Tavern on the Meta

12:10 AM

I'm not really comfortable with that wording. We are having difficulty understanding your question implies the problem lies on our side, which is not the case (it lies on the questioner's side). — Frédéric Hamidi Aug 27 at 8:22

Undo

1:10 AM

It's amazing how many obsolete comments are Jon Skeet's.

user206222

1:40 AM

This is probably kind of an obvious question, but... where did the tools link go in the header for 10K?

user206222

or do I have to manually go to /tools?

user206222

(Could also be caching, as I literally just got my powas.)

animuson

@Emrakul You can also get there by going to review and then clicking on the Tools link in the header (it will say "Tools | Review" on the home review screen). That's how I always got there before because the mod link replaced the tools link long ago for me.

Undo

@Emrakul You have to go to /review, then click the link to /tools.

@Emrakul And congrats on your powaz.

There a kind of switchy thing on the /review screen.

Tools | Review

^^^ You click here.

Then you get presented with a list of the most absurd requests/complaints/rants on Meta.

animuson

No, click there. ----->

4

Undo

1:51 AM

Ok.

animuson

Haha, I just realized the star button is actually over there. Yay stars!

Undo

We really need to change the avatar icon thingy to this:

(numbers may be inaccurate due to caching)

animuson

(numbers may represent forecasts for the year 2020)

Undo

New meme: future-caching

animuson

Someone travelled back in time and the data is still cached from the time they came from.

Undo

1:58 AM

New meta question: I just posted a question and the view thing is a three-hundred and fifty trillion!

answer: caching

animuson

The future: bringing new meaning to "It's always caching!"

Qantas 94 Heavy

2:46 AM

Apparently spammers know how to use markdown: stackoverflow.com/a/20111216/2074608

Undo

3:04 AM

@Qan Ugh, reminds me that I really need to work on getting 10k on SO.

Shog9

3:15 AM

@Undo 300K unanswered questions - plenty of opportunity

(we'd put those in a review queue, but the wailing and gnashing of teeth would be too deafening)

Undo

3:37 AM

@Shog9 Lol, I'm combing through them now.

@Shog And we all appreciate all your work on the CV 'issue', just so you know ;)

jadarnel27

I generally find that I can either burn through all my reviews, or answer some questions. But not both.

user206222

4:01 AM

(Thanks, @Undo, @animuson!)

Undo

No problem.

jmac

4:14 AM

Does anyone here know how the "Suggested Tags" on meta are chosen?

It would be really handy to know.

animuson

Not a clue. I've tried fiddling with that, but it seems like whenever I try to get it to suggest tags, it never works. Like it knows I'm intentionally trying to trick the system and decides not to help me...

jmac

@animuson It doesn't work? You mean you don't get suggestions?

(or the suggestions are wrong?)

animuson

It doesn't load suggestions. It seems like they only load when I'm actually typing a legitimate question and am not trying to intentionally make them appear.

jmac

I think it works off the same concept as the similar questions box

so you need to have over X amount of characters in the box, and wait for a refresh.

@animuson Figured it out! You need to click in the 'tags' bar once to get it to pop up. Or at least that worked for me after copying dummy text in to my question several times: "this is a test about feature-requests bugs support and discussions. " brought up meta as a suggestion.

gnat

5:14 AM

35

Q: Close Votes review: I'm going on a strike!

I know this question is going to make me unpopular here - but I feel I have no other options. I have been concerned by the size of the close votes review queue for quite a while. When I started reviewing (less than a year ago) this queue already had ~30K questions pending review. Time passes an...

> Close Votes review: I'm going on a strike! [duplicate]

Or instead of any of that we could just close this question as a duplicate and pretend the problem doesn't exist — Richard Tingle Aug 31 at 17:23

animuson

5:26 AM

Your Type: INTJ --- Introvert(89%) iNtuitive(62%) Thinking(75%) Judging(56%)

ajax333221

5:41 AM

the answer was posted, less than 30 secs accepted and +2 votes and the answer is just a link

suckpuppet hunt stackoverflow.com/a/20113339

is there a way someone can confirm the suckpupping, or that is like private thing between mods

in any case, thanks animuson

animuson

The laundry has been taken care of. :P

ajax333221

how dirty it was? 3 accounts?

michaelb958

7:00 AM

-6

Q: Is YeahMobi the mobile advertising network?

Is YeahMobi the mobile advertising network? Is YeahMobi the mobile advertising network?

discussion

The... um... what do they even want?

balpha

they want to spam

michaelb958

Oh, that makes sense...

user234239

7:21 AM

hi

user234239

hi?

Bart

9:05 AM

@jadarnel27 Flagged because of offensive nature of said joke.

HamZa

12:08 PM

Question of the day ...

17

Q: Can somebody tell me how to type curly braces?

I'm learning Ruby on Rails at the moment and I'm wondering how to type those curly braces you see everywhere? Right now I'm copying and pasting them all the time but that is very time consuming. I'm using a program called Sublime Text on my Apple Macbook (a white one) and hope somebody can help...

ruby-on-rails coding-style apple sublimetext2

Qantas 94 Heavy

2:44 PM

Did that really get nearly 6000 views?

Johannes Kuhn

Yes.

And lots of upvotes. WHY??? HOW COULD YOU EARN REPUTATION WITH SUCH SHIT?

user3016692

1 1 5

Bart

Hey, don't underestimate the serious nature of the curly-brace-disabled. It is the main reason why finding good programmers is so difficult. If only they had curly-braces they could use.

Johannes Kuhn

Well, you can programm in Tcl without curly-braces. You just need a lot of backslahes.

Johannes Kuhn

3:05 PM

Spam: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/208380/…

jadarnel27

3:22 PM

Or you could use LISP. But then you have to reach that point where you wrestle your sanity back from the rat's nest of parentheses.

jadarnel27

3:45 PM

(typed by a guy who used LISP several times for one class in college, so you know it's legit)

serially downvotes @Bart for flagging his chat message

Stijn

4:32 PM

On Meta there are a few questions and answers explaining the internals of Stack Exchange. I've got a rather specific question, and my gut tells me the question would be off-topic: "How does Stack Exchange combine the power of MVC's URL helpers with JavaScript". On SO I can only find half-baked solutions (much like our own solution right now).

Can I ask such a question or not?

Oded

Quick answer - we don't "combine the power of MVC's URL helpers with JavaScript". Not sure what that means.

Stijn

@Oded What I mean is, how do you pass URLs from @Url.Action to JS, if at all.

Global vars, constructor parameters,... it all feels dirty.

Oded

We don't do that. I suppose that if we needed to we could. What we currently have is um... all over the place.

Stijn

Ok, thanks for the info :)

Undo

5:39 PM

Wow, this is going to be my first holiday season on SE.

I'm kinda excited for the hats.

Any chance we do another one of these?:

48

Q: The moderators have decided to have a little yuletide fun, join us will you?

PS: You only get so many Iceland Fridays in a year, so make it special people ... To start things off, a little refashioned seasonal tune: On the twelfth day of Christmas, my Stack Exchange gave to me: 12 inbox 'lerts 11 chatty pings 10 AnnaLears a-leaping 9 spam bots posting 8 weeks a fea...

discussion always-friday-in-iceland

jadarnel27

6:00 PM

Remember that time we all changed our names to Tim? That was good times.

Undo

@jadarnel27 Tell me more!

jadarnel27

There was sort of a running joke where people would ping @TimStone by just typing @Tim, and that would ping one more people other than. Tim Stone (like Tim Post).

Undo

Oh, lol.

jadarnel27

And the other Tim(s) would come complain.

So a few people changed their names to "Tim {username}".

So that even more people got pinged.

animuson

> that would ping one more people other than

doesn't even try to process that sentence

Undo

6:07 PM

@animuson You're not supposed to be the grammar nazi! That's @minitech's job!

jadarnel27

Darned mobile browser letting me type the stupid things that my desktop browser stops me from typing.

That was supposed to say "...one or more people other than..."

Although it was still worded poorly in general.

Oded

Good - we are all in agreement then.

Undo

< --- I'm getting a head start on Haaaaaats!

jadarnel27

ME NO TYPE GOOD

Undo

Now, to sit back and wait for the confused mSO question about how that one guy has a hat but he can't find that hats and HELP!!!

Currently at 1500 helpful flags :D

animuson

6:12 PM

I need a picture of me wearing my diamond hat, so I can put another hat on top of it.

Undo

On track to pass ol' Andrew early next year.

@animuson Do diamond mods get a virtual diamond hat too?

> Suppose that in 12 minutes your supervisor can complete a task that takes you 15 minutes to complete. Determine the amount of time required to complete the task if you work together.

Well, it depends - how well do we work together? :P

jadarnel27

That is a silly question.

15 minutes - if my manager and I are "working on it together", that means I'm doing it.

Undo

@jadarnel27 No, 20 minutes - five minutes for the progress report.

JDB

87 minutes. 12 minutes for my supervisor to do it his way, 15 minutes to do it my way, plus 30 minutes arguing over it (at which point the supervisor pulls rank).

(But I think we both know my way was better)

jadarnel27

6:37 PM

Plus 30 more minutes rechecking your math? =P

Undo

I should pass AB in helpful flags in well under 80 days.

jadarnel27

I was gonna look at your flagging thing again last night, @Undo. Then I lost track of time trying to remember how to do 3D transformations with OpenGL.

Then my wife was like "what are you doing, it's 1:30 in the morning?" and "don't you do that stuff all day at work?"

And I went to bed.

lol

=)

6:46 PM

How long does it take you to cast those ~100 flags, @Undo?

Undo

@jadarnel27 Eh, give me 20 minutes.

Maybe two 20 minute sessions.

I have... help:

Bart

Could we just have a feature that invalidates a serious amount of rep and suspends a user as soon as they ask "Hey, why don't I get more than 200 points on SO today?" .... The last X amount of times that happened, there was vote fraud involved.

jadarnel27

Haha, that is an excellent idea, @Bart.

Undo

@Bart I vote we just instantly suspend the user as soon as they type "so I made a new one to ask this" into a box.

animuson

Oh sweet, I get paid on Black Friday, so I won't have a chance to spend that paycheck before Black Friday rolls around. :P Convenient.

Undo

6:51 PM

@animuson Just to clarify; we use VLQ flags for link-only answers, right?

animuson

Depends on the link-only answer. The flag should describe why it should be deleted, and being link-only doesn't always mean it should be deleted.

Undo

@animuson Should this one be?

0

A: Matlab:Make a contour plot with 3 vectors

This link should be helpful...

Bart

Perhaps it's better to ask the author to incorporate actual details into his answer. Especially since it's accepted.

animuson

Ewwww a link to a video on another page? Two fails in one.

Undo

(this search is a goldmine)

animuson

6:55 PM

I'll leave the flag to the Low Quality Posts queue, because I'm curious what others will do with it.

Undo

@animuson Do VLQ's to the to queue now?

I thought they didn't.

(could you give me a link to the review item?)

animuson

They have for quite a while. The flag has to be active for 15 minutes, then the review-queue-filling-script-thing will consider it "eligible" and put it into LQP.

Undo

My flag on this one got disputed - any feedback?

0

A: learning android

This link should help. http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html

(the question's a dupe too)

animuson

@Undo stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/3411547

Undo

It's a link to a list of videos :P

animuson

6:59 PM

And now it's a link on a deleted question.

Undo

Whoa, only one reviewer to smack down a VLQ flag?

animuson

@Undo Yeah... Unfortunately...

Undo

That... needs to be changed.

And 2ker's can get in there, right?

Yuck.

(says the snobby 4ker)

animuson

38

Q: A single "looks good" should not mean the post is "good"

In the Low Quality review queue a single Looks Good click is enough to take the post out of the queue, I believe. I'm basing this on empirical observations but on Stack Overflow at least, this appears to be the case1. The system should not be quite so simple as it enables a single mis-click or r...

feature-request status-completed review low-quality-posts

Basically the LQP works as a "1 for 1" system. 1 looks good counters 1 low quality flag.

Undo

@animuson We need a three-review minimum system, like suggested edits.

It's not like we're falling behind in that queue.

animuson

7:02 PM

49

A: Please require more reviewers on First Posts

I'm pretty sure it was three reviewers when these queues were originally created. I never really understood why it was lowered to just one. Sure, that cut down on the robo-reviewers casting three upvotes on everything because there wasn't a No Action Needed button, and review audits didn't exist ...

That's about First Posts, but it can easily apply to Late Answers and Low Quality Posts too, I suppose.

Undo

Yup.

Wait, the VLQ question is marked status-completed.

animuson

Well the criteria near the bottom of Shog's answer is what actually got implemented.

Undo

> So far, this seems to be working reasonably well, and has removed a great deal of fairly mindless work from the moderator queue.

I thought mods love mindless work!

JDB

7:42 PM

@jadarnel27 - I did check my math. 12 + 15 + 30 + 30 = 87

jadarnel27

That is some valid arithmetic right there.

I didn't see the second "30" in your first statement.

Or I didn't understand completely, if you were somehow implying the other 30.

JDB

Two people arguing for 30 minutes = 60 minutes of wasted (wo)man-hours

jadarnel27

Ah, that's what I missed.

I've always thought counting time like that was kind of odd.

JDB

Sounds like you need to get yourself a Meeting Calculator

jadarnel27

Haha, I suppose so.

"5 people were on this 2 hour conference call, go ahead and add 10 hours to the project." - Something about that strikes me as shaky logic.

Part of that is that probably 3 of the people weren't listening beyond the first 2 minutes.

And 1 person did 98% of the talking.

JDB

7:58 PM

Yeah, but those 3 people could have been working on something else. They got paid for those 2 hours, at least. If they weren't getting paid to sit through a 2 hour meeting, then why didn't they just get up and go home?

But reported hours and billed hours are never the same anyway, so count however makes you happy (and rich)

Undo

I think I'm going to put my algebra book on hold as off-topic: questions asking for numbers must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Show what you did, why it didn't work, and what the expected results are.

jadarnel27

I'll have to think about this some more to really understand what bothers me about it. I don't think I'm expressing it well. But something always seems off when I see that at work.

JDB

If a chair stands 18 inches off the ground, does it make sense for the carpenter to charge you for 18 inches of pine, or for 72? That's how I've always seen it. Then again, in reality, I've never worked for a company that didn't regularly "throw away" billable hours to Keep the Customer Satisfied.

Wow... I really need to review the formatting rules for chat. I keep screwing it up.

jadarnel27

Yeah, the formatting is just different enough to be confusing.

JDB

8:15 PM

Of course, if one of the participants in the meeting was Tony the Pony, then I'd probably have to charge at least double that.

Manishearth

@JDB why 72? O.o

I think I know what you're driving at, but I'm not sure if I get the analogy

JDB

Employee time costs the employer money (both in terms of salary and in terms of lost productivity). It's a scarce resource. Not unlike the wood a carpenter uses. If a meeting is 2 hours long, but requires 3 employees to attend, then the meeting costs the employer 6 hours. Like a chair 18 inches high with 4 legs costs the carpenter 72 inches of wood. Adding a fifth leg costs the carpenter another 18 inches, even though the chair remains the same height.

Manishearth

@JDB ah

JDB

Charging the customer for that time is a completely different topic, but the cost to the employer doesn't change.

Undo

9:26 PM

Whoa:

> UPDATE (Nov 21, 2013): The DMCA takedowns that we have received over the past year are now posted at Chilling Effects.

AWESOME!!!

Lynn Crumbling

I can't believe this has lasted for 8 minutes...

-12

Q: Does this girl like me?

OK I have liked this girl for a while at school about the first day of school, we about half the year into the school year and before she has really never paid any attention to me, not like ignoring but like she wasn't interested, well anyways the past week or so she has been saying hi more and s...

relationships

animuson

> I'm afraid of toasters

Lynn Crumbling

oh... all gone.

Bart

@LynnCrumbling I'm sure plenty of users were writing a jQuery solution to that problem.

2

Lynn Crumbling

@Bart HAHAHA

animuson

9:41 PM

Nah, Manish was writing a user script.

Undo

Lol:

jadarnel27

I hope that girl gets over her fear of toasters. I never did.

Undo

I think people want mugs.

@animuson Does merging keep the tag from popping up again?

animuson

@Undo It destroys the tag in the process, so you'd need a 1,500 rep user to create it again.

Undo

@animuson 1500+ rep users make typos too... I am one :P

Why not merge + synonymize?

animuson

9:48 PM

Because I'm not a fan of filling the synonyms list with silly spelling mistakes.

Undo

Oh.

It qualifies as an 'alternate spelling', right? :P

animuson

I'm ok with the spelling difference synonyms, like British English <--> American English.

Undo

Oh, ok.

animuson

But flat-out missing letters that should be there, no.

I'm pretty sure all these people know how to spell "search" - they just weren't paying attention.

Undo

Today I saw a post written in Spanish or some foreign language and left a 'this is an English-only site' comment. Something didn't feel right, so I went back to the post. Sure enough: I had said, "Sorry, this is an Omgrish-only site."

No idea how I missed the E and hit the O.

animuson

9:54 PM

Hey, one of your flags actually had a positive result: stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/3412139

Undo

Quite a few of them did:

...

animuson

Last time I checked that accepted answer VLQ never made it into review. Maybe the checkmark makes it ineligible for the queue. shrugs

Undo

Weird.

I guess I've never seen an accepted answer in the queue.

Going to switch to Dvorak layout for a few minutes, let's see if I can still type coherently.

Bart

Still?

Undo

thia co dapev

C jab-y yfl.!

Never doing that again.

animuson

10:00 PM

> earned at least 200 reputation on 94 days

Undo

All the letters moved around!

animuson

My quest to be Legendary, like a Pokémon!

Undo

I definately fall under this category.

Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard ( ) is a keyboard layout patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey. Over the years several slight variations were designed by the team led by Dvorak or by ANSI. These variations have been collectively or individually also called the Simplified Keyboard or American Simplified Keyboard but they all have come to be commonly known as the Dvorak keyboard or Dvorak layout. Dvorak proponents claim the Dvorak layout uses less finger motion, increases typing rate, and reduces errors compared to the standard QWERTY keyboard. Th...

animuson

Who the hell names their son August?

Shog9

Mrs. Caesar?

Undo

10:03 PM

I think that if my keyboard had a Dvorak layout printed on it I could manage.

But it doesn't.

Shog9

I think if someone snuck in and rearranged all of my key-caps randomly and then remapped the keys accordingly I could manage... but, why?

animuson

If only I worked at the SE office.........

CDspace

colemak.com

Undo

@Shog9 To 'decrease finger motion, increase typing rate, reduce errors, and in general cause all heck to break loose'

Shog9

Dvorak: write more crap faster with less strain

Undo

10:09 PM

If nothing else, switching my keycaps to Dvorak will make people less likely to steal my machine.

jadarnel27

10:52 PM

This is awesome: vimeo.com/78343974

Someone definitely had too much time on their hands there.

Undo

11:11 PM

Solution to the FGITW problem: Make everyone switch to Dvorak.

ajax333221

11:56 PM

oh no, I took my time to answer the question of a 1 rep user and he has lots of follow-up questions in the comments

even one of those questions was clearly explained and even put a link that explains it more, how were these called? vampires?

jadarnel27

"Help Vampires", yes.

michaelb958

183

Q: Exit strategies for "chameleon questions"

I'm not sure if there's already an existing term for this, so I'm inventing my own. (tl;dr: I call them "chameleon questions" because they change every time you submit or edit an answer. If you're already intimately familiar with the phenomenon, please skip past the first set of bullet points t...

discussion questions

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