Tavern on the Meta

Undo

00:13

What's the current status on the data dumps?

GnomeSlice

@Undo They're full of data.

Undo

Well yes, but they also kind of no longer exist.

Or no one is hosting them, at least.

Pops

We're talking to archive.org about it.

Undo

Yay!

I noticed they have one from 2011

@Pops What needs talked about? They want the data, don't they?

Or is it just the size of the data?

Probably some legal thingy I don't understand :P

Pops

00:29

I don't really know much more than that. I doubt they want to collect data indiscriminately, though. Otherwise they'd probably have way more stuff in the wayback machine.

Undo

Ahhh, true

So why can't SE run the data dumps? Torrents don't take up much bandwidth after the first few hours, after the data gets spread out, right?

(again, I have next to 0 knowledge in the area :P)

Pops

I don't know that. Will ask tomorrow.

jmac

Hey @Pops, as community managers, do you guys notice huge spikes in traffic on various sites and actively monitor them?

Pops

I don't, personally. Can't speak for the whole team on that one, though.

jmac

Specifically referring to things like this. Due to the hot question issue, we got a whole massive amount of new traffic, and were struggling to self-moderate and couldn't.

@Pops if possible, if you could talk to the community team about monitoring sites for huge surges in traffic like that and planting a community manager in the chat room(s) of the affected site(s) to help out with moderation it would at least do a little bit to allay some of the concerns about getting tons of new visitors.

Pops

00:43

Okay, yeah. I didn't know that was a problem. Will definitely bring it up. Thanks for the poke!

jmac

No problem, figured as long as you were here. I was thinking of making a meta post about it, but I didn't want it to sound like I was calling out the CMs.

For The Workplace there are probably 4-5 people who do a bulk of the everyday moderation, but when there is that much traffic, it really just swamps us. I find myself having trouble prioritizing what to manage first because of the volume. New traffic means new users asking questions/giving answers that need to be welcomed (first), and then told where to look at to understand our corner of SE

And at the same time there are dozens of answers and voting patterns and comments and flags and reviews that come through at the same time and cause trouble with other hot questions, and it's just endless catchup.

This time I was lucky enough to find @Nick in here who was able to protect the offending question to prevent the worst of the worst, but the burden 4 days later is still pretty insane and could really use some outside support.

I am pretty good at managing my level of contribution to prevent burnout, but 40-year floods like that one are when community moderation is needed the most, and I feel the least able to actually effectively moderate because of the volume.

hichris123

02:04

@Pops Is it still going to be every ~3 months for a data dump?

Undo

@hichris123 Probably not until the clearbits thing gets cleared up

hichris123

I assume so too, but just wondered if it's still going to be every 3 months or >3 or <3.

Pops

@hichris123 I haven't heard anything about changes.

Undo

02:35

> Your apache2 configuration is broken, so we're not restarting it for you.

How helpful.

jadarnel27