Tavern on the Meta

Today was a rough day for us - you'll notice that some folks no longer have diamonds. We had to make some tough decisions and cuts in order to continue to advance toward some pretty critical business goals. While we're usually very open and public about our operations, please allow some privacy for folks that have been affected; the biggest thing for anyone to take away from realizing what happened is that we're taking exceptional care of the folks that had to leave us [1/2]

Fawad

Tim’s post didn’t mention names hmm

Magisch

That is deliberate

to protect the privacy of affected people

Journeyman Geek

Nov 3 at 12:43, by Jaydles

All, we need to ask that folks not post lists of employees that appear to have lost their jobs in here. What’s happened isn’t a secret, and we’re willing to talk about the situuation, but a list of people who (presumably) lost their jobs being posted in public isn’t fair to the affected employees. I’m 100% clear that no one here meant any harm - the goal was just clarity, but we need to take the links down.

Derpy

12:40 PM

@JourneymanGeek Has Mannekenpix reopened his tavern?

Andrew T.

neckbeard

Journeyman Geek

@Derpy who?

Optimus Prime

It means.... are they got fired or relived themself?

Derpy

The Twelve Tasks of Asterix

The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (Les Douze travaux d'Astérix) is a 1976 Belgian/French animated feature film based on the Asterix comic book series. René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, the creators of the series, wrote the story and directed the film themselves; with co-direction by Pierre Watrin and the screenplay co-written by Pierre Tchernia, a friend of Goscinny and Uderzo. The movie was directed, produced and animated at Goscinny and Uderzo's own animation studio, Studios Idéfix and is the only Asterix animated film that has used the Xerography Process.. At the time the film received polarized reviews...

Journeyman Geek

@OptimusPrime basically "You're awesome but we had to adjust our headcount..."

Derpy

12:42 PM

> Finish a meal by Mannekenpix, the Belgian. The chef is famous for cooking gigantic meals for the Titans - the task is to eat one of his massive three-course meals "down to the last crumb". Obelix devours <CUT> and an elephant stuffed with olives. This exhausts the kitchen, but disappoints Obelix, who considers it "starters".

Fawad

Hope thing become good.

rene

waffles

Grr, bluefeet ....

Andrew T.

bluefeet ate the waffles

Optimus Prime

It's confusing. Joe didn't had a diamond previously. and still he don't have one.

Fawad

Blue waffles? What blue feet and waffles?

rene

12:44 PM

delv-pls 20K appium meta.stackexchange.com/questions/303072/… /cc @Bart @ShadowWizard @JourneymanGeek @TravisJ

Fawad

Ok. Bye now 👋

bluefeet

@rene wat??

Optimus Prime

he's complaining that you deleted the post using your diamond and hence wasted his del-request

Journeyman Geek

@OptimusPrime he did not want one.

Andrew T.

Hmm... the chat is suspiciously not auto-scrolling...

I hope it's just my imagination

Optimus Prime

12:59 PM

@AndrewT. or does it have anything to do with your spects

rene

@bluefeet you deleted the MSE post the moment I posted the delv-pls here ... so I should have said thanks instead of Grr ... sorry about that ... ;)

Optimus Prime

added Grr as a synonym of Thanks

rene

that should work I guess ...

Magisch

rene is still miffed that a different blue feeted boobie ate his petals once

bluefeet

@rene Grr works, I ruined all your extra typing.

Magisch

1:10 PM

I wonder bluefeet

do you get a lot of bird jokes at work

bluefeet

only from you all

Magisch

I think it's just me at this point

I can't help myself, puns and name jokes are my second nature :/

Derpy

@Magisch I wonder if @blue uses linux....

Journeyman Geek

The Stack Overflow repo commit log gets a little more interesting every day:

Tweeted by Nick_Craver on November 9, 2017 at 5:06 PM

I think SO might have broken @balpha a little

Andrew T.

Nah, that's just the daily life of programmers,,,

Optimus Prime

1:14 PM

many of my commit messages looked like code committed and pushed

future visitors have to check the files changed to get an overview of what happened

Optimus Prime

1:25 PM

can't stay here for so long

gb cya

\o/

Derpy

@OptimusPrime had once used "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" as a comment....

Magisch

I'm vanilla I always write what exactly I changed and who requested/authorized the change

Journeyman Geek

heh. I'd be boring when we used git for system config management management and yanno "Changed this in this file"

Magisch

I call it covering my behind

So in case someone says I should do something and it wrecks something I can prove who wanted it

Andrew T.

1:42 PM

git blame

Optimus Prime

1:57 PM

I have a .bat file for that

git add .
git commit -m "code committed and pushed"
git push

just double click it and it will do the job for me

Shadow Wizard

2:21 PM

Huh? Welcome back @Sag! /cc @Opt

Bart

/me writes batch script to punish Optimus Prime

@bluefeet I was going to say "obviously they don't know about your nickname at your work" ... then I remembered who you work for and that I'm tired and need coffee.

Shadow Wizard

@OptimusPrime on purpose, he tries to mingle.

@Bart blue coffee?

Bart

Blue is not the new black, so no

Andrew T.

Blue top bar!

Bart

Blue top Bart?

Shadow Wizard

2:31 PM

@Fawad it is @6'whitemale's fault, poor @Andrew could not find a matching name.

@Bart blue on top, yellow on bottom? Sounds like some exotic fruit.

Andrew T.

Shadow Wizard

Lol

Bart

Ooh, now I want those

bluefeet

@Bart I'll fight you for them

Bart

^ online harassment!!!

I'm but a frail pair of glasses. Any rumours that I'm a 2m tall guy of sizable proportions are lies!!!

bluefeet

2:43 PM

just like rumors of my feet being blue have been greatly exaggerated

Andrew T.

you... you don't have blue feet!?

:O

Derpy

and somewhere right now @shadow is probably wondering if I really have a yellow mane/hair.

Magisch

3:23 PM

@bluefeet Madam are you aware that you are a bird?

(Joke adapted from the "Sir are you aware that you are a cat" meme)

Bart

3:59 PM

A wild @Oded appears o/

Oded

@Fawad might take me a while... As soon as I figure out how to do that without access.

@Bart o/

Optimus Prime

4:34 PM

@ShadowWizard thanks @ShawizDowArd /Cc @ShadowWizard

Shadow Wizard

@Bart don't forget with shoe size 50 i.e. huge feet... ;-)

Andrew T.

(wrong glasses)

Shadow Wizard

@Derpy I know it is.

Magisch

Plot twist: Derpy's actual rl job is delivering mail

Derpy

even bigger plot twist. Had a stomachache no more than two weeks ago because I ate too many muffins.

Shadow Wizard

5:09 PM

@Derpy sounds real enough... :/

Catija

5:22 PM

Anyone around who wants to help me with a SEDE query? I'm trying to see the historical number of answers per post on TWP over time. Back in 2014 they had a notice (unintentionally) added to their questions with more than two existing answers and I'm trying to ascertain if this actually affected the total number of answers per post. I'm guessing this may already exist? workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2899/41738

Hmmm, maybe this one does it: data.stackexchange.com/workplace/query/199189/…

Magisch

@Catija Give me a couple minutes and I'll try my hand on it

Catija

@Magisch Sure. :D

Magisch

Ahh, it seems to already exist

Catija

If that one is good, I'm not sure that the feature does much?

Magisch

We're not talking about generally fewer answers, just fewer duplicate answers

Imo

Catija

5:30 PM

I don't know that there's a way for SEDE to determine that... I suppose comparing number of deleted answers before and after? But... a lot of dupes probably don't actually get deleted.

Magisch

Yeah

Btw

Is the flag queue on IPS backed up?

Catija

@Magisch There are 12 pending right now. I've been working on other stuff.

Do you have a specific concern? I'm about to go get some lunch.

Magisch

6:12 PM

@Catija Nah I just flagged something this morning and was wondering

rene

6:36 PM

we turned into a dating site

now gone

we have a troll here: stackoverflow.com/a/47229224/578411

also gone

Catija

7:24 PM

@rene Well, that's certainly something we hadn't tried before. Maybe they can use the Jobs infrastructure for it.

rene

Does that bring in any money?

Catija

eHarmony seems to be making a good amount...

I met my spouse on a dating site... though not one I paid for.

I can think of at least two "SE Couples"... :P

rene

@Catija Did your spouse also met you on that dating site?

Catija

@rene Meaning - did I stalk him on a dating site and track him down in real life?

rene

something like that. Or was he looking for someone totally different to date ...

Catija

7:28 PM

He contacted me through the site. My profile was pretty much "don't contact me, I'm here for the quizzes".

rene

lol

Catija

22

A: How do I phrase an introduction on a dating website?

I'm Catija. I'm female and I met my (male) spouse on one of these dating sites. We met about 11 years ago and this is what made me respond to his message... and what made me not respond to others. First off, when I joined said dating site, it was because I wanted to take the quizzes. Yeah, I k...

An excerpt from my profile, if you're curious.

rene

Well, he was brave contacting you then ... :D

Catija

Yep. He's a good guy.

rene

Good to hear it worked out.

Catija

7:40 PM

It has. :D And we have a small adorable person out of it, so it's even better than just two happy people. Though, right now he's got a big bruise on his forehead. :(

rene

7:56 PM

Maybe you should stop hitting him ... oh wait ...

Catija

8:07 PM

:( He's climbing a lot right now and hitting his head.

... when he falls.

rene

Well, with boys that is all part of the contract ....

Catija

At this age, I don't know that there's a huge difference between boys and girls. They're both pretty adventurous.

rene

That is all good and needed for later.

Catija

8:22 PM

At this point, he seems none the worse for wear: i.stack.imgur.com/JAr8n.jpg

rene

He can always become an understudy for Harry Potter ...

Aaron Hall

9:20 PM

I'm here.

What did I miss?

Magisch

@AaronHall Hello Aaron

Aaron Hall

@Magisch Hello Magisch.

has decided to make a cup of Trader Joe's Organic Ginger Turmeric Herbal Tea

Catija

Flagged as spam.

Aaron Hall

mmm... that's good tea. Now what has everyone been up to?

I noticed they're playing Christmas music pretty hard in Starbucks.

Catija

Ah, yet another reason not to go. I have a very strict "no holiday music before Thanksgiving" rule.

To be clear... I love the music but it has to be contained.

Aaron Hall

9:36 PM

I've been learning me some Haskell. It has a strictness... function?

wxii12.com/article/suspects-farting-shuts-down-interrogation/…

If you're prim and proper, you'll probably want to avoid clicking that link...

tries being prim and proper... fails

adjusts his posture

Aaron Hall

10:08 PM

Read up on the Abilene Paradox, but my takeaway: - don't go along to get along - but that doesn't mean to be uncooperative - above all don't suggest anything you don't want. https://twitter.com/ThomasWictor/status/929106103807311872

Tweeted by aaronchall on November 10, 2017 at 10:07 PM

ok, I've made my impactful comments - but now I must fly. Up up and away! gets up from his desk... but has nowhere to go

rene

10:42 PM

"Answer" linking to the hyphen site: stackoverflow.com/a/47232221/578411

Magisch

@Catija No offense but that profile description comes across as mildly arrogant

At least from an outside view. I'm not familiar with dating sites so maybe I have a skewed perspective, but I would find that awfully off puttingly self confident

Catija

@Magisch It was supposed to.

The point was to get people to not contact me.

Magisch

Why would you be on a dating site if you didn't want to be contacted?

Did it force you to fill that out and you wanted to look around on your own?

Catija

@Magisch It's OKCupid... they have quizzes... I needed to know which Star Wars Character I was.

Magisch

Oh

Heh

Catija

10:47 PM

And which punctuation mark (elipsis).

Magisch

I've never felt drawn to dating sites. They seem akin to a meat market for me

I couldn't imagine dating someone I haven't known for a long time

Catija

I've never used one for the purpose of dating.

Magisch

@Shog9 Since you asked. I think it would probably be nicer to focus more on engaging the community and community efforts. A lot of people's moderation depends on the perception of how effectively they're being assisted, so I think a lot can be gained there.

rene

I see @JeremyBanks got his diamond (again/back) on SO. Thanks for helping out.

Magisch

Also a higher focus on delegating some tasks currently only CMs can do to the mods or even the community could work - there is some cruft that has accumulated that could be opened to moderators to deal with in limited capacity.

@Shog9 I think stack could also benefit from something between users and mods. People that you can get to do stuff for you. The community is a vast ressource and has thousands of people willing to take work off your hands, and that willingness is not going to exhaust itself. What I think can be improved upon the most right now is to empower the community to pick up the slack for the more mundane parts of CMship that don't have to have an employee doing it. If y'all can delegate more that

frees up loads of ressources for other things. Ideally you could have the whole meta monitoring thing taken over by trusted regulars and focus on the stuff that really does need CM level access. It's a noble goal to be personable and reachable by the community at large, but it increasingly looks like the ressources and staff planning just doesn't support that at the moment, and that other necessary tasks are suffering from it as a result.

From my limited outside perspective it seems that a lot of tasks are done by CMs and not moderators more as a "because they've always been" rather then because they need to be. One example of that would be vote invalidations. According to current moderator tooling, it doesn't seem like that would need a set of CM eyes for the vast majority of cases.

There seems to be so much ... completly mundane stuff that CMs currently do that could be handled by volunteers instead. There are already so many people who (mostly) know what they're doing that would gladly spend their free time doing the stuff you guys are probably so sick of by now so you could focus on keeping the network together more

Shog9

11:16 PM

@Magisch mmm, yeah. There's a pitfall when designing tooling to skip the work necessary to make it safe and just limit who can use it. We've made that mistake a lot - giving tools to mods instead of enabling more folks to use 'em, giving tools to CMs instead of enabling mods to use 'em, leaving things dev-only instead of enabling CMs to use 'em...

Magisch

@Shog9 One thing you could do right now would be to hold an election on MSE

I wager every second a CM spends on mundane MSE flag duty is wasted

Shog9

@Magisch that... Is rather a lot of work.

None of us handle all that many flags.

Magisch

Or appoint some people

Does it really need a lot of work to let some people do that?

Catija

@Shog9 Yes. Which means that I rarely actually flag anything because the flags usually go ignored.

Shog9

The most time-consuming thing I had to do flag-wise this past year was move answers off that Sandbox post, and I finally just wrote a script for that.

Magisch

11:18 PM

I imagine the job can't be very complicated since it's essentially what users are already doing with some more immediate effects

I'm pretty sure the hour or two it would take to figure out some people to appoint would pay off rather quickly

When I see the amount of times employees are pinged here for one MSE thing or another

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch I thioooonk flag handling is semi trivial taking into account the tavern posse. In theory the big timesink is answers.

Magisch

Yeah

But unless there's serious sphaghetti code going on, I don't see how moderating MSE could be any more difficult like any other site minus the community building

So it sort of boggles that employees still have to lord knows they have better things to do

Shog9

@Catija oh fine, I handled your flag.

Magisch

@Shog9 Am I missing something that would make appointing a couple even mse moderators a time consuming process?

Shog9

@Magisch it's not. There's really not very much to do; tons of folks have gold tag-badges, which covers the bulk of closing. Tons of folks have delete privileges, which takes care of the worst answers. Deleting the odd off-topic question and deleting comments are the bulk of the rest.

Catija

11:26 PM

@Shog9 I wasn't talking about NAA flags. It's been a long time since I've bothered to flag much other than spam. Maybe it's different now but I remember some flags from the past that seemed like they took a long time to be handled... but it was a while back.

Shog9

@Magisch appointing mods on any site is a time-consuming process.

Magisch

@Shog9 Why is that? Do you guys comission full background checks?

Adam Lear

I only look at MSE flags once in a while, but IME most of the work there is actually subjective (especially when it comes to flags on things posted by employees)

Magisch

Or is it because the formal process has to be adhered to?

I was under the impression you guys literally just choose people based on how you feel about them when they say they want to

Adam Lear

@Magisch that's not how elections work on graduated sites, no

Magisch

11:28 PM

@AdamLear Well we're not talking about an election there

Shog9

the usual process is:
1. compile a list of candidates.
2. email the first one
3. wait for a response
4. if response is affirmative, go to #7
5. discard name from top of list
6. goto #2
7. appoint mod

Magisch

@Shog9 I guess #1 is where 99% of the work lies

Catija

@Shog9 There's 101 20K+ users on MSE and a good chunk of them are either staff (17) or inactive.

Adam Lear

@Magisch ah fair, I misread what you said then

Shog9

@Magisch and #3 is what burns most of the time

Magisch

11:29 PM

I would take a guess

That if you decided to pick 3 people from mse at random that you think are up for it

2 would be up for it

Shog9

We used to email the top n people simultaneously, but that had other issues

Magisch

MSE is a spcial case since very few people are active on there

highly active, that is

Catija

@Shog9 When Robert contacted me about IPS he said that they contact more people than they need, so not everyone asked gets appointed.

Shog9

@Catija that's for the first set of pro tempore mods (and even then, not always done)

Catija

I can't imagine that it'd take much time to get info back from your top choices... provided it wasn't like ... Friday.

Magisch

11:31 PM

Ah well then

I assumed the process was simpler

still might be worth it in the long run, though

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch for certain values of better things.

Tim Stone

@JeremyBanks I see this situation addressed itself but I would have said yes ;)

Magisch

I imagine coming up with a list of people on MSE wouldn't be terribly difficult, and the #3 part is just waiting, no?

Shog9

@Catija you'd be surprised

Magisch

The main regulars of MSE are in here like almost literally every day

Journeyman Geek

11:33 PM

Course some people never read their email.....

Magisch

You'd probably have better luck pinging these people in chat tbh

Shog9

some people don't read their email, some people have aggressive spam filters, some people used a throw-away address, some people just don't respond to emails...

Magisch

I wonder though

Shog9

@Magisch honestly, this would all be a lot easier if we just contacted folks on-site, via something like the mod-message system

Magisch

Is there anything that can be done short term on the side of us users to alleviate the amount of work the CMs are buried under

Catija

11:35 PM

@Shog9 :( I guess it depended on whether they were expecting the email or not...

Magisch

@Shog9 Or like a chat system

You know, chat :p

Catija

If they were chat regulars, you could ping them in chat. :D

@Shog9 Why not then?

Adam Lear

Public pings have other implications, though.

Magisch

Aren't moderators able to make private rooms?

Catija

@AdamLear I hear y'all can make fancy rooms on MSE...

Magisch

11:36 PM

I know they are on chat.SO

Adam Lear

@Catija We can make them anywhere. ;)

Catija

@AdamLear Sure, but the regular mods have access to them otherwhere.

Adam Lear

Yeah, I guess you could do a private room. Feels like overkill, but maybe not.

Journeyman Geek

(shog basically told me to check me email when I was made SR pro team)

Adam Lear

Email's nicer for us because it's just one place we have to search later if we need to.

Catija

11:36 PM

@JourneymanGeek So... don't check your email much?

Tim Stone

It'd be a shame to lose so many good people in a MSE election due to me having to thin out my competition

Magisch

devious

Catija

@TimStone I don't think an election is in the cards, anyway. :P

Magisch

I don't envy the CMs having to deal with the incessant bickering from everyone including us right now

Journeyman Geek

@Catija no :p

Catija

11:38 PM

@Magisch Who's bickering ;)

Magisch

Well not intentionally

but when you get like 1000 pings a day everything can seem like bickering, no?

Catija

Oh, I only ping them when they're actually around... usually.

I try not to.

Shog9

@Magisch quite honestly, the work we're buried under right at the moment mostly involves figuring out which work we're gonna drop - that is to say, what sort of things we're just not going to do anymore at all. Or to put it a different way, what we're gonna focus on doing to the exclusion of everything else.

The bit folks can help with is the bit y'all invariably do and always have: disseminating information.

Magisch

@Shog9 I think reworking handling systems to enable users to do them sounds like its far off

I imagine Dev time is even more costly then CM time right now

Adam Lear

Calling it a night here. Y'all have a great Friday and/or weekend.

Shog9

11:40 PM

you too

Magisch

good night adam

Catija

Have a good one!

Magisch

@Shog9 The problem is, can you drop anything without serious problems resulting from that?

Like imagine y'all just stopped invalidating votes. That'd be a disaster once word got out

rene

@AdamLear have a drink ...

Catija

I understand the concept of "something's got to give"... I... I think we all just want to figure out how to help with the work.

Magisch

11:44 PM

It's a bit ... frustrating. I have all this time and all these ideas but all I'm doing atm is making more work for mods and CMs with the serial voting thing

Shog9

@Magisch well, that's ok - as long as you're sticking to recent votes, it does actually help.

Magisch

I have my doubts about that

Shog9

If we get backlogged (and... we may be backlogged a bit...) it'll get cleared eventually.

Magisch

SO didn't collapse before I started doing that, and the effects aren't very obvious

Shog9

that's sorta the point

Magisch

11:47 PM

So all I've realisticly done is ruin the day of some mostly indians

And of course piled another couple hours worth of work onto JNat's day

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch poor Bharghav

Shog9

Honestly, the most trouble I've seen thus far is someone taking one of your scripts and running it on a tiny site, and then thinking they'd uncovered some big plot when, uh, the 20 people who comprised the entire voting and primary answering populace turned out to be voting for each other.

That's... One of the things that's kept me from rolling out some of this tooling more widely: you gotta be really careful when interpreting the results.

Magisch

It's like yeah I understand voting fraud isn't cool and it'd be PR suicide to not treat it as a big deal but it feels like most of the reaction from the team so far has been more along the lines "Not this guy again with his pointless extra work we can't publicly say really just delays more important work"

Shog9

I mean, we do totally say that

but not just about you

Magisch

But not on meta

Because I had to be a complete git and make 3 meta posts about it

Like an absolute tosser

Shog9

11:51 PM

The blessing and the curse of being involved with a large group of talented, curious people... Is that they tend to be curious and talented even when it's inconvenient.

Magisch

I would like to do something to use all this effort I've put into understanding the that actually helps and is not just not openly bad enough to get me shafted :p

Shog9

So you gripe about it and then you go fix things, and secretly you're glad you don't work on stuff that no one uses or cares about enough to break.

Right now, my biggest problem is that I kinda have too many irons on the fire, and I'm being forced to stop lying to myself about getting them all hammered out any day now.

That sucks, but... Ultimately, it'll be a good thing.

Magisch

And none of us can help with that

Not even a little

Shog9

Actually...

Magisch

Asides from stopping wasting your time in chat, I presume :p

Shog9

11:53 PM

You want a project?

Magisch

Is it actually useful or something you hand out to stop me from talking to you so you can get something done?

If it's actually useful shoot

Shog9

67

Q: Let's rescue wayward resource requests! (trial run)

A few months, back, Stijn raised the issue of old, closed resource-requests: When searching for a library/tool/... with my favourite search engine, there are often results from Stack Overflow. Since these questions are (in theory) closed and/or outdated, they pollute my search results and cau...

That's been on my list for... Ages.

An ad-hoc meta post worked pretty well for, uh, 200 questions. It wouldn't work for 20,000

We need some sort of... Review system, but one that isn't like /review in any way.

Something that'll track multiple opinions on a post, multiple actions, and decide when a given item is actually done.

m0sa dug up this deal, and I had it in my head to try building something on it, but... Time.

Magisch

This makes me think it could fit really well into just becoming a second smokey clone

fed by a SEDE query...

Metasmoke, I mean

Art even already made a framework like this for my serial voting query..

Get feedback going on that like it does for metasmoke, and slap some thresholds on that

hmm

Shog9

Here's the critical bits:
- gotta auth folks with SE API to verify they actually know something about the topic being reviewed
- gotta get a decision from at least *n* (3-5) reviewers before pushing a task to the second stage
- allow editing to go hand-in-hand with a decision
- gotta record that decision for auditing purposes
- second stage is deletion or reopening - only allow folks who are privileged to do it
- record final outcome per post, and stop assigning it
- link audit info to the post itself somehow (comment, revision, etc.)

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