Tavern on the Meta

6:13 PM

My computer tells me when to stand up and when to sit down.

My computer doesn't talk to me.

Braiam

@jadarnel27 next, your computer will tell you what to buy, who follow, what to believe...

No, google does that already

@Braiam That would be nice. I feel like I waste a lot of time making such decisions.

[ SmokeDetector ] Email in answer: Samsung Galaxy S3 (i9300) "no network" issue by Daniel on android.stackexchange.com

6:26 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in title: Oro Lift skin care anti-aging review by hiyaankoeny on askubuntu.com

sd tpu-

Looky, spammer find blockquotes!

that's so cute

oh wait, that was accidental :P

So I found this using Blaze: stackoverflow.com/a/31461781/1768232

(NAA ^)

@Undo I clicked "flag" and now it says "working..."

@durron597 "Flag" or "flag on site"?

"flag" doesn't work anymore

6:34 PM

@Undo Oh ok (it doesn't say that in the wiki)

I just learned about Blaze 3 minutes ago from the pin in Charcoal HQ

It's a neat tool

If you click the "authenticate" button at the top it'll let you cast actual flags on the site from within the webapp

@Undo Agreed

I'm not prepared to do that ;)

@durron597 why?

It's all client side, nothing goes to my server ever

@Undo Because I'm very paranoid and also it's easy to just click through

oh okay

But it's convenient :)

6:38 PM

@Undo What's the throttling on it like?

@durron597 Same as the regular site

Five seconds IIRC

@Undo I was reading the API docs for the first time today... isn't there a limit like 10,000 requests per day or something?

Something like that

(actually asking, trying to learn)

But it's 10,000 requests per day per user per app

So you can use Blaze all day long, and everyone can, and nothing breaks

6:42 PM

@Undo It's very cool.

What is the need for Firestorm? I guess I'm not entirely understanding what it does

I should do something with the API.

Probably something that doesn't use Python.

Not that I have anything against Python.

@durron597 I can't remember what that is

so it must not be important

oh

That's a thing for putting more info in flags than the char limit allows

I've never needed more than 500 characters with a custom flag.

Something has white-space: nowrap somewhere on blaze.

@durron597 Sometimes I'll have sockpuppet flags that need a bunch of links

6:47 PM

But right before I was about to find it, my browser decided it wanted to repaint to blank

It does that sometimes

@Undo Oh, like "I've caught this spammer posting the same thing in these 8 places, here are links?"

eh, with that I can just point to the profile

I've occasionally wanted more than 500 characters for similar reasons (links take up so many characters).

More "this guy is probably a sockpuppet of this guy because this and this and this, and he did this and suggested this"

@undo why no voting on blaze?

6:49 PM

It'd be possible

I just haven't sat down and tried to do it

Go for it if you'd like :)

I don't have much experience with the api yet.

@Undo What about just making an MSE post "give users with more than X helpful flags an increased character limit in the box"

@durron597 normal-length custom flags are already ugly in the mod tools, I can't imagine them doubled in length

@Undo Ah. the things you don't know when you don't have a diamond.

@TinyGiant okay, deal: If you can hack the HTML to put the voting arrows in the right place, I'll wire them up.

6:51 PM

I'll do my best.

@durron597 I want to fix some of the moderator tooling first, because it's even more long overdue. That's an active initiative as of next week. The 10k tools were designed to facilitate more oversight, which at our current scale, is a function that they fundamentally don't provide very well. You need to be able to drill into those lists more conveniently at a much deeper breadth, and (optionally) filter out the stuff you can't act on, even if just seeing what's ultimately happened to it is interesting. — Tim Post ♦ Jun 27 at 4:08

7:05 PM

.ice-ice-baby lol cdn.sstatic.net/stackoverflow/all.css

7:23 PM

in The Whiteboard on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, 6 mins ago, by durron597

However, I was actually looking for a request for a privilege "allow me to CV flag (as a user with less than 3k rep would) questions after I run out of CVs"

Anyone better at duplicate-fu than me? I'm trying to find that particular request and several of us in the Whiteboard can't find it.

I have a strong memory that it's status-declined but I just can't find it.

Q: Reviewing a flagged question should allow me to flag Exact Duplicates even when I'm out of close votes

14

As we know, it's By-Design that flags for closing as exact duplicates are converted to close votes when the person has the power to close. All is as it should be. Problem However, when that person runs out of close votes, they can no longer flag exact duplicates (that option is taken away). I ...

feature-request status-declined review flags

related, possibly what you're thinking of?

Q: Allow marking questions as duplicate even when out of close votes

8

Now that we have a great UI for allowing people to close their own questions as duplicates, I think we should be able to offer that UI to people even if we are out of close votes. Proposal: if out of close votes, if you click close, allow the user to choose the "duplicate" close reason. This wil...

feature-request vote-to-close exact-duplicates

I remember posting that one, lol

It's possible that I was thinking of yours, though.

I didn't think it was dup specific, but maybe.

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in answer: Piracy/File sharing - Why aren't songs, movies or books given for free? by LarryBud on economics.stackexchange.com

@SmokeDetector fp

@Undo Registered answer as false positive.

[ SmokeDetector ] Repeating words in answer: How to generate a HTML page dynamically using PHP? by PENIS on stackoverflow.com

7:39 PM

sd tpu-

@KevinBrown I'm stunned that word isn't blocked by their username filter.

Haven't gotten spam from people with that name

I imagine we get some abusive stuff, though

@undo jsfiddle.net/477ck1fq if you need the styles for the buttons when clicked let me know

@TinyGiant sweet

:) the magic of the code inspector.

and this

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snappysnippet/…

awe it wont onebox

7:50 PM

@Undo I meant stack exchange's filter, not your filter.

@durron597 oh

It's dangerous and usually useless to throw plain-text blocking on the network

SE has blacklists, and they work, but pretty soon it catches someone with a real name Elpeniston or something and people get angry.

The SnappySnippet plugin is pretty nice, but it would be better if it used the declared css instead of the computed css

And the real idiots just put two E's or something

@Undo I mean, you could just have a really narrow filter for names that are full words in any capitalization

You could, but the crazy people figure it out and you have a bunch of people named "PEENIS" running around

You just can't win

7:54 PM

@Undo Smokey always wins

5 hours ago, by SmokeDetector

@ShadowWizard It's SmokeDetector's fault.

^ counterexample

@undo jsfiddle.net/477ck1fq/2 some minor fixes

kk

thanks

It'll be a while before I can get to it, so much stuff on the todo list

[ SmokeDetector ] All-caps title: HELP WITH THIS SENTENCE PLS by Danielle Kondratyeva on writers.stackexchange.com

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive body detected: iTC: Unable to delete already approved app by Pikmin25 on stackoverflow.com

Cool.

8:02 PM

@SmokeDetector Both of their questions are off-topic on writers ("looking for a rewrite")

Also unclear

[ SmokeDetector ] All-caps title: ANOVA AND BLOCKING DESIGN by JMRamos on stackoverflow.com

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive answer detected: Can my motherboard/ CPU support 8 GB RAM? by james smithers on superuser.com

user259867

@SmokeDetector tpu-

user259867

user259867

This might explain the dearth of questions on Arabic Language

user259867

8:09 PM

That, and RTL language, I suppose.

Q: هل يوجد قواعد مبسطة للغة العربية؟

-2

هل يوجد قواعد مبسطة للغة العربية؟ مثلا استخدام عشرون أو عشرين. هل يوجد طرق سهلة وبسيطة بدلا ً من تذر القاعدة ومحاولة تطبيقها؟

question

got through somehow

also, they have a [question] tag?

A question is a construct of a language, so when discussing a language, that tag could be useful in classifying questions about questions

> Is there a simplified rules of the Arabic language? For example, the use of twenty or twenty. Is there an easy and simple ways instead of devastating al-Qaeda and trying to apply?

impressive how google translates some words: القاعدة can be "The base" or "Al-Qaeda" :-O

interesting question

user259867

@Undo And it's the most popular tag on the site

8:16 PM

ouch

user259867

This does not bode well.

How's pt doing?

11 questions asked, 12 this week?

user259867

Much better. Still struggling to adjust to the fact that it's not 100% Portuguese, unlike pt.SO. But good level of activity and voting.

166 questions in portuguese, but it's just the usual boom at the start

user259867

8:18 PM

The top question of those in English: Why does the definite article for country names vary so much? (e.g. "no Brasil", "na Alemanha", "em Portugal") by Rafael Almeida on portuguese.stackexchange.com

Nevermind, I read that wrong

user259867

> Brazil is a boy (As most countries), Germany is a girl. United States is a Boy, Europe and America are Girls

what seems to me interesting is the use of "in the" for Brasil or Germany, but just "in" for Portugal (without "the")

cv-pls duplicate: stackoverflow.com/questions/8556264/…

A: Penalty for answering help-vampire questions? Or reward closure?

15

One option would be to simply remove all rep gained from questions that are subsequently closed. This would not punish anyone, but would not reward anyone either. There would be no plus-side to answering bad questions. Those answering the bad questions might join the fight for better questions ...

I didn't think it would get that many votes

I'd be willing to bet that anyone who downvoted that answer likes getting rep from answering bad questions

8:25 PM

@TinyGiant I commented along with my downvote.

So why do you disagree? Besides that discussion from 2012?

Remember this would only affect questions that are closed and stay closed

user259867

One problem is that it would give a strong incentive to vote to reopen just to get the rep back, regardless of the merits of question.

@1999 It would also encourage people to close in order to penalize.

user259867

That is probably less of a problem. One would need 4 other users to agree.

But you would still need 4 other reopen votes, and someone could just come along and close it again, then you couldn't vote to reopen again.

8:32 PM

@TinyGiant Yeah but this doesn't actually happen

@TinyGiant I only ask because the current policy for deletion is that old, popular questions keep the rep earned (I think?) if they are deleted. — Kevin Brown 1 min ago

And more people are apt to close bad questions than to reopen bad questions I would imagine

Can anyone confirm that?

Stuff that should be closed remains open for years, and vice versa.

Reputation and Historical Archives

Well, I would imagine that is because we have too many people trying to answer these questions instead of close them. If there were more people who didn't see any benefit from answering these questions and did see benefit in closing them, then it would be less likely that they would stay open.

@KevinBrown I would like to know as well

user259867

8:36 PM

Josh Heyer on March 6, 2012

If you've been around Meta Stack Overflow the past few days, you've seen a fair bit of conversation sparked by the recent changes to how reputation is calculated:

Q: Should reputation be earned on questions that get closed?

-6

The current situation Let me start of with two a priori observations: Due to the way StackExchange is designed the easier a question is, the more reputation one will earn. This simply a consequence of the fact that more people will visit a simple question. Simple questions have often been aske...

feature-request reputation bounty

user259867

The prevalent mood appears to differ between meta and meta.SO.

I should have excluded duplicates in the post, as those are useful.

Because meta.SO is really tired of "low quality" questions, whereas mSE is from lower traffic sites.

user259867

Personally, I'd be happy with having 0 for any closed questions I answered. There are but a few of those, out of... 1897 answers on math currently.

user259867

8:40 PM

There's a query My answers to closed questions

I disagree with it... and I think it would cause even more outrage. But remember, we're optimizing for pearls -- even if a question is closed, the answerer should be rewarded for a good answer.

However, a lot of closed questions have an answer with 2-3 upvotes for a really simple typo.

Now those questions should just be obliterated.

I'm certain that those same pearl answers could be posted on better questions.

user259867

Or the question edited into a better shape.

Or the question could be edited to match the answer

Beat me to it.

Then encourage the answerer to improve the question.

8:43 PM

The only thing would be old questions, but if their worth keeping on the site then they should be locked

user259867

@hichris123 ... by withholding rep until they do that.

Don't penalize something that only goes half-way... encourage the other half to be done.

@1999 Yes that

@1999 Some questions can never be on-topic. But the answers were very very useful.

(incidentally, I think SO should be taking a look at allowing some tool recs)

Then those answers should either be posted on questions that belong on the site, or on another stackexchange site where those questions are accepted

8:44 PM

Because blindly shutting everything down because "it didn't work before"... isn't fun.

I think it could work.

But how can you quantify if one recommendation is better than another, or the best overall? It's an opinion if anything

Basically what Shog outlined a while ago... specific goals for a specific problem.

user259867

@hichris123 Related ru.SO originally copied off-topic reason from SO, translating them. Recently they revised them and removed the tool-rec reason.

(hmm, this is starting to sound like Software Recommendations)

@1999 Huh.

user259867

@hichris123 It stems from Какие изменения необходимы Stack Overflow на русском? by Nicolas Chabanovsky on meta.ru.stackoverflow.com ... which I'm not going to translate :/

8:47 PM

@1999 Apparently, out of my 277 answers, only 14 of them are on closed questions, according to that link

And the latest one was closed over two months ago, before I realized that I was doing it wrong.

AstroCB

No I haven't tried, like I said. I'm curious on some peoples logic how they'd achieve it — mogorilla 47 secs ago

@1999 Could you translate the gist of this (Google Translate isn't doing too well):

> Решение. А что если разрешить

> а также не требовать однозначного ответа от вопроса, сайт станет действительно хуже?

Ссылка на обсуждение: "А что если разрешить?".

(from meta.ru.stackoverflow.com/a/631/178296)

@hichris123 basically it is: What would happen if it were allowed to ask for recommendations for books, tools, libraries, teaching materials or any other external resources. Would be worse this site?

the part you pasted is about allowing to ask things that does not require a clear answer, would be worse the site?

9:07 PM

I see.

Hello @BlasSoriano. :)

hi :)

user259867

@hichris123 avp proposed to allow recommendation questions, provided that they are posed in the context of a clearly described situation faced by the OP ("user story" as they say on software recs). The long answer by CM isn't really about tool-recs; he talks at length about opinion-based questions and why they are bad. I don't see any place of discussion that resolves in "yes, get rid of tool-rec reason".

user259867

(I searched for a while, hence the late reply)

I know just a few words in russian, but I can read cyrillic, and a lot words are very similar to spanish and/or english

@BlasSoriano Ooh, cool. I'd like to be able to read cyrillic sometime.

@1999 Hmm, okay. So basically someone just proposed it, and they did it? Much easier than meta.SO. :P

9:11 PM

Lol

user259867

Well, first there was some talk about long-time HashCode contributors leaving the site... then CM posed that question about optimizing the rules for ru.SO specifically... then the change happened.

Ah.

user259867

My opinion: tool-rec questions would be okay if they were phrased in a way that makes spam invalid answers.

user259867

If you can't tell the difference between a keyword-targeting spambot and a valid answer, that's no good.

Whatever the case may be, ru.SO does not currently face the gigantism issue that SO is currently facing. It is understandable that they would want more questions to be allowed, when they have less of them.

user259867

9:15 PM

Hence, the demand Don't tell - show! If that was enforced...

Also I think there is another factor to think of: if you search for resources using any search engine, you can get easy what you need... if you use english! But for any other language there are a lot fewer results. I guess it is just a matter of time

For example, imagine you are searching for documentation about D language, compared to C or C#: it is not so easy to find resources

> Avoid poorly-written questions. Posting a well-written answer under a poorly-written question just makes your answer look worse. Also become familiar with what's on-topic here - and avoid answering questions on topics that aren't well-regarded.

that supports the idea that people should not be answering bad questions, even if it is a good answer.

Which is also, somewhat, on the how to answer page

user259867

I'd support getting rid of the bonus for acceptance. If the asker never earns 15 rep, and nobody else cares about the answer, there isn't anything to reward. The site did not benefit from that answer.

As for the pearls before sand aspect, if the answer is truly a pearl, then it should be posted on a valid on-topic question. If it cannot be posted on a valid on-topic question, then it is not on-topic for this site no matter how useful it is.

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive body detected, offensive title detected: Why the fuck wont Ubuntu write to my fucking USB properly by Flare Games on askubuntu.com

user259867

9:29 PM

@SmokeDetector gone

Nothing like trying to track down a bug from project to project.

user259867

+1 mod on pt.SO: Moderadores são como dias de férias by Gabe on meta.pt.stackoverflow.com

@TinyGiant Interestingly, only 5 of my 14 answers to closed question (out of 277 answers total) are not duplicates, and those answers did not receive any upvotes or accept marks. So basically, I would not lose any rep if this suggestion was put into play.

How to get close reason in SEDE?

@TinyGiant It's in the posthistory table

9:46 PM

What column am I looking for?

user259867

Start with the query "show all types"

rene

@TinyGiant comment

> Submission rejected as potential spam

Yay.

I'm spam!

rene

who is moderator? — Rahul 1 min ago

epic comment

@hichris123 yummy

and I'm out ...

10:01 PM

Night rene.

@1999 Check this out to see what questions you would lose rep on if my suggestion went through

It told me 0

user259867

@TinyGiant Aside: when forking, it's better to log in & rename the query. Otherwise this is what other will find when searching for its name.

ahhhh

user259867

Anyway, none of the questions I answered on SO (102 presently) have been closed, for any reason.

user259867

And on math, I don't pay attention to rep anymore. Over 35K there is no difference.

10:09 PM

If the suggestion did not take into account questions that predate their close reason Jon Skeet might see a loss

Q: Proposed micro-privilege: site analytics

8

Remember when I asked a few months ago: Help us identify micro-privileges for top users? The idea was to be able to start rolling these out quickly and not take too much developer and designer time. In particular, the idea I suggested in the question, site analytics, should have been a quick turn...

feature-request moderator-tools privileges analytics

user259867

25K is an odd rep level to grant this on. At that point, increased deletion votes still provide motivation to keep going. </bikeshed>

I wonder what machine Stack Overflow would look like. "I tried to install a new kernel but now my human won't boot up."

Tweeted by SwiftOnSecurity on July 16, 2015 at 10:13 PM

user259867

Meta question: what does the /site-analytics page show at present? (To be posted on every meta site).

user259867

Possibly self-answered.

10:24 PM

Can we do SUM with SEDE?

user259867

Yes, select sum(...)

user259867

Like this: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/32911/…

Jon skeet would lose approximately 71480, shog9 would lose approximately 17620

10:45 PM

Ha, just an idea but, why not create an offtopic.stackoverflow.com where all off-topic but still programming-related questions are on-topic? That would put an end to "Where can I ask this off-topic question" posts on meta.

Not Programming Related – programmers.stackexchange.com

... you mean Not Programming Related? (today: Programmers)

Launched Q&A site for professional programmers who are interested in getting expert answers on conceptual questions about software development.

No, they have to be programming related, just like pob or rec questions and the like.

For all the questions that are closed on this site but touted as "pearls"

Good Subjective, Bad Subjective

11:04 PM

@TinyGiant That was NPR.

> As you may have noticed, Programmers is the hard one to define, the only one I included an image for. Two reasons for that, first I'm a moderator there and I wanted my site to stand out, and secondly the site's scope changed drastically shortly after it's launch. Originally Programmers was intended as an "off topic Stack Overflow", a site where people could post everything that didn't fit on Stack Overflow, even if it had little to do with programming.

It soon became apparent that this wasn't such a great idea, and the site was filling up with crap. Highly upvoted, fun and interesting cr…

And then Good Subjective, Bad Subjective happened.

Robert Cartaino on September 29, 2010

Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers. We've been crystal clear about this for as long as I can remember, even back to the earliest, pre-beta days of Stack Overflow. It's right there in the standard Stack Exchange FAQ:

Not sure if NPR accepted tool recs though.

user259867

> As a character for joining/splitting, I picked CHAR(9999), which, being ✏, is rather unlikely to be present in your data.

user259867

Does this render as a pencil?

AstroCB

@1999 Yes.

user259867

Cool. I thought of using a banana, but 9999 is easy to type and is less likely to be mistaken for something important.

11:19 PM

I think I've edited this question enough for it to be reopened stackoverflow.com/q/30087610/4639281

user259867

Maybe CHAR(7) is better... BELL

user259867

No, that doesn't work. In Google Sheets, one can join strings using CHAR(7) as a separator, but cannot split by it. Which really shouldn't come as a surprise to me...

Google sheets/docs are exercises in futility

user259867

Depends on one's goal, I suppose. I like ImportXML, for example.