Tavern on the Meta

3:20 AM

@rene what memo?

3:54 AM

@SamuelLiew "Get/got the memo" is an expression. In this case they (not just Rene) probably refer to these: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/featured-tag and meta.stackexchange.com/a/342363/282094

Samuel Liew

4:12 AM

I know; I'm aware of it alright. twitter.com/gortok/status/1217990083535609861, twitter.com/gortok/status/1217990448586817536

Rob

4:35 AM

Ah, RPQ.

Mithical

7:39 AM

→ 18 messages moved to Chimney

rene

7:51 AM

@SamuelLiew Just to get this right: I love, admire and encourage people to use their own judgement. I thank you for doing exactly that.

2

Shadow9

8:03 AM

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog only API bugs that cause indirect bugs in the apps are still fixed.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

@Shadow9 Well, because they're API bugs.

Shadow9

Anything that requires build and/or deploy on the app server side code itself (not API) won't be touched anymore, even if it leads to the final shutdown of the apps.

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog API is totally different than the apps. It existed before them.

The apps use the API, but it's one-way.

@Sonic what bug(s) you have on mind?

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

But not everything used by the mobile apps is necessarily part of the API. For instance, the apps use some undocumented APIs and have special keys that give them unlimited access.

Shadow9

Dunno about that, yeah.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

@Shadow9 Just an example, a bug with /hot-questions-for-mobile.

Shadow9

8:06 AM

Anyway, Yaakov did fix one such bug two weeks ago:

6

Q: Stack Exchange mobile apps still use 'on hold' for recently closed questions

Since the introduction of new post notices, the "On Hold" label is not used anymore: "On Hold" had been used to label recently closed questions. The idea was that this language would imply less permanence to the current state than "Closed". However, user research showed that this distinction ...

Only API fix, so it was done.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

Another example, the special API keys suddenly granting 0 queries or the default 10,000 instead of unlimited.

Mithical

Pretty soon only Smokey's key is going to be special-cased...

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

@Mithical Don't some SOBotics bots have more than the usual quota?

Journeyman Geek

8:28 AM

@Shadow9 the really funny thing is there is one really critical things the apps do that is probably possible to do, but hard to do well - push notifications

More precisely, it is a feature for a small number of super hardcore users and I have literally no idea how you would make it non annoyingly opt in

I mean the ideal would be a preference checkbox (where?)

Journeyman Geek

8:47 AM

I'll update and bumpety bump it a bit

If someone thinks its a good idea, might as well make it easier to sell :D

Shadow9

@JourneymanGeek hmm?

Journeyman Geek

15

Q: Now that the mobile apps are no longer in development ... Could we get Web Push Notifications?

TLDR: Mobile is sad. Can we have web push notifications? (While the eventual intended audience will know what I'm talking about,google has a nice, though somewhat technical article on what this is. I don't expect it to happen soon, but would be nice to put it on the radar.) For starters - and t...

feature-request notifications

Shadow9

@JourneymanGeek there are some apps on Stack Apps also doing it, but dunno if any of them still work.

Journeyman Geek

Probably something for someone who knew what they were doing to write it :D

(The question that is)

V2Blast

10:06 AM

just noticed an interesting bug, wasn't sure whether it's been reported yet

I ran out of comment flags for the day (on travel.SE)

Afterwards, I'm still able to click the flag icon and bring up the dialog box of flag reasons (and select one)

however, when I click "flag comment", I sometimes get the error message "You may only flag a comment every 5 seconds"

checking again, it seems like if I wait 5+ seconds and click the button, I get the right error message "Daily comment flag limit reached; please try again in 13 hours"

but if I then try to click the button again within the next 5 seconds, I get the "You may only flag a comment every 5 seconds" error message, even though that previous flag attempt didn't actually go through

has anyone else encountered this bug or reported it already?

(if anyone's wondering why I clicked the button repeatedly, I hadn't yet noticed that I was out of comment flags, and I just initially assumed the initial error message was for having flagged another comment in the preceding 5 seconds)

rene

Can you also open the developer console of your browser and verify the network traffic? Do you get server responses that match your observation or could it just be a client side awkward handling

I've never seen that bug myself, nor do I recall previous reports of it on MSE.

Shadow9

10:32 AM

@rene I suspect userscript

rene

I suspect a bug

John Dvorak

10:55 AM

deploys a spider

Mithical

AAAAHHHHH SPIDER KILL IT KILL IT GET IT AWAY

John Dvorak

killing spiders is murder

My house is insect-free ever since I stopped relocating every spider in sight

Did you know that spiders have retractable claws, while insect claws are ginormous compared to the rest of their legs?

Mithical

How about a bearded dragon instead

John Dvorak

That's not a bad choice, but don't they need UV lamps?

Mithical

I don't know, I've never actually looked into the practicalities of owning one.

John Dvorak

11:14 AM

Clint's Reptiles rates bearded dragons at 3.8/5, while jumping spiders get 4.8/5, and he only "had to deduct a point for handleability because they are so tiny".

Bearded Dragon, The Best Pet Reptile?

►

I'm about to watch the full video on bearded dragons; I've already seen the one about jumping spiders

He even gets a better score (4.2) to a black widow.

-> black widow video youtube.com/watch?v=MrGn9hQjrY8

Lucas The Spider - Jumping Spider, The Best Pet Arachnid?

►

rene

Is elections.stackexchange.com 404 indefinitely or did it get a new home that I fail to find? I mean it is mentioned in several posts, for example here and I've seen bug reports in this very chatroom about the site.

Mithical

It's been dead for... years.

Blame @Tim. :)

rene

Okay, so it is not me, failing to search

Mithical

@ArtOfCode had put up a replacement at some point but I can't find it

ah, here it is: artofcode.co.uk/elections

John Dvorak

> A bearded dragon is no more likely to lose its tail than a cat is

Mithical

11:23 AM

(won't load, though, presumably because there are no active elections?)

John Dvorak

> They have a distinct bearded dragon-ly aroma

rene

@Mithical He can post an answser on my MSE question.

Disappointed in SE

meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/392889/revisions

I somehow doubt SE have changed their minds about featuring resignations, so I'm curious what will happen here

Shadow9

11:48 AM

@DisappointedinSE nothing, probably. e.g. this is still featured.

And in case you missed it:

Yeah, here are my reasons: this was unfeatured previously to grant slots for CEO's and a sponsored tag merge post. Also, I miss Shog. — Samuel Liew ♦ Jan 28 at 14:07

Disappointed in SE

@Shadow9 that's not a moderator resignation, so there is some room for interpretation of the new rule for that particular post.

Shadow9

@DisappointedinSE oh. Well, checking boundaries is important step of growing up. :)

You might get yelled at and even spanked, but without trying, you'll never know.

Disappointed in SE

I don't think the SO mods are the ones that need to grow up ;-)

5

Shadow9

Hopefully if they kick Samuel for that, all SO mods will follow.

@Mithical which of them?

rene

all

Shadow9

11:52 AM

(and they're both pingable)

@rene even Tim Tam?!

Tim Tam

Tim Tam is a brand of chocolate biscuit made by the Australian biscuit company Arnott's. It consists of two malted biscuits separated by a light chocolate cream filling and coated in a thin layer of textured chocolate. == History == The biscuit was created by Ian Norris, who was the director of food technology at Arnott's. During 1958, he took a world trip looking for inspiration for new products. While in Britain, he found the Penguin biscuit and decided to, successfully "make a better one".Tim Tam went on to the market in 1964. They were named by Ross Arnott, who attended the 1958 Kentucky Derby...

Mithical

@Shadow9 both

Shadow9

@Mithical why Mr. Post is to blame with the dead elections page?

!!/Tim Tam

SmokeDetector

@Shadow9 No such command 'tim'.

Shadow9

:(

Mithical

18

A: elections.stackexchange.com isn't loading

Yeah, this is gonna be down for a bit; Tim Stone was maintaining it and Tim Post was hosting it. The domain, of course, was controlled by the company... Which is currently moving all se.com subdomains to HTTPS. This presents two problems: Tim Post can't continue hosting it, and we don't have an...

rene

11:56 AM

thanks

Shadow9

Hey that's not my eye ^^

@Mithical ugh... can't they have it hosted externally, e.g. where Smokey is hosted?

Mithical

Smokey is hosted across a dozen different private servers and computers, and regularly goes down and switches to a different instance. That's not really good for an official SE page

!!/location

SmokeDetector

@Mithical iBug/Sandy

Shadow9

!!/status

SmokeDetector

@Shadow9 Running since 09:46:16 UTC (2 hours, 13 minutes, 50 seconds)

Yaakov Ellis

12:05 PM

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog If there bugs in the mobile apps due to bugs in the public API, we will try to fix these bugs. Server side issues that are only related to the mobile apps and nothing else, as well as bugs in the actual mobile apps (which would require new releases) will no longer be addressed.

@rene what did this site even show? I am not at all familiar with it

Mithical

@YaakovEllis It used to show an overview of all ongoing elections across the network, including candidates, nominations, candidate scores, etc

Shadow9

With the oncoming mass elections, it's kind of.... needed, yeah.

Mithical

*sets out to earn 150 reputation on every site across the network*

Disappointed in SE

@Shadow9 I think one big problem is that giving out an SSL certificate is inherently problematic. So it would have to change domains in any case.

Shadow9

getting ready to flag @Mithical's socks

:D

Mithical

12:16 PM

I flag all my socks myself to have them annotated as socks

Shadow9

@DisappointedinSE yeah... :/

@Mithical prove

Journeyman Geek

@DisappointedinSE IIRC the official policy is if it isn't hosted on SE hardware and part of the public Q&A network, its not on a foo.stackexchange.com domain

even their auto-mail services and the blog

Shadow9

This is your sock then? @Mith

:P

Disappointed in SE

hmm, did the election site get stackexchange cookies? That would have been very bad even before SSL

Journeyman Geek

But that's not really that critical IMO. As long as people can find it, and the information is up to date, it'll do the business.

@DisappointedinSE I don't think you needed to log in at all

Disappointed in SE

12:19 PM

@JourneymanGeek I don't mean for login, I meant if the session cookie was available to the election site, Tim could have hijacked any user account that visited it

Journeyman Geek

/me wonders if there's a waybackmachine backup of one of those pages for references, its been ages, and my memory is terrible

@DisappointedinSE maybe

but we trust those Tims :D

And well, I think that was a kinder, more innocent time :D

Disappointed in SE

hmm, that cookie was probably marked as SSL-only, it would have been far too much of a security breach otherwise

Shadow9

@JourneymanGeek true. It can be seen in the web archive: web.archive.org/web/20160324124549/http://…

Journeyman Geek

@DisappointedinSE no SSL for much of the time it was there

in fact the SSL push was one of the things that made the site more difficult

Mithical

Shadow9

12:22 PM

@Mithical Good!

Mithical

(Took a bit of time to track that down...)

Journeyman Geek

@Shadow9 looks like it generated stats on the fly

not... very useful if you don't know/remember what it was :D

Shadow9

@JourneymanGeek it did, using the API from what I read

Journeyman Geek

yup

maybe we can find a meta bug report...

ah hah!

@YaakovEllis meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121425/…

something like that per candidate, and other assorted stats

art has a clone cause, well, it rather sucks without it :D

Mithical

oh wow, that dates back to before age was removed

Journeyman Geek

12:31 PM

"Judge me by my age do you? mmm?"

Mithical

heh, posted almost exactly eight years ago

@JourneymanGeek Exactly. ;)

Journeyman Geek

facedesk

Mithical

careful with the nose there

Journeyman Geek

I'm on helpdesk duty right now. THis involves waiting for emails to come in, that get automatically processed by our ticketing system, which sends another email, then forwarding that to the appropriate vendor or engineer, and updating the ticketing system manually. We also close external vendor cases in the ticketing system which automatically sends a mail to the last distribution list.

It was worse before

I closed a case. Then got confused cause a new mail came in... it was the closure email for the case I just closed

(No, they don't exactly pay me to sit on chat all day, or night :D)

But its a very trigger/interrupt driven shift

Mithical

@JourneymanGeek They just don't know that that's what they're paying you to do.

Journeyman Geek

12:36 PM

@Mithical :D

It so happens its the easiest way for them not to pay me to take a long nap

which... one of my ex co-workers apparently did, and he's no longer with us :D

Mithical

They killed him!?

Journeyman Geek

I hope not!

When I originally joined this job, I mostly did monitoring. Twas boring but mostly needed your attention

I do more helpdesk and "we have no idea what's the status of this case so we need to go down and check" now

Mithical

("no longer with us" generally means "dead")

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical I was aware of the dual meaning

Mithical

:)

Shadow9

12:52 PM

@Mithical "Departed" then? ;)

Wonder if there are people saying "Rest in peace" when someone goes to sleep? :D

djsmiley2k TMW

:D

did something more happen around #featured ?!

Journeyman Geek

sigh

He got realigned?

djsmiley2k TMW

/me needs a 'last time on the meta' update

Journeyman Geek

@djsmiley2kTMW er...

nothing on meta

djsmiley2k TMW

k

Journeyman Geek

12:57 PM

Nothing I can talk about, but I haven't exactly ragequit so... :D

(that said, if I ever quit being a moderator, I'm going to explictly ask for it not to be featured, and for folks not to fuss too much :D)

(no plans for that, and least for SU, Y'all would get to know first :D)

Mithical

@JourneymanGeek PREPARE FOR YOUR WISHES TO BE DISOBEYED

Journeyman Geek

1:18 PM

@Mithical I think anyone who has the ability knows me well enough to understand why :D

Well there's one circumstance I wouldn't have minded, but it would need a monumental change in the company's course for that to be possible :/

Mithical

Indeed. I wouldn't apply for a job now either.

Journeyman Geek

The other circumstance - I don't really feel making a scene, or a obvious stand is how I want to do things

Quitting should be a quiet disengagement at best. Taking my leave at worst

And If I end up one of those guys who harassesses people who work or mod here on twitter, shoot me :D

Mithical

Deal. *solemn handshake*

Journeyman Geek

2:02 PM

spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/…

> Gundam Factory Yokohama, which is a Gundam Factory in Yokohama, is constructing an 18-meter-tall, 25-ton Gundam robot.

I guess there's ONE upside to the onion timeline

Shadow9

3:24 PM

@djsmiley2kTMW in case of spam use just "k", it will also blacklist the spammer and won't give the extra Smokey message.

djsmiley2k TMW

heh wasn't sure i should blacklist the use

but looking at their name... lol

Shadow9

Typical spammer

πάντα ῥεῖ

Can we have a status-poof here plz.

Shadow9

> You voted to close this question 2 mins ago

πάντα ῥεῖ

Urgency calls for urgency ;)

Shadow9

3:44 PM

Kaboom

πάντα ῥεῖ

ty

Rob

4:33 PM

They built a Gundam (bicorn?) a few years ago, and there's walking ones more recently: youtu.be/zgF_-JEBG1M?t=1m8s youtu.be/Z-ouLX8Q9UM?t=16m46s youtu.be/-DKwl0OjoYE youtu.be/F1nVldck7HM

?

??

???

video-frt3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t42.4659-2/…

Shadow9

?

πάντα ῥεῖ

4:47 PM

Short for: Who cares?

Shadow9

For rice spilling? I do. I love rice.

Also, China is more than rice.

Also, still don't get what @Rob was trying to say.

:D

πάντα ῥεῖ

Me neither :D

Rob

Run everything through here: rewordify.com

πάντα ῥεῖ

Nope!

Rob

7:18 PM

ELI2: Why are translators such as Google translate so bad at translating?.

Mithical

8:03 PM

> Comment: add image description for accessibility

> [...]

> ....reviewed this 1 hour ago: Reject
This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.

Ah the irony

djsmiley2k TMW

lol

Mithical

8:25 PM

Oh, it looks like chat.<site>.stackexchange.com redirects are broken

rene

@Mithical uh, what? Not for me ...

Mithical

@rene try chat.scifi.stackexchange.com

Ah, it's only broken on http://. It gives me a "privacy error" if I use https://.

rene

right, that is a server error for me as well.

Mithical

Oh, and if I click "continue" on the privacy error for https:// I get a server error again.

rene

yeah.

Mithical

9:44 PM

> Monica Cellio’s account gives context. The week she described was one of the most miserable I ever experienced in my career. I could see a conflict that began in a relatively private place (the moderators’ chat room) threatened to spill into very public places. I have long held as a universal principle of ethics that admonishing another person should be done privately. Public rebukes without first attempting to resolve the situation privately violates our shared morality. So that week I sent an email to others in the company stating my intention to call Monica in order to attempt reconcil…

Journeyman Geek

heh, I was just reading that

> In 2019, the Community Team was given a directive to reduce our use of Meta. On the one hand, I get it. Employees posting on Meta were repeatedly dismissed as incompetent. I even wrote an appeal for compassion when it comes to designers, who often got the worst of it. On the other, “Meta is Toxic” seemed to be code for “It’s hard to understand our users and it’d be easier if they didn’t exist.” I doubt anyone actually said or even thought that, but that’s how it felt to me.

Mithical

...for those curious:

"2019 in Review", by @JonEricson

Journeyman Geek

oh and

> In retrospect, this was a giant red flag. One of the great joys of community management is having agency to resolve community conflict. It’s already been a highlight of my new job. Taking away this agency was a clear sign my contributions were not valued. ↩

I guess a question I wish I had an answer to was... how to convince the higher powers that be that, well, CMs and the community is critical to the success of the org, and they need agency to deal with these things

Mithical

...basically, what I'm getting from that is "SO is directly interfering with the people who know what to do and preventing them from doing it".

Journeyman Geek

Yup

Mithical

9:56 PM

@JourneymanGeek I have a feeling !!/stopflagging might cause a stir... ;P

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical would it?

OH

@Mithical I don't think folks higher up the food chain would even notice

Mithical

They might, when they start getting complaints about their sites being covered in spam

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical who would complain? ;D

Mithical

The people looking for answers.

Journeyman Geek

I guess

Mithical

9:58 PM

....sorry, I'm in a vengeful mood

Journeyman Geek

question is are folks mad enough to do it?

I am somewhat

John Dvorak

your vengeance would spill to the innocents, keep in mind

Mithical

That decision probably rests with @ArtOfCode TBH. I'm not running that command myself, I don't want a pallet of bricks on my head

Disappointed in SE

The additional details we've seen now about what happened do make it clear that it wasn't just a snap decision to fire Monica, but a deliberate act against the advice of the most experienced CMs. This does make it a fundamental moral failure by the decisionmakers, as the consequences and harm that would affect Monica were predictable. And they still decided to act in public against the custom and the advice of CMs.

Journeyman Geek

@DisappointedinSE I always felt like it was a show of strength

3

as were other things

Problem is... we don't work here. And we know how things work a lot better

Disappointed in SE

10:01 PM

@JourneymanGeek I suspected something similar as well, but back then we didn't have those small insights into the way it happened

Journeyman Geek

@DisappointedinSE I've suspected enough

but on the other hand, its only where the position lets them

Disappointed in SE

@Mithical I've said it before, but the only thing I could see getting attention from high up would be a coordinated strike by a majority of SO mods and the automated spam tools. And even then probably only because that might be big enough to be picked up by the media. The problem I see with it is that I wouldn't even know what demands to set, anything that could really restore trust is stuff that is almost certain to never happen

Journeyman Geek

@DisappointedinSE at this point, so much needs to be fixed that I can't think of where to start

Mithical

First off would be them following the mods' and CMs lead on stuff - e.g. not trying to police featured meta posts (and for that matter reinstating HMP). They need to release a press release apologizing to all of their moderators and former staff members. They need to give all the CMs a pay raise and start listening to them. And reach out to every single mod who stepped down or was removed and work something out. That'd be a start.

djsmiley2k TMW

@Mithical those same people are the ones who post crap on twitter that causes such messes....

Mithical

10:12 PM

Then they can start paying more attention to meta, fix some of the issues we've been begging them to fix for years, and basically they need to grovel. I'm angry.

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical I think everyone realises policing featured meta posts is a lost cause at this point

djsmiley2k TMW

hahaha none of this is going to happen

:(

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical funny thing is - I think to a certain extent, these actions are fed by a fear of meta and the community

djsmiley2k TMW

and sadly someone high up is reenforcing that fear at every chance they get.

Journeyman Geek

@djsmiley2kTMW hmm

the difficulty is I think that's the person most afraid

Its easy to lead from a position of strength

Dealing with an angry mob is more challenging

I deal with it by not being a leader :D

Mithical

10:18 PM

like it or not you are kinda a de facto leader on MSE

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical Possibly, but it isn't (just) by virtue of that position

Mithical

No. As in, you have the trust enough of the community that they will follow you.

Irrelevant of whether or not you have a diamond.

Journeyman Geek

@Mithical and I don't need to rely on shows of force :D

hmm

Its 6 am, and I've not had any sleep

Mithical

you should probably sleep

Journeyman Geek

But there's 2 kinds of leadership - "Servant" leadership - of the sort you talk about, and leadership by position/force

2 hours to get off work ;D

Mithical

10:54 PM

twitter.com/shog9/status/1224096604358991872

> There is... Some reason to believe that forcing action while Jon, one of the people most familiar with the situation at that point in time, was away... Was not accidental.

Disappointed in SE

> Everything I've learned since that day suggests pure, boring apathy: folks too annoyed that they had to spend even a few minutes thinking about messy humans to put even a tiny bit of effort into talking to more of them.

twitter.com/shog9/status/1224099283063828480

> FYI: I was the person who actually pulled the trigger on the de-modding. Was told it was urgent and that details would be forthcoming... They were not, and by the time I had the full picture - 5 weeks later - it was apparent that there had been no valid reason for the urgency.

twitter.com/shog9/status/1224098305489006594

The urgency always seemed weird, I did suspect for the most part that it was simply something like counsel saying that there was some legal risk for some weird reason. It does make more sense that there wasn't any actual reason at all, though it really emphasizes that management is either incompetent or evil

ArtOfCode

it's the latter

Mithical

> The retrospective document that we finally compiled after 5 weeks was... Brutal. The same folks who called the shots had had stuff on their plates for half a year or more that they'd just... Ignored. Then, suddenly: it's the CMs fault for not handling this sooner.

ArtOfCode

they wanted to do it while the people who knew were away and so the people doing it wouldn't have time to think

Mithical

discordapp.com/channels/628507458452586497/628507458910027777/…

Disappointed in SE

11:02 PM

@ArtOfCode I suspect it's both, with the evil being closer to oblivious to the harm they're causing

Journeyman Geek

@ArtOfCode the onerous conditions that were mentioned for sevierence make sense if they didn't want this coming out. ._.

but I'm feeling less than charitable

John Dvorak

Did this ever have a chance of not blowing up?

Journeyman Geek

Good question

Mithical

Depends on how you define "blow up".

Things had come to a slow boil even before the "firing incident"; what that did was send it all into a roiling boil.

Disappointed in SE

Firing Monica in this way created an inevitable cascade, and that was entirely predictable. If you didnt' want this to blow up, you have to change things before that step

SE could also have stopped digging after they fired Monica, but instead they doubled down on every bad decision. The discussion before the firing and just after it was still controversial in TL, it got pretty one-sided after the news article appeared, and it was unanimous when they fired Shog and Robert. There is nobody left to defend the company

John Dvorak

11:17 PM

Lawyers can still defend the company, but that too "costs too much money"

Disappointed in SE

11:29 PM

@Mithical where is that quote from?

Mithical

27 mins ago, by Mithical

https://discordapp.com/channels/628507458452586497/628507458910027777/673663952814604326

Shog

SE is evil

@Mithical does that channel only work when you register?