Tavern on the Meta

Jason C

9:00 PM

That unexpectedly triggered a sudden weird nostalgia for BP's old logo.

bjb568

You kids and your oil nostalgia…

Jason C

Well, the one before the sunflower bullshit.

Sterling Archer

I've had way too much caffeine I'll stop

Jason C

@Shog Wait. I'm thinking about this more now. If you discovered a large quantity of unexpected new nipples on your body, your first stop would be HR?

Shog9

@JasonC if it simultaneously became apparent that your co-workers were missing them? Yeah... HR or police

Jason C

9:05 PM

The weirdest possible outcome I can think of is that HR corrects the issue.

I smell a short story.

Look out Readers Digest.

hichris123

Sometimes I wonder about our room owners...

rene

RO's in general? Or just the ones here?

hichris123

@rene I was referring to Jason. ;)

bluefeet

@hichris123 because nipples?

rene

hides

hichris123

9:19 PM

@bluefeet Because random topics such as those seem to spring from @JasonC's mind very... easily.

Braiam

why are we seeing a 22 MiB gif again?

rekire

That explains why my browser is loading that gif since 2 minutes

SmokeDetector

9:36 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Blacklisted website in answer: A question in a sentence of the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" by cloud three on english.stackexchange.com

rene

sd k

Jason C

→ 1 message moved to Sandbox

@bjb Check your image sizes first.

rene

Blames JasonC for load times in the Sandbox

Jason C

@hichris123 Nothing is random.

Sterling Archer

9:57 PM

You should see load times in the Orphan Gifs room on SO

hichris123

@JasonC except for you

Sterling Archer

it's a real browser crasher

Quill

well that transcript was fun

hichris123

10:14 PM

Hmm, I just noticed the "asking tips" page never says anything about an MVCE...

"Be specific" - well thanks, how?

Meta post time I guess...

S.L. Barth

....not that anybody actually reads that thing before they check the checkbox... :-(

hichris123

@S.L.Barth Well, I'd hope some people do.

But even if they do... that page is not very specific...

S.L. Barth

Well, at least it can be improved for the few that do read it.

hichris123

I guess taking your own advice doesn't happen. :P

@S.L.Barth yeah.

rene

until recently MCVE couldn't be found either when searched for in the help center...

S.L. Barth

10:23 PM

@hichris123 Advice? You mean tricking people into trying your ideas, to see if they work? :-P

But seriously, years of EULA's have already trained people into clicking "I agree" without reading.

hichris123

I know. But you can't fix that.

Unless you have some really creepy eye monitoring thingy...

S.L. Barth

The "asking tips" needs to be concise. The more text, the less chance anyone reads it.

I've even been thinking that we should create some kind of comic book version of our Help Center.

hichris123

How concise is too concise though? :/

If it's too brief, it doesn't help those that read it.

If it's too verbose, no one will read it.

S.L. Barth

....not an exact science. But anything over 1 page is too much.

Ideally it should fit on a smartphone screen.... but that just isn't going to fit.

hichris123

@S.L.Barth 1 page... double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt? :P

S.L. Barth

10:27 PM

@hichris123 Naturally :-)

If you want to add the MCVE to the "Asking Tips" page, it should indeed be in the "Be specific" part.

But explaining what an MCVE is, might be a bit much. Maybe we could add a single line.

"Ideally, add some example code that allows others to reproduce your problem".

hichris123

@S.L.Barth do people click the links though?

Maybe a question for @Shog9?

S.L. Barth

I don't have the data, Shog might have it.

Shog9

huh. Apparently we don't track views to those.

that's annoying

hichris123

Or no one clicks on them so you don't have any data. :P

Shog9

There's actually no metadata for that post at all

Braiam

10:32 PM

bad SE, very bad!

S.L. Barth

I don't think many people click it.

Imagine being a dev with a problem. You know about SO, but have never been a user yourself.

So you think, "I'll try asking these guys."

....and then you get this page in your face.

...but you already have an issue. Maybe you'll read this page and take it to heart, but at the end of the day, you have a problem to solve.

Mike Edenfield

...and then your question is closed as a dupe of "What is NullReferenceException" ?

S.L. Barth

...maybe, @MikeEdenfield, but that's not the way my story is going yet.

So this dev, needing help, has read the page. Would he bother to click even more links?

I don't think so, because he wants to get his problem solved. Today. Not after reading an entire Help Center.

(Ok, I'm exaggerating a bit there, but you get the point).

Mike Edenfield

ok. but what if the first page was saying, very clearly, "The best way to get your problem solved quickly is to make one of these."

wouldn't that motivate you to click and read?

S.L. Barth

That could actually work.

Mike Edenfield

10:39 PM

because 1. just making one may solve his problem, and 2. having one makes me want to solve his problem.

so problem gets solved, and now one more person knows the awesomeness of a MCVE

S.L. Barth

I like the idea. I'd like to see it as a feature-request, but I think it needs to be fleshed out a bit.

@Shog9, I was wondering - are there systems that look at the speed of reviewers?

Shog9

@S.L.Barth yes

S.L. Barth

Glad to hear it.

I once flagged a reviewer who did 14 (!!) Edit approvals in a minute.

After the flag was deemed helpful, the reviewer didn't do reviews for 2 days - the time of a review suspension.

But after that, said user continued to do this at the same breakneck speed.

hichris123

I can reject 14 edits in a minute...

Mike Edenfield

guess he really wanted that badge...

hichris123

10:48 PM

If they're all audits...

S.L. Barth

Audits were the only thing this user rejected.

@hichris123, the edits and the dialog box have a load time.

Quill

I've made more than 14 edits in a minute

hichris123

@S.L.Barth Not here... then again I have a 45 ms ping time to the SO servers.

S.L. Barth

@Quill please tell me it was just retags on otherwise fine posts.

Quill

nope and not on SO

S.L. Barth

10:51 PM

Anyways, in practice it's impossible to do 14 fair reviews in a minute.

Quill

not necessarily. there's probably edge cases

like completely just retagging and titles

hichris123

spam? stackoverflow.com/questions/35222751/…

Quill

but full rewrites are another thing

@hichris123 yes

hichris123

!!/report stackoverflow.com/questions/35222751/…

(for metasmoke)

!!/status

...

S.L. Barth

Flagged. The username is a very common name in India.

Quill

10:52 PM

!!/alive

hichris123

in Charcoal HQ on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, 33 secs ago, by hichris123

@Undo Smokey is down.

Quill

in related news, he hasn't been present in a while

hichris123

@Quill He might have left already... he was taking a trip this weekend.

welp.

hold on a few minutes.

Quill

you gonna run smokey locally?

tchrist

¿blinky blinky blinky?

Quill

10:55 PM

bill

hichris123

@Quill yes

Braiam

where was that userscript by normal that rewrite twitter links to prevent oneboxing

@ArtOfCode smokey is up again

hichris123

@SmokeDetector del

@ArtOfCode del

S.L. Barth

@Braiam Hurray!

Shog9

@hichris123 I went and scraped the logs. 11257 MCVE views in January

S.L. Barth

11:11 PM

@Shog9 Unique visits? I sometimes visit it too - when I add the link in a comment, I try it out to make sure I spelled it right.

Shog9

@S.L.Barth unique per day; if you visit the page every day, that'd count as 31 visits.

hichris123

@Shog9 If you don't mind doing a little more work... could you tell me how many people interact with the links on the "How to Ask" page? You can pick any one; it doesn't really matter.

S.L. Barth

@Shog9 I'm probably in those 11257 a few times then, although not 31 times.

Of course I might not be the only one who puts that link in comments.... and has done so often enough to know the address by heart.

Shog9

@hichris123 um. Lots. Like, 1K per day at least. Why?

hichris123

@Shog9 We were wondering if people would click on a link to the MCVE page or if it would just be ignored.

Shog9

11:17 PM

@hichris123 both

hichris123

So that means it would be worth the effort of adding a link to it?

Shog9

not necessarily

MCVE is pretty specialized advice

hichris123

Well I mean the page does talk about being specific...

And I don't think there's any better advice on how to be specific in asking your question.

Shog9

stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

That's already linked to from the sidebar

hichris123

And people really read that?

They go from a page titled "How to Ask" to a page named "How to Ask a Question"?

Mike Edenfield

11:21 PM

I'm string trying to figure out when we stopped calling it a SSCCE

MCVE sounds like some kind of screwy new Microsoft Certification

user202362

I think the usual way is: a newb comes & ask a question for the first time, gets negative feedback, either 1) quits or 2) learns how to ask a question better & gains knowledge

Shog9

@MikeEdenfield the guy who wrote SSCCE wasn't wild about it being used for that purpose. So he helped us write a different guide and we called it MCVE.

Mike Edenfield

Microsoft Certified Vole Engineer

Shog9

18

Q: Questions .. must describe the specific problem and include valid code to reproduce it

I would like to see one of the reasons for closing questions changed. Specifically as mentioned in a comment to the War of the closes (which I'll repeat here). I disagree with the wording of one possible suggestion. Questions concerning problems with code you’ve written must describe the ...

user202362

of course there are the lucky ones who ask good questions in their first try

Shog9

11:23 PM

60

Q: Can we create a Help Center topic that outlines what a SSCCE / MWE means for Stack Overflow?

We've been linking to http://sscce.org/ in one of the custom Off Topic reasons on Stack Overflow for a while now. I added that link because there's a ton of good advice there, but... It's not really ideal for a few reasons: It isn't particularly concise. Folks hate reading. Especially the folks...

discussion feature-request

S.L. Barth

@TelkittytheWebDeveloper What helps is a little hands-on guidance.

user202362

that would take effort, but if you can get a lot of volunteers to do it, it would be awesome

S.L. Barth

@TelkittytheWebDeveloper I invited a friend to the private beta for 3DPrinting.SE .

Shog9

@hichris123 13470 in January

S.L. Barth

I showed him around a bit.

This particular friend was answering first, only asking later. But I think it helped that I showed him how to get a good response here.

We have a lot of unwritten rules these days.

user202362

11:27 PM

Many people would help their friends, very few of strangers ...

S.L. Barth

@TelkittytheWebDeveloper Well, that's not entirely true. If few people would help strangers, SO would never have become this big.

hichris123

@Shog9 Is that significant? I'm never sure on SO scale...

Shog9

@hichris123 In the face of everyone asking questions on SO, it's tiny - a single-digit percentage.

Of course, it's still 13 thousand people

which is a lotta people

hichris123

Hmm, yeah. Not enough sadly. But what can you do...

Shog9

Kinda like how everyone I've ever met could move to Chicago and get murdered and Chicago wouldn't even blink. I'd still be pretty bummed about most of them.

Mike Edenfield

11:32 PM

if everyone I've ever met moved to Chicago it would get really lonely in Orlando

on the plus side, my ex-wife would be gone.

S.L. Barth

@hichris123 Well what we can do, was what we were discussing, right?

Shog9

It's like they say, every Chicago has a silver lining

Anyway...

hichris123

@S.L.Barth Well yeah. But even if it's 16% instead of say 8%... sure, you have a two-fold increase, but you still have to worry about the other 84%.

S.L. Barth

@hichris123 You can't save them all from themselves.

Shog9

@hichris123 What can you do? You make the information available. You make it as good as you can make it. And you realize that 90% of people won't read it and won't accept that they should have to do or know anything in order to get a pat on the back and a helping hand, but those few % who are willing to make the effort will at least have something worthwhile for their troubles.

S.L. Barth

11:35 PM

Well that was the idea @Shog9 - we were discussing if it would help, if we put the MCVE link at the top of the "How to Ask" page.

Shog9

@S.L.Barth I don't think so; not in the way the page is structured now at least. How to Ask is already there, and if you read that you're in decent shape (also, it links to MCVE). Problem is, /questions/ask is not optimally structured for people who are not diligent.

kind of a lot of negatives there

anyway

It would make sense, I think, to restructure it at some point.

We keep saying that

Then we say "that'll be the new PM's project!"

we... might be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to keeping PMs here

S.L. Barth

I had a different idea - offer the same information in the form of some kind of comic book.

Shog9

I'm all for it

but I can't really draw

user202362

Why move to Chicago, when you can move to New York, Chicago is almost a mini version of NY ... almost ...

hichris123

@Shog9 Tim's daughter can...

user202362

11:38 PM

P.S. I have never been to Chicago

hichris123

(the jobs ad)

Shog9

Chicago is not very much like NYC

S.L. Barth

I'd been thinking about a scenario, but it takes some creativity. You want to show a little more than a guy sitting behind a screen.

Shog9

You drive through Chicago and think, "what a terrible place to drive through". Then you try to drive through NYC and pine for Chicago.

You fly into Chicago and think, "what a dirty, janky airport". Then you fly into la guardia.

S.L. Barth

Well, I got to go. See you all!

Shog9

11:41 PM

@S.L.Barth 'nite! Keep thinking about it, if you come up with something good let us know.

user202362

Everything is by comparison - Chicago is a lot like NYC if you compare it to, say, Paris, kathmandu, Berlin or Beijing ... or even SF

hichris123

O'Hare is usually ranked as one of the worst US airports...

Although I guess LaGuardia is beneath it... wow.

Shog9

yeah... Imagine someone crushed Chicago like a soda-can and then built a bigger Chicago on top of it, and then put it on an island... That's NYC.

hichris123

And people live there?

Seems like a depressing place to live.

Shog9

Unless they escape. But that's harder than it sounds. I believe there's a movie about it.

hichris123

11:45 PM

imdb.com/title/tt0082340

Except IMDB is down...

Shog9

Escape from New York

Escape from New York is a 1981 American dystopian action film co-written, co-scored, and directed by John Carpenter. The film is set in a then near-future 1997 in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security prison. Ex-soldier Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is given 22 hours to find the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence), who has been captured by prisoners after the crash of Air Force One. Carpenter wrote the film in the mid-1970s as a reaction to the Watergate scandal. After the success of Halloween, he had enough influence...

user202362

@hichris123 Have you been to NYC? It's absolultely impressive to look at, very convenient. But I would be depressed to live there, because personally apartments reminds me of chicken cages stake on top of each other ...

hichris123

@TelkittytheWebDeveloper No, I haven't. But I have been to Chicago. ;)

Shog9

Chicago has better hotdogs too

hichris123

Don't forget the pizza!

Shog9

11:49 PM

eh... They're both pretty damn good.

user202362

When I said that Chicago is very similar to NYC I am really referring to 1) large number of finance related jobs & 2) high crime rate :p

tchrist