Tavern on the Meta

12:00 AM

@jmac keep in mind, some of that is just part & parcel of being a relatively small site yet. Not that TWP is all that small anymore, but still - there's a much greater chance of something like that overwhelming the community than on, say, Ask Ubuntu.

jmac

Of course, but because we're small it is that much more important that we grow naturally and that we hold standards and develop our scope ourselves

Cole Johnson

On the topic of moderators, is the moderator diamond a BLACK DIAMOND (U+25C6) (◆), or a BLACK DIAMOND SUIT (U+2666) (♦) (which is HTML escapable with &diams;)?

jmac

If you look at the list of most viewed questions on TWP, only a few are good natural questions not boosted through the Hot Questions list. And that's bad.

Manishearth

Peter Mortensen joins Quora

5

Cole Johnson

@Manishearth lmgtfy.com/?q=%22stackoverflow%22+site%3Aquora.com

Shog9

12:03 AM

@jmac sure. I'm just saying, a lot can happen in 8 hours but... if it gets cleaned up eventually, it's only 8 hours.

Cole Johnson

Oh, so LMGTFY isn't banned in chat, but it is on the main site.

jmac

@Shog9 I understand your perspective. "As long as it gets handled, it's okay". On the community-moderating side though, it doesn't feel good.

Manishearth

it does. lmgtfy is used on main to harass users

on chat...not so much

Shog9

@jmac of course not

Blog - Stack Exchange: New Question / Answer Rate Limits

Jeff Atwood on February 21, 2009

Stack Overflow is somewhat unique in that we encourage participation of essentially anonymous, random programmers. Our idea is to radically reduce the bar for participation, and take one giant leap of faith:

Well, most of them, anyway. We have the typical hurdles in place to prevent bots from gaming our system: JavaScript and “too fast to be human” triggered CAPTCHA. This works in conjunction with community use of the offensive flag, which auto-deletes any post after 5 users tag it “offensive”, and traditional downvoting. This system has been fairly effective to date. We …

jmac

I mean, I had to come in here to get someone to protect the post before it really overran us all...

Cole Johnson

12:05 AM

@Manisheart lmgtfy.com/?q=cache:lmgtfy.com

Shog9

@jmac uh...

Cole Johnson

@Shog9 What did those questions even say? (I'm not 10k)

Shog9

@jmac you should have that privilege on TWP...

Cole Johnson

But then again, I could get around that using Tor to an extent

jmac

@Shog9 We had a question with 10k views in the first 24 hours. I cannot protect until that grace period is up. I can't do it when it's needed most.

Shog9

12:06 AM

@jmac ah, gotcha

Cole Johnson

@jmac Questions can't be protected in the first 24 hours?

jmac

Not by trusted users.

Here is the question in...errr...question?

Shog9

@jmac There. Now it's 0 days on TWP. If y'all over-use it, it'll be 1 again, so... Use wisely.

jmac

Thank you!

Cole Johnson

If your managed can't figure that out himself, you shouldn't be working there.

jmac

12:09 AM

managed?

Cole Johnson

If you deserve a raise and he says no, quit

jmac

@ColeJohnson That isn't exactly what the question is about, and just quit answers are strongly discouraged

(and if you quit every time you had a bad manager, you would never stay in a job for more than a couple years. I say this tongue-in-cheek since that's the trend anyhow)

Shog9

@jmac I do want to note that the system did do some self-protection there by flipping the whole mess into CW-mode. So no one's posting an answer and rep-capping after that.

Cole Johnson

On another topic

Shog9

Again, I know it's frustrating to see stuff like this and not be able to get instant relief, but... Patience goes a long way.

Cole Johnson

12:13 AM

does this question belong on SeverFault?

Shog9

SAME TOPIC!

Cole Johnson

21

Q: What are "_vti_cnf", "_vti_pvt", "_vti_script" and "_vti_txt" folders?

This folder appear in my dotnet Web project. Why? Does are usefull?

Shog9

No.

That is not a good question for SF.

Cole Johnson

It deals with server administration

jmac

@Shog9 At least to my knowledge, none of the team doing most of the community moderation on TWP cares about whether or not users get rep (though new users may care), for us it's more about handling the massive volume of posts that come up, especially when the US is asleep and it's hard to get together enough downvotes/delete votes for really poor answers, or close votes for poor questions that come up

Shog9

12:14 AM

@jmac sure. I'm just saying, the actual long-term damage is limited.

jmac

@Shog9 I think that where we disagree there is that the motivation of the people doing the work is very important. And if the community moderators get tired of moderating during these peaks and burn out or become less motivated to continue, that does do long-term damage.

Shog9

Lemme give you a more extreme example: a group of new users descended on SO the other day, posted a whole bunch of plagiarized questions and answers, and started up-voting each other. They racked up a fair bit of reputation and ranking in just a few hours. Folks were flagging them, but there's a limit you can do when faced with something large enough and organized enough.

Mod catches it, whole mess gets destroyed.

Problem solved.

yeah, it sucks the stuff was visible on the site for several hours - but long-term, it's as though it never existed.

jmac

On SO the burden is spread out amongst far more people -- on small communities like TWP there is a handful of users doing 99% of the community moderation. I should probably back that up with stats, but...

And long-term the site will be fine, sure, but that doesn't help if users feel strain from the community moderation during these hiccups.

(we do want to build a good community, right?)

Cole Johnson

@jmac no

hichris123

^ Duh, why would we want a good community?

Shog9

12:24 AM

@jmac data.stackexchange.com/the%20workplace%20stack%20exchange/query/…

Gotta remember, while SO has a lot of active users, it has an insane amount of traffic. Every day.

hichris123

@Shog9 created by anonymous

Shog9

I don't like logging in when I don't have to

jmac

That's just # of people who have made edits in the past 30 days, right?

hichris123

Says the CM who is on SE practically 24/7. :P

jmac

@hichris123 data.se has funky login compared to the rest of SE and constantly logs people out. So even if you're logged in to the other sites, that one is finnicky

Shog9

12:27 AM

@jmac no. That's the avg # of posts per day and the # of people who've showed up on the site during the past 30 who have the ability to edit without approval.

jmac

@Shog9 Then you want this (1000 is the edit privilege on beta sites)

Shog9

I could look up stats on folks who flag or vote to delete or something, but figured this was probably more generous and makes the same point

@jmac ah right

animuson

Holy crap I can see Tim Stone's face! world falls apart

2

jmac

@Shog9 I will take a look at the stats if I can figure out this SQL thing, but my gut feeling is that we have fewer editors on TWP than other more tech-oriented sites because of our subject matter. There are a lot of regulars who don't moderate so much and focus more on answering.

Shog9

@jmac could be

Anyway, to get back to your original question

If something is breaking badly, don't hesitate to just drop a note in this room; there are usually people here even when the rest of the site is a ghost town.

jmac

12:31 AM

(and I know this is something we have to work on, but not everyone is necessarily interested in community moderation, and that's fine too)

I suppose I'll compile all this stuff together and toss it in a community meta post on TWP to let people know what to do when the brown hits the fan.

Shog9

Otherwise, be patient - there are enough high-rep users on TWP to handle this stuff on their own, and if they aren't the mods will show up eventually.

Just be glad you haven't graduated yet - lot fewer privileges at full-site rep levels ;-)

jmac

Once all the stats come out from the data explorer, I may toss together a feature-request to ask CMs to somehow get a notification and drop by a site's chat when there is an unusual rush of traffic.

Shog9

@jmac Sure, but keep in mind, we aren't all active 24/7 either.

And when we are, we see the same hot questions lists as everyone else.

As well as a nice list of all flags on the entire network by site.

If something is getting hammered, we can know.

jmac

I do appreciate that, of course, and you are all more than generous enough to help out when asked which is great

I just feel like our community would be grateful for someone popping in and saying, "How are you guys doing with all the traffic? Anything we can do to help?" rather than seeking it out on our own.

(perhaps that's the salesman in me talking based on what makes my customers happy)

(and once we graduate, I think we have a good core of 10k plus users around most of the time, in the US at least, and plenty of 3k users to close questions even from Europe)

GnomeSlice

12:48 AM

@Shog9 ಠ_ಠ

animuson

Just sayin'...

jmac

Hey, 19-132-297 is my locker combination!

(I have a really really big lock)

jmac

1:39 AM

Is it a holiday in the US or something? This place is usually busier.

animuson

@jmac Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

jmac

Oh, that would explain my Facebook feed.

Thanks!

(google.co.jp doesn't show special headings for US holidays, and going to google.com auto-redirects me. This makes me sad.)

animuson

I didn't know that until a few hours ago when I realized there was no mail in my box.

jmac

I didn't realize the holiday was for his birthday. You learn something new every day!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (officially Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.) is an American federal holiday marking the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, which is around the time of King's birthday, January 15. The floating holiday is similar to holidays set under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. King was the chief spokesman for nonviolent activism in the civil rights movement, which successfully protested racial discrimination in federal and state law. The campaign for a federal holiday in King's honor began soon after his ass...

LessPop_MoreFizz

3:00 AM

@Shog9 IS THAT ENOUGH LINKS FOR YOU?

Shog9

@LessPop_MoreFizz barely. There's a good inch with no blue in it.

LessPop_MoreFizz

@Shog9 Blame the stupid character limit.

It is far too tight.

Shog9

What is San Dimas? IS IT THAT MOONBASE IN DOOM?

LessPop_MoreFizz

@Shog9 oh no. Don't tell me you don't know what this is either.

It was bad enough that Ashley didn't know.

►

hichris123

> Just change your name to @GnomeSlice and nominate on Aqade.

@Shog9 ^ Shouldn't that be Arqade?

GnomeSlice

3:06 AM

Yes.

hichris123

Or did Shog just change the name or Arqade to Aqade?

He probably would... :P

@Gnome Y u no mod nominate?

GnomeSlice

Because I would not make a very good mod.

Also I definitely wouldn't win.

Shog9

@LessPop_MoreFizz ahhh... been a long, long time since I've seen that.

hichris123

@Gnome Eh, you could just decline all flags with a link to Today's Listening. :P

LessPop_MoreFizz

@Shog9 It's been years and years since I've actually seen the whole movie. But that 30 second clip has always stuck in my mind.

hichris123

3:09 AM

Heh:

> Can we really trust a person who can't use the site effectively from his mobile phone? At 3AM when your flag goes into the queue, who do YOU want handling it? (seriously though, Less is a solid member of the community and would make a great mod. If you're reading this and don't vote for him, it means you hate Arqade and probably also hate America.)

Oh, hiya @LessPop_MoreFizz.

Shog9

See? I spelled Arqaalude right that time.

hichris123

And your point is?

I would have thought you would fix it already with your supreme mod powers.

Apparently not.

Shog9

That this isn't part of a subtle campaign to make you all forget what the actual name is so that I could change it.

LessPop_MoreFizz

@Shog9 Oh man. If we could produce some ArQualudes as swag...

Shog9

heh

hichris123

3:12 AM

@Shog9 Isn't it Gaming?

Shog9

Board & Card Games

That site?

Game Development

Or that one?

hichris123

No, Role-playing Games is the right one.

Shog9

There we go. Knew there was some site about gaming with no q in the name.

hichris123

You forgot the u...

jmac

3:53 AM

> I used to know a man named Henry. He spelled his name H-E-N-3-R-Y. The three was silent you see. Henry was financially independent, having inherited his father's tar-and-feather business, and was therefore able to devote his time to such intellectual pursuits as writing.

hichris123

@jmac Um....?

jmac

@hichris123 We were talking about spelling.

hichris123

Oh, I get it now. :P

jmac

Tom Lehrer was a brilliant man. Harvard educated mathematician turned singer/song writer. What more could a boy ask for?

LessPop_MoreFizz

4:19 AM

@jmac Other way around really. Singer/Songwriter turned math professor.

jmac

@LessPop_MoreFizz Excellent point. I believe that would be an even greater challenge.

LessPop_MoreFizz

@jmac He basically just gave up on making silly music one day and went back to academia and spent 40 years teaching math and poli sci at UCSC

jmac

Yes, he did, but that doesn't make him any less interesting.

He has performed in front of the queen!

LessPop_MoreFizz

@jmac Oh, I'd argue it makes him moreso! I'm just clarifying the story for those too dense to know it already. :P

jmac

I think knowing about Tom Lehrer is more uncommon than not knowing.

michaelb958

4:36 AM

@ColeJohnson It's a U+2666 (tested by copy+paste from Stack Apps front page).

LessPop_MoreFizz

4:52 AM

2

Q: LessPopMoreFizzPedia Brown and the Mystery of the Missing Mentions

There's a new Response to my Declaration! I should go see what it is so I can respond to the concerns of my would be constituents! Except, the newest response I see is my own. From over an hour ago, not a mere 6 minutes ago. Going to the "Responses" tab on my profile reveals not just one, ...

bug comments election

Shit's broken yo.

Laszlo Papp

5:04 AM

whoa, 482 comments under an answer!

Duncan

1:28 PM

Quiet in here today... surely we're not all working?

Transcript for