard question, the first step is often to factor it into easier sub-questions – sometimes lots of subquestions, which helps you to frame your thinking about the problem. We want it to be easy to spawn 20 subquestions to a problem. But we don't want those 20 questions to show up on the frontpage as posts.
So, questions created through the "Related Question" UI element have their "hiddenRelatedQuestion" flag set to "true", which makes them not show up in primary post lists. (They still show up on the User's profile page, in Recent Discussion, and on the /questions page).
We recently rolled out some UI improvements to Related Questions to make it easier to see how sub-questions and sub-sub-questions will look. You can get a sense of it looking at lessestwrong, our "beta" site where we sometimes test things out.
The best example is here:
Or, the current lesswrong.com version is here:
We have plans to make "hiddenRelatedQuestions" got toggled back to false in some circumstances (such as, the question getting highly upvoted). I think it's actually fine for users to manually set some of their related questions to show up on the frontpage, as long as it's an intentional choice and they don't spam it.
But, obviously, that field should not show up in it's current form, apologies for the weird extra field in your editor form. Will fix that soon.
What is this? I just noticed it (I see it when editing one of my posts):