Tavern on the Meta

Interesting coincidence that they posted the first one today... I think it was already planned... I'm sure it was... I did say that it might be good to wait to post the question as it sounded like they were about to do some posts about Channels.

Journeyman Geek

@Catija zero inside knowledge there ;p

I actually kinda worked out the outline of what I wanted on a bus that morning

Catija

Inside knowledge?

We're going to use some of the blog posts to discuss our thinking on this. I believe the first post is going to cover it. — bluefeet ♦ Nov 6 at 21:27

^ That's pretty... outside?

Journeyman Geek

I mean as far as timing

Catija

Ah. Sure.

Journeyman Geek

I actually worked out the broad idea of what I wanted to write, and what I wanted to reference in my head on a boring bus ride that morning.

Catija

12:58 AM

Yeah... I've done that while driving or cooking... or other stuff... unfortunately, I often lose half of it before I get to writing it down... I think I need to find a way to record mental thoughts.

Time to go home... Whee!

Shog9

Kinda interesting... The comment from enderland prompted me to look at Google Analytics' data on blog traffic.

A year ago, it was essentially nothing, a sliver of what went to MSE on a daily basis. Now it oscillates between maybe a third more and twice the visitors MSE gets.

(granted, most read one post and leave, while somewhat more stick around on MSE - but that's hardly unusual)

Ties into what I said earlier today about novelty though. If there isn't something fresh to read on a regular basis, folks tend to forget it exists.

(and... without Reader, so do your "recommended reading" tools)

Catija

I don't know... I read the Good Subjective; Bad Subjective post a lot...

Shog9

You kinda have a special reason to be interested in it though...

Jon Ericson

Everybody's an outlier sometimes.

user202362

so ... paid this so called PR specialist to help promoting a website/blog, the person brought a herd of spammers instead

Catija

1:07 AM

I used to access it daily for IPS meta questions.

user202362

now cleaning up the aftermaths of 27,665 spams

Catija

Does the analytics show which pages get attention?

Shog9

@Catija yup

The oldest page in the top 10 is from May

The rest, Aug Sept Oct

(that's for the past week)

Taking into account all page views for the past year, the top posts are all... From the past year.

Page #2 leads with a post from 2016

Finally on page #6 there's an old post - probably because we link to it from /questions/ask

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 ._. I run my own rss aggregator thing, but I'm an outlier.

Shog9

The two oldest posts in the top 100 are 1 and 2, and I'm guessing they catch a bunch of searchers who don't necessarily even know what they're in for.

A theory of moderation - linked to in every election - is at #114

One of my favorite books from childhood, Fred Allen's sorta-memoir "Treadmill to Oblivion", ends with a couple of pages reflecting on the state of his former profession (radio comedy) and the factors that influenced its rise and eventual demise. Within them can be found these two paragraphs (shortened slightly)... I think they've aged pretty well:

> Radio was the first free entertainment ever given to the public. Since it was piped into homes it was a service similar to running water. When the novelty of the shows wore off many people had more respect for running water than they did for radio. A house owner who would never think of speaking disrespectfully of the water in his house would rant around his radio set, sounding off about the dubious merits of some program he had just heard.
Radio could not survive because it was a by-product of advertising. Ability, merit and talent were not requirements of writers and actors working in …

Journeyman Geek

1:22 AM

@Shog9 on the other hand, you can only listen to "Friday" so many times...

Shog9

Once every week?

Journeyman Geek

52 times too often ? ;)

Jon Ericson

@Telkitty Surely the collective noun would be a 'V1@gra of spammers'.

Shog9

Folks may remember old posts fondly, as they remember their favorite sitcom or drama... But mostly they read whatever's fresh, watch whatever's on.

If you want to get folks' attention, you gotta post... constantly.

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 I kinda disagree somewhat, but, I wouldn't have written a slightly rambly MSE post otherwise.

Shog9

1:24 AM

@JourneymanGeek well, this is why I tend to prefer meta.

user202362

@JonEricson not just that, but also selling t-shirts, adult sites, steroids, 'legal drugs', tickets and mostly brain dead praises of any blog (no targeted)

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 well, I admit, meta has a certain appeal, but meta (and chat's) very good for certain kinds of things, and not others

Meta works best for insiders. I kinda think (admittedly potentially uncharitably!) that essentially having the blog as a sort of article mill dosen't reflect that well.

Shog9

I wrote this almost four years ago, based on a conversation in this very room. It didn't get a lot of editing and no one reviewed it, I did nothing to promote it... And it still collects a regular stream of votes and views.

It has doubtless saved me countless hours of arguing and debate.

I can't readily point to anything I ever posted on the blog that came close to that in terms of work vs reward.

user202362

typical spamming comment would look like this:

user202362

Hey very nice web site!! Guy .. Beutiful .. Superb .. I will bookmark
your blog andd take the feeds additionally?

Journeyman Geek

1:27 AM

@Telkitty <3 akmiset for that

@Shog9 while SE is different (for one, SE's about content over a service) - I was thinking of stuff like backblaze or cloudflare's blog.

user202362

random praises from bots is not what I am looking for ...

Journeyman Geek

I mean, SE's core "products" have changed little over time but...

Jon Ericson

@Shog9 I think "Respect your Community" is right up there. But it would have worked just as well as a meta post I bet.

Journeyman Geek

eh, in the sense of what they do

Shog9

@JonEricson Heh... it would've... because the biggest outcome of that post were two feature-changes: migration rejection and a 60-day limit on migrations.

@JourneymanGeek an endless series of posts that boiled down to "here are interesting ways to use Stack Overflow" would be a huge hit, I suspect.

Journeyman Geek

1:34 AM

@Shog9 or somewhat similarly with SO careers.

Shog9

(unfortunately, we just lost the person who would've been the champion of such an idea)

Journeyman Geek

Maybe its just me but "5 resources to learn lolcat" kinda...

Shog9

Maybe when @Jon's done sunsetting things, he'll be fired up to write more about lessons learned from running sockpuppets.

Journeyman Geek

hah

Jon Ericson

Oh boy. Yeah. I've got a giant backlog of things I want to write.

Journeyman Geek

1:38 AM

:(

(and ugh. I was trying to balance "We want nice things" with "Being an ass about it")

I really do hope I didn't tip over to the being an ass side.

Jon Ericson

Fun fact: a year ago I thought it would be fun to be a blog freelancer. I wrote two posts and one of them was published. It didn't take much time to write and the pay was decent. But it's so hard to get excited about writing something for someone else's blog.

Shog9

So... Question for whoever's bored and just now realizing it isn't Friday or Happy Hour:

When I joined this team, the primary responsibility of a CM was to write - to document effective ways to use the site, to use the tools, to work-around the deficiencies of the tools, to adopt policies that were mutually beneficial...

Somewhere along the line, we kinda picked up a lot of... detritus... in terms of our responsibilities. Everything from end-user support (I got a couple of deletion queues I should clear out...) to quality assurance to feature design to playing PR rep of sorts on behalf of different teams.

Not to knock any of that in general - work that needs to be done is good work - but I'm not entirely convinced we have the balance right. I kinda think we should be doing less contingency planning and more watching and writing about what we see.

So... Given the choice... What would you rather see: more consideration given to bugs and features, more insight into company plans, or more discussion of how Stack Overflow is and can be used effectively today?

2

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 Well, over the past few years, (maybe especially as the network grows), it feels a lot like we interact less with the folks who run the network. Its better for me as a mod I suppose, but you guys are a lot less visible.

To a certain extent, that's mitigated a ton by the 'system' that's both set up and has fallen into place.

To me, the "ideal" is basically for you guys to kinda act slightly more as a bridge between SE corporate (and I get the slight feeling that some in the community feel a distance there, especially outside SO) and the community than you are now

Bugs need squishing, but understanding where we are and where we're going probably helps a lot in using the sites effectively

Shog9

@JourneymanGeek big part of that is simply scale. There are a dozen of us and an awful lot of you. The size of the team hasn't kept pace with the growth of the network (and... well, now it's kinda taken a big step backwards)

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 that it has

I think a few of us were kinda expecting the CM team size to go the other way tbh

Shog9

1:52 AM

Which is pretty much what's prompted my line of thinking here. Keeping up with the growth in demand was already a struggle, but I was kinda holding out hope that we could maybe bring on a couple more savvy people, buckle down and make it work, do it all, make everyone happy.

Journeyman Geek

Also, kinda why I probably shouldn't complain. We should be aware y'all work your butts off.

hah, ya

Shog9

...that's... well, it was probably wishful thinking to start with, but now it's super naive. Gotta pick some areas to focus on and be really clear that the rest is gonna have to sort itself out.

Journeyman Geek

eh, things won't be strained for long hopefully, and SO finds their moneymaking groove? ;p

Shog9

If that happens, great. But even at best, that's a bad short-term strategy ;-)

So on the bright side, spending more energy compiling and prioritizing feature-requests is clearly not necessary - there's a massive backlog already, and best-case scenario that's not getting cleared until sometime next year.

Journeyman Geek

heh. Yeah

Jon Ericson

1:56 AM

@JourneymanGeek I've been thinking the last few weeks that it would be nice to have an ombudsman. Would have been nice while we were shutting down Documentation to have a voice who knows the inside scoop, but is independent of management. Now is a bad time to suggest a new position, however. Plus, I don't know how well it would actually work.

Journeyman Geek

@JonEricson eh, dosen't the community do that? ;p

Cause if nothing else, we have opinions

Jon Ericson

But not always all the information. :-(

Journeyman Geek

ah, true

Shog9

Honestly, we've always sorta talked about mods as though they were to be de-facto ombudsmen. We've just sorta waffled on what that actually means.

Jon Ericson

They do have the necessary independence.

Journeyman Geek

1:59 AM

But not always the information ;p

Shog9

The email every new moderator gets includes the line, "The job is, essentially, to act as a liaison — someone who links the Stack Exchange team with the individual communities."

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 natch. And eventually realising how to do that.

Shog9

But we aren't consistent on two fronts there:

- providing mods with detailed advance information

- providing mods with information on how to bring concerns to our attention

Again, this is sort of a failure to scale: when there were a few dozen moderators, replying to the email they got that welcomed them to the team was a pretty obvious and effective way to open and maintain that communications channel.

...that email is currently "do-not-reply@" for every elected moderator.

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 well, there's ways for us to tell you stuff (and that gets looked at, eventuallyish). If its something non public, there's no real way for that at the moment

@Shog9 I think enough time in the room that shall not be named, and people work out that you can use team/<otherthing>@stackoverflow.com or contact us.

Shog9

@JourneymanGeek yeah. But... Only a portion of all moderators spend that time.

Journeyman Geek

2:03 AM

True

Shog9

There's a help center article that documents it too, but...

Journeyman Geek

And it gets fun when you have site full of fresh pro-tems

Shog9

Even there, we're kinda vague as to when or what the scenarios for contact should be.

Journeyman Geek

yup

I think most of my CM contacts have been vote invalidations, and that one troll ;p

Shog9

And so in a lot of cases, we've just sorta made up for it by brute force: lots of manual monitoring, jumping into conversations, showing up out of nowhere to answer meta posts...

...and that also doesn't scale. Especially when the number of people doing it is growing inversely to the number of people needing it.

Journeyman Geek

2:05 AM

Well in theory, mods/"powerusers" pick up the meta slack except when official policy is in question

Anonymous

just need to open source the software, then you can replace the rest of the devs with a well-funded community team. ;)

Journeyman Geek

lol

@JeremyBanks from what I've seen, if they wanted to expand the community team, competition would be... pretty stiff

Shog9

@JourneymanGeek which is kinda what led to the question I asked above: I'm starting to suspect our increasingly limited time is better spent providing information to mods and power users for them to disseminate / interpret / question / act upon.

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 in practice though, that might not scale that well

Not taking into account SO (I'm unfamiliar with it) - people with that level of engagement are pretty rare

Shog9

Drawing a parallel to Stack Overflow proper, Google with all of its resources can't devote enough people and skill to train Android developers; they rely on their staff to write documentation, provide limited training, etc. and a much larger group of experts to disseminate that information on places like Stack Overflow.

Journeyman Geek

2:09 AM

and least on some smaller sites , I do worry about burnout- some of them are pretty heavy in terms of soft moderation workload.

(SU is generally easy ;p)

Shog9

2nd-party experts in a given area don't scale either - but with a bit of luck, there are enough of them to get the information in an accessible format for moderately-skilled novices to understand. There are a lot more of them...

...and they in turn are able to pass it on to the vast ranks of complete novices.

Journeyman Geek

Or try to anyway ;p

Shog9

(After adding lots of security flaws, of course)

Journeyman Geek

of course

user202362

android documentations used to be terrible

Anonymous

2:10 AM

Never mind teaching the broader community, when I was at Google they needed to bring in external help to train their own devs on Android. :P

Journeyman Geek

Likewise - we can interpret what we get off you guys + add common sense but...

eh, actually that's not something I can complain about. I manage to get enough influence to do that sort of thing effectively off SU ;p

Catija

@Shog9 I probably link to that more than any other meta post... It's a good post. The fruit helps. :D

Journeyman Geek

and I can think of a few other folks who do

Shog9

@JeremyBanks Remember when we created a subsite for Facebook under the assumption that they'd devote a ton of people to answering questions? Eh-heh-heh-heh...

Anonymous

😬

Journeyman Geek

2:15 AM

lol

@Shog9 unexpected result of HTTPS - that gets slightly more annoying. ;p

Shog9

As they say, things are tough all over.

Journeyman Geek

Seems so :(

Catija

@Shog9 Was it you that linked to that article about growth in tech and how you have to expect your job description to pretty much change entirely every six months?... I feel like that sounds a lot like what you're talking about here.

Anonymous

@Shog9 I would like to take another shot as Stack Sherif.

Journeyman Geek

@JeremyBanks and be a font of moderation? (Yes, that's serif. And sheriff. Lets just split the difference for a bad pun)

Anonymous

2:22 AM

I'm going to kern the behaviour.

user202362

do you see what I see? :p

user202362

also not sure data source reliable ...

Journeyman Geek

@Telkitty netcraft is dead, BSD confirms it.

also % statistics over what + what does active mean + lies, damned lies and pretty graphs.

Catija

2:27 AM

@JonEricson I've actually been thinking about whether it would make sense for there to be mods on MSE and I wonder if these might also fill this need... The people selected for that position could act more like an ombudsman and having a diamond on MSE would give their posts a special air of authority.

user202362

apache still dominates though (according to the stats)

user202362

lol ... sun microsystems, talking about things we once knew but forgotten ...

Jon Ericson

@Catija Interesting. Out of curiousity, what prompted you to think of MSE mods?

Anonymous

https://meta.stackexchange.com/election/0

Catija

@Shog9 I have to admit... one of the things I've found amazing and part of why I haven't been screaming for help on IPS is the camaraderie of the other mods and their willingness to wade in to some of the tough meta questions. It's made my job easier when the local users weren't ready to step in to that role.

Shog9

2:31 AM

@JeremyBanks cool. Shoot me an email, please?

Anonymous

roger.

Catija

@JonEricson Flag handling, mostly... whether that's migrations or unilateral close votes on bad content... yes, the users do an amazing job at that and the staff do, too but I was thinking that the traffic on MSE was enough that it seems like even the day-to-day mod "job" on MSE was likely something that didn't need to be relegated to staff, particularly now.

user202362

need to clear up some 15000+ reminding spams so I can upgrade server, having a 11 pages development guideline from local government I need to read & really need to think about how to resurrect my windows phone app, so g2g 4 now :p

Catija

@Shog9 I can think of at least one example, annually, where you do this... when asking the sites if they want to participate in Winterbash. This may not be the best example but it's an easy one.

Jon Ericson

@Catija I'm gonna mull over that next week. I've not been excited about non-employee MSE mods in the past. But it would be nice to outsource flag handling now that we have fewer people looking. If it could solve other problems at the same time, the idea is doubly interesting.

Journeyman Geek

2:39 AM

@JonEricson I thought ~~the~~ one reason for all MSE mods being employees is the super seekrit chatrooms?

Catija

@JonEricson I think the concern I've heard people voice in the past is PII... and I can understand that. I've heard of some people quitting a site entirely due to a new mod getting a diamond. I'd hate for people to be afraid to come to MSE for that reason.

Journeyman Geek

@Catija least for some things, this place handles deletion and nuking automatically

@Catija I can think of a few people who're probably mostly controversy free - who'd complain about say, Monica ;p

Catija

@JourneymanGeek I'm guessing they can figure that out... ? Surely they could add some walls. :D

Journeyman Geek

@Catija I suppose it comes down to whether the dev work is worth the additional help on site

Catija

@JourneymanGeek I saw lots of posts closed and deleted by Oded. That was part of his magic.

Journeyman Geek

2:44 AM

@Catija Yeah, but reliance on modhammers doth not scale too well too

<3 oded, and all buuuut

"Mod" time's best spent on the less routine stuff?

Catija

I think we're going at it from two different directions...

Journeyman Geek

Possibly

@Telkitty with the last....ehhh windows phone needs resurrection too ;p

(Historically - before my time, I recall trilogy mods had moderator powers on MSO? I'm just not sure that 'regular' closures and nukes are really the situation where having a flag-wrangler around helps)

Catija

The CMs and other staff obviously spend time on MSE "cleaning up" stuff. Maybe they're doing it in their free time while waiting for stuff to compile but I regularly see posts deleted by several of them. At least one of those high-volume actors no longer has those abilities which means that the users and other staff now have to pick up that shortfall. Yes, the users can do it... but it takes a lot more work to delete bad content if you're relying on them.

Having a couple-three non-staff mods who can help out with that (and other flags) would lighten the load.

Journeyman Geek

true

and it would be easier than marco-poloing close/devotes all the time? ;p

Catija

Yes.

So... yes, "Mod time is best spent on less routine stuff"... but staff time is more valuable than mod time and more rare.

Journeyman Geek

2:52 AM

ya

(but I'm PROBABLY thinking of staff ~ mods and the half hour a day mod minimum and... )

ehh

Total mixed feelings XD

bjb568

"shortly"

Shog9

3:19 AM

Moderation stats, MSE, last 365 days:

Action                                  Moderators Community
--------------------------------------- ---------- ---------
Users suspended                              163        106
Users destroyed                              138          0
Users deleted                                  6          0
Users contacted                              180          0
Tasks reviewed: Suggested Edit queue         139       4271
Tasks reviewed: Reopen Vote queue             48       2042
Tasks reviewed: Low Quality Posts queue       31       1301

@Catija ^

Catija

> Questions closed 1362 3096

That's... pretty much exactly what I'm talking about.

Shog9

Yeah, this is true in many areas; moderators (staff) already handle only a fraction of the work on MSE

Catija

Along with the deleted numbers.

Shog9

Which is good

Catija

That's like a quarter each of the questions closed and deleted and there's only like 10-12 diamonds on MSE?

Shog9

3:24 AM

uh...

Catija

Am I reading it wrong?

Journeyman Geek

@Catija least in theory, something like 30?

Catija

I'm guessing that a lot of those 30 don't necessarily spend a lot of time on MSE.

Journeyman Geek

nope

Shog9

There are currently 66 users with moderation rights on MSE

Journeyman Geek

3:25 AM

@Shog9 completely unscientific wildass guess

Shog9

Which isn't to say most of 'em actually do much moderation, but... Not really lacking for warm bodies so to speak

Journeyman Geek

(I guesstimated maybe a dozen in SRE, Dev and CM teams)

Shog9

(Also one reason why I'm a HUGE fan of eschewing blog comments in favor of meta posts)

Journeyman Geek

On the other hand, meta is... kinda hard to get your head around, especially as far as metamoderation (and moderation goes) least for me

Catija

... I've already explained why I think it would be helpful. The info you posted doesn't (to me) disagree with what I expected... it seems like the 66 people who have diamonds on MSE are doing a ton of the work.

Shog9

3:28 AM

84 users have had moderator rights on MSE at some point during the past 365 days (and thus have the potential to be represented in the stats I posted above)

Journeyman Geek

... ow

Shog9

(I'm not presenting an argument here, just data)

MSE is complicated... For lots of reasons

We've always sorta been open to the idea of appointed or elected moderators there, but in a certain sense it's one more thing to deal with as much as it is a potential aid

Journeyman Geek

@Shog9 its another one of those "things unique to SE" ;p

Anonymous

You could take it back to the old days of sharing mods with Stack Overflow. ;)

Shog9

@JeremyBanks SO, SU and SF - but only the special few that got grandfathered in ;-P

Anonymous

3:32 AM

ah, right

Shog9

@JeremyBanks BTW, I got your email - will respond tomorrow when fully awake :)

Anonymous

Sounds good. (:

Catija

Um... how did community suspend 106 people?

Shog9

oh right, there's usually a pile of footnotes I attach to those stats

Journeyman Geek

@Catija spam/abusive flags?

Shog9

3:35 AM

@Catija read footnotes here so's I don't have to copy 'em

Catija

Ah, thanks.

user202362

@Shog9 proves that you really need to pay people to do the boring jobs >_<

user202362

who wants to be a mod if there is no power to abuse </trollololo>

user202362

clearing trash/spam, 2% completed ...

Shog9

can't spell abuse without u s e

user202362

3:41 AM

registered abuser

Shog9

also can't spell abuse without a b s

Journeyman Geek

@Telkitty I hardly ever cackle gleefully when suspending people ._.

user202362

what if the things you suspended were socks?

user202362

Catija

Maybe that explains it... I use the site a lot but I have no abs... well, at least not discernible ones.

Journeyman Geek

3:43 AM

@Telkitty those are always fun, but one of the other mods tends to get them first.

user202362

3:58 AM

mass deletion causing database to go berserk ...

user202362

only deleted like 700 -800 so far

user202362

4:13 AM

at this rate, this cleaning operation is going to take me 20 hours

Shog9

what a long day... Time for some sardines and toast

user202362

like ... there are always 24 hours in a day ... so if you feel it's long, it's because reaction is faster? it's all about relativity! </trollololo>

Feeds

5:04 AM

When we started distributing special status tokens that signify which people are important enough to join an elite group, we never could have imagined we might be creating some problems down the line.

Journeyman Geek

.... that alt-text ;p

Anonymous

5:44 AM

♦️

Travis J

6:09 AM

@Feeds Needs moar orange.

@Shog9 With regards to that... I had this idea earlier

user202362

Travis J

That is a rooster stuck in a chickens body

user202362

what if ... twitter was originally featuring a chicken ...

Travis J

maybe clucker just didn't sound right

Journeyman Geek

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/303061/… cvs please!

Travis J

6:19 AM

dun

Travis J

6:37 AM

So Shog asked a question earlier for people who were bored or inclined, and being mostly the latter, and slightly the former I wrote this novel that I am now going to wall of text here into chat. Sorry.

@Shog9 To me, some of the posts which I place the utmost value on were the ones where the SE team (or I guess technically now termed the SO team, I liked SE better) reflected on issues the community was stuck on or confused about. I have probably read all of your major posts, as well as similarly authoritative posts from other team members (Jaydles, Tim Post, Jon Ericson, etc.) so I think I have a decent grasp of the history involved in the type of communication given.

Some of my favorites were when the team was hand in hand with the community - trying to solve the issue of one meta for everyone, the issue of a the first flag queue being so wasteful, the issue of 6 figure close vote queues, the issue of close vote reasons, the issue of duplicate closure, and so on. The Stack Overflow community is priceless, and because of the way that the company has been run, very much willing to help with their time, insights, or even partial feature constructions.

So, to answer your question, as to which one of the options I would rather see given attention, I would very strongly argue the one which causes the largest amount of interaction with the community; and, I would argue that the best way to engage in that would be to actively take part in the issues which divide the exchange. Bridging divides will allow users to focus on content instead of meta, which is murder afterall.

When users cannot post an answer to a question without needing a meta discussion after, there is a problem. When users cannot case a downvote without needing a meta discussion after, there is a problem. These two examples are not new issues, but that does not mean they are solved. It also does not necessarily mean that there needs to be some discourse which can "fix" the problem. In all honesty, this is were just a community issue it would have worked itself out already.

There are available tools and features that can be implemented to address the problems, and finding out what they are is just as important as explaining the why behind the larger corporate moves. The blog explains those, and moreover, the community has little say in the larger decisions so there isn't really much to talk about aside from bike shedding.

This probably reads as an incoherent stream of consciousness, which is a fair surmisal, but that is because you asked in chat and I just typed it all in this little textarea without any fancy markdown editor :P

user202362

7:03 AM

@TravisJ birds chirp, they don't tweet :p

Travis J

Rockin' Robin (Original)

►

Magisch

8:07 AM

@Shog9 Would it really be though? I imagine the functions of a moderator on MSE would be very contained. Delete spam and blatant OT, handle flags and escalate as necessary. Where would the extra work for the community team be in that?

For bonus lazyness just pick someone who won't need much training and/or already is a mod somewhere

Or someone who is just always here, like ShadowWizard or Journeyman Geek

I imagine there'd be a lot of people willing to do this that are also qualified.

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch or just give closehammers/delhammers by tag ;p

Magisch

That would require more effort to just slap a diamond on 2-3 people who know what they're doing

Actual dev effort, that is

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch I suspect its PII + internal SE workings being visible to diamond mods on MSE

Magisch

Meta.SE is probably the easiest site to moderate out of all of them

Literally just janitor work

Journeyman Geek

Slightly more complex than making me agree to a mod agreement and setting me loose on an unsuspecting superuser.com.

Magisch

8:11 AM

Heh

Unless there is some hacky code somewhere that assumes mod on MSE means employee, I don't think there'd be a downside to just appointing some for MSE. Would save the community team from having to babysit it and people from having flags sit for months

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch Well, not all dev team employees are mods

its semi optional

Travis J

@JourneymanGeek I agree. I don't think the concern is so much about the work the mod would do, so much as the access they may have as a result of the current setup assuming that MSE mods are employees.

Journeyman Geek

Yup

Magisch

Thats a variable for sure

Well if they ever hold a MSE election, I'd probably run for that

Journeyman Geek

lol

Travis J

8:17 AM

There would certainly be some fierce competition in the first election.

I wouldn't run, there are a lot of highly qualified people for that.

I would #popcorn though for sure

Journeyman Geek

Would be interesting to say the least ;)

Magisch

Heh

running and losing is better then not trying at all

Travis J

I am not worried about losing, frankly I would be equally worried about winning lol

Being a mod is a lot of work and time

I am kinda maxed out right now running two companies

I could use a nice Maui trip, or some Turks and Caicos or something right about now lol

Magisch

@TravisJ Advantages of a 39 hour week

Travis J

I work from about 10am-5pm and then 8pm-3am every weekday

In Germany, isn't there a lot of mandatory vacation time too?

user202362

8:33 AM

8pm - 3am @_@

Travis J

yeah, halfway through it atm (its 12:30am)

currently designing db tables

Magisch

@TravisJ 25 days / year

23 if you're an apprentice

(assuming full time work, part timers get however much % of that as their time is. So if someone works half time, they get 50% of the mandatory vacation days)

Travis J

Nice, definitely have time for travelling

The Greek Isles are kinda close by train I think, one overnight gets you there

Journeyman Geek

Well, unemployed at the moment, so in theory I have nothing but time

in practice, ugh,

Magisch

Not everyone has money to go on trips :p

Travis J

8:46 AM

I was young and broke once :P I once slept in a $5 room (which was kind of like basically a small kitchen with a bench as a bed).

Had a great time, may have been intoxicated.

Derpy

@ShadowWizard does that matter since that "snarky comment" is often used as a valid "downvote to oblivion" reason by community common consents?

Travis J

I don't think that post got downvoted into oblivion.

Maybe if you give it some time, community consensus can take a while. After a year type that exact sentence into Google and you should find this page in chat telling you that consensus can take a while.

wow

Where is the red alert button?

I wonder if that was handled automatically by flags. Perhaps someone can destroy the user account? So the question was removed... but the user remains

@balpha ^?

balpha

9:02 AM

yeah, the flags took care of the posts

I destroyed the user

Travis J

\o/

Magisch

I wonder balpha, does MSE have hacky code that assumes mod on mse = employee?

Like the code that used to assume mod on more then 3 sites = employee?

balpha

@Magisch no, employee is a dedicated account type

moderator is a user type

alexolut

The last day there is no builds for site ... what's going on? Is it a result of employee reduction?

Magisch

@balpha I know there used to be an issue with code that assumed someone with 3+ diamonds was an employee

And that that came to light only when a user achieved it

Andrew T.

9:13 AM

._.

balpha

@Magisch yeah, but a) that was chat, not MSE, and b) that was only for listing (or excluding from being listed) people in the TL "whois" bot, there were no permissions assigned based on that

we're stupid but not that stupid :)

@alexolut hmm good point, there are 27 commits in the queue :\

I guess we should deploy that

Travis J

ducks

alexolut

@balpha Is there a place where ordinary user can see build logs, at least date of them?

balpha

no, not beyond the build indicator in the bottom right of the page

alexolut

sad

ruSO still has rev 2017.11.7.27655, but MSE already got rev 2017.11.10.27682 ... why? @balpha

balpha

9:28 AM

because meta is already deployed, the rest of the network has 1m 5s left

we deploy in two tiers: first MSO and MSE, make sure nothing is horribly broken, and then the rest

check now

alexolut

Oh ... true. I already read about it somewhere ... but forgot.

updated!

Andrew T.

9:46 AM

I think I missed a full day conversation due to moving on (physically)

Journeyman Geek

10:12 AM

@AndrewT. missed quite a lot ;p

Fawad

11:03 AM

Hello

why can’t I keep 1 seperate account for my dumb questions?

Journeyman Geek

11:17 AM

@Fawad why ask dumb questions?

Having a secondary account is , eh, not that bad

having it to get around any sort of suspension or ban is... kinda lame

Optimus Prime

It's been so long since I am inactive in group

now need a help from @JourneymanGeek

Journeyman Geek

hmm?

Optimus Prime

do you know how to clear the clipboard caching problem in ms excel

I have to copy paste few email and mobile numbers from chrome to excel. It's works without any issues outside of excel. but in excel, it keeps pasting the previous data

had to paste -> remove -> paste -> remove 5-6 times to get exact data pasted

Journeyman Geek

err

no

I try not to use excel ;p

Optimus Prime

11:32 AM

no other choice

Andrew T.

never heard of that issue in Excel... that said, AFAIK when highlighted cells are used as a copy-source, they will have "the marching ants" border, and to remove it, just press ESC button?

So... copy from Chrome, paste in Excel, press ESC, rinse & repeat?

Optimus Prime

whoa. that solved it

Thanks @Elias

O_O I remember your name. still

Andrew T.

caching

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