Ah. So I asked @JNat to poke Pops about this a couple days ago. @bluefeet TL;DR: Charcoal (the people responsible for SmokeDetector) have set up a project to flag spam automatically. We've been in communication with Pops about expanding that in a couple ways, but haven't heard from him since he responded to an email we sent a couple months back, and don't appear to be able to get hold of him in chat (TL or via superpings).
@TimPost It's just that, I can handle being told no, I can handle being told "No time atm", but when a inquiry goes unanswered for two months, not even a faint "we're talking about it but no news yet" and if someone 4 months ago said next week or sometime somethings coming, and nothing yet. It gives off the vibe that you guys aren't just decked in work and have no air, but that you're trying to make entirely too patient people go away by ignoring them until they stop caring. — Magisch10 mins ago
I'm not an admin on charcoal so this is my opinion alone
The admins are very patient, I'm not as blessed with that virtue
I've been sitting on this idea for over two years. It's relatively easy, but not a huge return on investment. The #1 thing I hope for if we can hire a PM for Q&A is a focus on prioritization. We have enough ideas already for decades of work, but not all of them are going to be worth doing.
@JonEricson the latter, at least, must be automatable. Script it, if nothing else - stick the profile URLs in a JS array, then loop through and ping the award URL for each one
@ArtOfCode I copy and paste a bunch of URLs into a text box. That's not a problem. The problem is I need to clean up the data first. I have a soft heart and am awarding people the badge if they put their email in rather than their profile link.
@JonEricson Thought about farming all the boring parts of CM work (vote invalidations, election announcements, etc) out to grunts low paid workers or volunteers, like a step between mod and CM?
@ArtOfCode The work on Charcoal has come up several times, but I'm not super involved in those discussions. I'll say that the lack of response isn't because we are ignoring you guys. It might be that we don't have any updates.
@bluefeet that sentiment has come up a few times the past weeks, and I think the What features did the Community Team ... posts will have a big impact on improving that
@Magisch Election announcements can't be farmed out since there's a "award a diamond" step. They also aren't a huge burden unless, like me, you are allergic to manual labor. (Again, I've got a time-saving workflow, but it really could be automated in the system itself.)
@Magisch that's kinda where we started here. Didn't used to do announcements for elections, beyond what's on the election page itself; if folks wanted an announcement, they posted it.
I mean, in theory, there's no reason we have to do 'em - the data is public, anyone can run the election and figure out who won, and folks usually do that anyway
been working on some nifty tools that should be fit for moderator use in the near future. Gotta be a bit careful though, since if I don't get the right restrictions in place an inexperienced moderator could really make a mess.
@Magisch Like I said earlier, the system does most of that. We get a handful of reports from all over the network to take care each day, if that many :)
been working on some nifty tools that should be fit for moderator use in the near future. Gotta be a bit careful though, since if I don't get the right restrictions in place an inexperienced moderator could really make a mess.
@Magisch I'm currently at a company that used to be government owned, and you can still feel the atmosphere of slacking and talking lots at the coffee corners
@Magisch as I was. I joined a company working on a ms access front-end with ms access backend that served about 60 users. I had to rewrite it into sql server backend with winforms front. Super fun
Pizza Hut #1 in my city has online ordering, but Pizza Hut #2, which is closer to my home, requires interacting with a human by means of a phone call. Decisions, decisions...
A grand total of 17 people cast "3rd choice" votes in Mathematica's two-candidate election. (Not that it matters. With two candidates it's pretty much first-past-the-post.)
@ShadowWizard I wish I'd noticed before the election so I could play with the UI. It doesn't look like anyone managed to cast three votes. Some cast a first and third, and others as second and third. Nobody tried just third (or second) alone. A few more people correctly recognized that second-place votes don't matter.
@JonEricson oh, thought you meant they cast three votes. So ticking the third just negates the second? Still a bug, but pretty minor. (i.e. if two candidates, show only two choices... :))
@canon We have about a year. If participation doesn't grow after we put some effort into it, we'll have to figure out what to do next. I've thought about it a bit and I think we can just stop investing in it, if it fails.
Worth remembering that we've had tag wikis with next-to-no enhancements for years now. I'd have to say it's likely that even worst-case, Docs is gonna end up being in a better place than that.
@Stijn some of them have been. But, those are relatively rare. In a lot of ways, we had an even worse story there: no clear initial goal, and then no follow-up once it became apparent which uses were actually working. So we've already done one better with Docs.
Personally, I don't think we've even hit the point where Docs' strengths are able to show; an awful lot of the features built into it are directly aimed at addressing areas where Q&A hasn't aged well: better update & versioning features, better conflict resolution, etc. That's stuff that's mostly just dead weight starting out, but becomes the opposite as topics get older.
Which suggests we can also take some lessons learned and back-port them at some point
Which again hints at lampshades the big problem with trying to make any substantial improvements to Q&A at this point - there's too much history & too many users to just "try stuff" anymore, so we desperately need projects like this if we're ever going to fix some of the long-standing systemic issues with Q&A.
If you quote a table, it cuts off the first character in each row:
Interestingly enough, it will consume back ticks before they can become code formatting.
Note that prepending any character provides a quick fix for this bug.
Copy and paste this for quick testing:
>method|description
--...
@Stijn It's not heavily advertised even if you did use it.
@canon So, I'm not a huge fan of the Syntax and Parameters sections. Most topics don't need them and the ones that do could just shove that information in the Remarks section. We don't do anything special with those sections, so why are they special?
If you quote a table, it cuts off the first character in each row:
Interestingly enough, it will consume back ticks before they can become code formatting.
Note that prepending any character provides a quick fix for this bug.
Copy and paste this for quick testing:
>method|description
--...
