Or you could type "black bar" and find the answer?

I had no idea seeing this black bar meant a death. I thought it meant a rendering error and gave a half second to reload the page, say hunh it's still there, and go on to something else. I came away with the impression somebody got design-y and changed things up for no real reason.

Edit: and for all the talk on this page about the bar, very little is being said about the man. Here's his Wikipedia page for anybody interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_P._Thacker

> I'm not trying to be snippy, but the answer is generally on the front page. Or you could type "died" into the search box and choose most recent.

But that presupposes you know this black bar indicates someone's death, which is not the case of the person asking the question in the first place.

A thin black bar that occasionally appears with no context is pretty information-sparse imo.

Look at every other venue for black bars... sports, military, flags at half mast... they never have a person's name on them. That just isn't how it's done.

Just making it clickable to link to the relevant post would be enough IMO. I never knew the black bar principle myself. Assuming knowledge is not the way to go.