Tavern on the Meta

Travis J

8:00 PM

@Shog9 - Is that really the outlook? 20 users should go around voting in blocks of 20 like a fire hose?

user213963

Becomes difficult to find old crap with it.

Shog9

@TravisJ you realize there are a lot more than 20 10K users on SO, right?

6 mins ago, by Shog9

Which is usually the real problem in practice: only a tiny, tiny handful of people actually use their delete votes

Travis J

Yes, but how many of them do anything but answer questions?

durron597

@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

Travis J

Many high reputation users are not active on meta.

rene

8:01 PM

Maybe the only thing that is left to do is watching troublesome tags for new posts but leave the current mess in its status quo

Travis J

Nor on moderation in general aside from what they encounter

Makoto

Would it be the case that we're missing some kind of "burnination" tool, then? Do these problems seem to come up during tag burnination?

durron597

@Shog9 "probably" incomplete? It's desperately incomplete. And filtering is nonexistent.

Shog9

@Makoto so one of the easiest things to do here would be to just delete all closed, negatively-scored questions in a tag when the tag itself was burned.

durron597

@Shog9 We are doing it this way because we are trying to relieve moderators from being involved in the process

Makoto

8:02 PM

@Shog9 So help my understanding. How do we determine when the tag is "burned"? I believe that to be when there aren't any new questions tagged with it.

Is there another state that I'm unaware of?

Because, honestly, that sounds like a great approach.

durron597

I can't remember the last time burning a tag was done by a mod, except for the last 100 third-party questions

Shog9

> Now, even if you can edit without approval... You probably shouldn't bother if there are more than a few dozen questions. Even if you have a few other people involved, 50-100 is probably the most you should bother with unless you're down-right masochistic.

> For tags that involve large numbers of questions, just flag the burninate-request and leave a note for the mods that the cleanup is done. They'll pass this along to someone like me, I'll verify that you didn't lie about the sanity-checking and cleanup, click a button, and it'll be like the tag never existed...

user213963

@TravisJ the thing is that canvassing for votes and using down votes to delete a post was specifically advised by mods. They are refusing any mandate to help with that aspect of site quality.

Shog9

83

A: When to burninate

Before you start doing anything, put a little bit of thought into the request: Does this tag even need to be burninated? There are a lot of burninate-requests posted to various meta sites that are... To put it gently... A complete and utter waste of everyone's time. Some folks will seemingly p...

durron597

We did source-code source software-tools exclude delete etc. etc. entirely by ourselves

SmokeDetector

8:03 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Repeating words in answer: Move image down using HTML/CSS by daddy on stackoverflow.com

Shog9

@durron597 and if you can, that's no problem.

user213963

No, mods don't scale. But neither do our tools in the face of the onslaught of crap.

Shog9

But at the point where you're saying you have to organize voting rings to work around the deficiencies in the tooling, I'd have to say there's a problem.

user213963

something needs more power to scale.

durron597

@Shog9 If the tooling were improved, then we wouldn't need to use downvotes in this way

TylerH

8:05 PM

@Shog9 I agree, and we should fix the tooling, not prevent people from working around the deficiences

Makoto

Okay, from context it's a mod-specific thing. Perhaps power users need more insight into that?

durron597

28

Q: 10k "Most Delete Votes" List - Don't Show Questions I Can't Vote For

This is somewhat related to a question here on meta about whether the number of questions in the "Most Delete Votes" list in the 10k moderator tools should be increased. I looked for that question every way I could think of, to add this as an answer (if it wasn't closed), but couldn't find it. I...

Shog9

I can easily delete hundreds of questions an hour if need-be. If the need grows greater than that, we probably have bigger problems to address.

Travis J

At the same time, users who would not have access to that tooling should not bypass the reputation requirement by simply coordinating workarounds and gaming the system.

durron597

If the 10k tools became more useful for burnination efforts (tag filtering) then we wouldn't need to do this.

Shog9

8:06 PM

@durron597 you don't actually need to do it now.

Travis J

Why is the focus on tag burnination though? That doesn't seem like the overall problem I observe. Questions in general are a lot easier to moderate. The current culture of focusing user coordinated removal of answers is what bothers me.

durron597

@Shog9 Which circles me back to my original point: do you want us to clean up crap, or not?

Shog9

I mean, if your primary goal is to get rid of a tag, then closing all the questions that should be closed, deleting the ones you can, and retagging the rest is sufficient.

Makoto

@Shog9: More communication, perhaps? If you can actually handle these more efficiently than the community, we should probably have a better communication flow towards this.

user213963

@TravisJ it's a way to have some measure of success.

Travis J

8:07 PM

In fact, there was an entire discussion recently on the decline of answers per post and while the cause is hard to determine, anything undermining answers at the moment is not a good idea.

durron597

@Shog9 This would result in hundreds or thousands of closed questions that will never get looked at and remain on the site forever

Travis J

@MichaelT - Clarify? The tag burnination, or the answer removal?

durron597

Which goes back to my question about "is closed a transition state or a final state"

user213963

Looking at the front page remains very disappointing. Too much crap there.

Travis J

When you go looking... that is all you will find.

durron597

8:08 PM

If "closed, not deleted" is a reasonable endgame state for a question, then what you suggest is fine

Shog9

@Makoto I wrote a big-ass meta post about it and if you use [burninate-request] as a tag on a MSO question it's linked there...

user213963

But a tag burning - you can see that number go down.

Shog9

As usual, folks don't read

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Hey how many late answers did SO get?

Makoto

@MichaelT: There's still crap questions, but the thing is, I see a lot less of it on the main page than I do in a specific tag.

TylerH

8:08 PM

@TravisJ removal of answers here is a symptom, not a cause. It was already established long ago that deleting good content/answers is not the right way to do things (even durron agrees), so that shouldn't be your focus here

durron597

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M 1.2k

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

That's . . . disappointing.

Shog9

@durron597 not necessarily. A big chunk will be deleted automatically; a smaller chunk will be deleted by vote over time (again, delete votes don't expire). Some may take years to be gone. They won't be lost though.

user213963

@Makoto front page of SO is filtered by triage.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Physics isn't SO's fingernail and it got 505.

Travis J

8:09 PM

@TylerH - That is what garners my attention. The question closure is not as much of an issue, but the focusing of votes in general is still a problem that goes against the way the site was designed.

durron597

@Shog9 The tags are an organization scheme to help us find questions that we know are bad

it's much easier to find a question about, for example, legal advice while it's tagged legal

Makoto

@Shog9: Yes, the question in...question was indeed originally tagged with burninate-request

durron597

@Shog9 if we burn the tag to avoid having to delete the tag right now, then the question becomes much harder to find later.

Maybe the right thing to do is make it much easier for tags to be in a "no new questions may be asked with this tag" state

Makoto

I'll re-read that post, though.

user213963

With close votes aging out and large queues or small community moderation pools, it can be very difficult to get anything closed or deleted without coordination.

durron597

8:10 PM

Then, legal can continue to exist, we wouldn't need to burn it.

user213963

Especially so on old posts.

Shog9

@durron597 so, this is where drawing a line between "small enough we can do this with 10 people" and "big enough that it'll be easier to just tidy up the edges and ask for help" is gonna benefit you a lot.

Travis J

@MichaelT - And what negative effect have these old posts had on users aside from those looking for that type of post to close?

durron597

@Shog9 We were able to do source and source-code and legal with 10 people.

1500+ questions in all three.

Shog9

The hardest, most tedious parts of tag cleanups for me are going through questions and finding those that shouldn't have had the tag in the first place, or should've had a different tag.

That's where it really helps to have some dedicated editors working with you

user213963

8:12 PM

@TravisJ they remain as examples of acceptable quality for new users.

durron597

@Shog9 I agree this is the hardest part, that is why my edits skyrocketed in the last two months

I didn't bother to edit a question I voted to close in most cases.

Travis J

@MichaelT - I don't think new users find them. I doubt many new users even go around looking.

durron597

I absolutely would edit a question if closing it was a valid endgame state.

Shog9

When it comes to deletion... I delete everything that's closed and scores <= 0 or scores < 0, with a minimal amount of review (spot-check for diamonds in the rough). Deletion is fast.

user213963

Every day people use them as justification for why their question should remain open, or as a template for how much we don't care about txtspeak

Travis J

8:14 PM

If new users aren't finding the large signpost canonical questions how are they finding a question with 65 views from 2010?

user213963

Search google, find a stack overflow post. Look at the quality.

TylerH

@TravisJ I think you underestimate the average user's ability to suck at searching

Shog9

@MichaelT yeah, but... That's mostly laziness. There are other bad justifications they'd use if those weren't convenient

Folks are great at bad justifications

user213963

@Shog9 every less excuse is a better post.

Travis J

@TylerH - If a user is finding a bad post before a canonical post, does that mean the bad post should be removed or improved?

durron597

8:15 PM

@TravisJ this is the number three result for "C# I need a library to" on google

TylerH

@TravisJ probably removed

Shog9

I've had folks write me lengthy essays explaining why they shouldn't have had to write more than 1 sentence of explanation in their questions

user213963

Consider the median question quality and ask if we can expect people to write better than that.

Travis J

@durron597 - No one has found that. It 5 years it has had 100 views.

@durron597 - Which is to say, no one is googling that phrase.

josilber

@Shog9 Due to advances in mind reading?

Travis J

8:16 PM

And back to my main point, 2 views per month is really affecting every new user?

durron597

@TravisJ my point is that low view questions can have good SEO

Travis J

And what post would you rather see for that search?

rene

We are not here to optimize for SEO

durron597

You haven't been involved in annoying arguments with people "oh I found this blah blah"

Shog9

@josilber yeah, tl;dr is usually "it's a fantastically hard problem, therefore only those who know the answer already could understand it, therefore making it accessible to anyone else would be counter-productive for me"

Travis J

8:17 PM

We aren't optimized for SEO? ... I disagree.

Shog9

SEO is a red herring here

Travis J

Stack Overflow is the first result a very large amount of the time for software related issues.

Shog9

Most views are on low-view questions. SO is a big long tail of niche information

Travis J

Niche information that we used to have to buy a book and poke around for.

Really it is a very efficient tool at problem solving. It may house some information which can be harder to find at times, but it is also very good at building information on new technology at a very quick pace.

rene

@TravisJ I meant that we shouldn't moderate posts for their SEO rank

durron597

8:19 PM

@TravisJ Again, the fundamental disagreement here is that you think crappy questions should stay and that others, myself included, don't.

Travis J

I mean that a post with 2 views a month isn't in dire need of moderation.

user213963

Do I need to find more old crap?

Shog9

@durron597 you're stuck on this. But no one is arguing that

Travis J

@durron597 - No, quite the contrary. Kill em with fire. But do it naturally, don't run around targeting perceived problems.

durron597

10 mins ago, by durron597

Maybe the right thing to do is make it much easier for tags to be in a "no new questions may be asked with this tag" state

Makoto

8:21 PM

I could get with that.

I think that may be the missing tool.

Travis J

I also would agree with that.

Shog9

@durron597 that's easy enough.

we could do a trial run or something

Makoto

Please do

user213963

@Shog9 consider that only thing that does scale is the automatic scripts.

durron597

But how would it work, though? Give that power to moderators?

user213963

8:22 PM

Improve the roomba and people can work more easily on the posts that need it.

Makoto

25K? 30K?

durron597

Make an MSO post about it?

Shog9

@durron597 when a burninate-request gets X votes, it gets featured for a day. If it hits [Y] votes, the tag gets "locked". When cleanup is done, it gets burned.

Makoto

It's not a privilege that should be given to just anybody.

Shog9

That'd be a rough test we could run.

durron597

8:22 PM

@Shog9 I like that

Shog9

If it works, easy enough to bake in

Makoto

That seems practical.

josilber

@Shog9 That sounds fantastic.

Travis J

Perhaps have a percent threshhold in there too? In addition to your metric, once some large percent of the tag was edited out the lock is triggered

Shog9

@TravisJ that's hard

Travis J

8:23 PM

Okay nvm then

+1

Shog9

Looking for a light weight system I can just do manually until we decide if it's worth automating

durron597

@Shog9 Shall I make an MSO / MSE post about it?

Shog9

@durron597 MSO

discussion

rene

@Shog9 Admit you like to push buttons

Makoto

@Shog9: Would this take into account legacy burninate requests as well?

user213963

8:25 PM

stackoverflow.com/posts/3835284/revisions

Andy

@rene Who doesn't? It's more fun if they are big red buttons too

Travis J

That post though...

Shog9

@Makoto so we have a bit over 100 requests >= 20 right now. That'd keep us busy for the rest of the year for sure.

@rene mostly just durron's

TylerH

zing

Travis J

@MichaelT - How do you even find this stuff? Just let it be lol find stuff to answer and help people :P

Makoto

8:27 PM

Fair enough

josilber

@Shog9 what about a case like this: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/304218/drop-tag-table

Highly upvoted but OP eventually decided it was not a good idea

Travis J

closed:no

user213963

@TravisJ I just look at old questions in a tag that have an up vote on an answer.

Travis J

@MichaelT - I just try to look at a question from someone that I can help or educate.

durron597

@Shog9 Don't I know it =D

user213963

8:29 PM

That is only a small fraction of the site.

Travis J

That is the whole point of the site.

user213963

You are restricting the maid to the foyer.

user213963

The rest of the house needs cleaning too.

Shog9

@josilber so... This is why we gotta try this out, because #1 we gotta figure out what that Y threshold should be and #2 we gotta decide whether someone needs to exercise oversight on this ("no you're not burning web-apps just because people who ask questions about web-apps are all bad at it - they'll just be bad at it elsewhere")

durron597

0

Q: Make it easier to prevent new questions being added in a tag

In part because of the recent controversy about downvoting questions for Roomba, @Shog9, myself, and others had a long conversation attempting to address the real problem: what are the goals of tag burnination? The main reason to get rid of a tag is to prevent users from asking questions about t...

discussion feature-request tags burninate-system

user213963

8:31 PM

It means looking under the sofa for the dust bunnies.

Shog9

(go ahead, guess where folks are asking their crappy web questions now...)

user213963

Burn php - you know you want to.

Travis J

@durron597 - In a burninated tag?

josilber

@Shog9 Makes sense. I think one potential issue (maybe just something I perceive) is that some burnination requests get more upvotes due to clever title than due to high-quality suggestion.

Makoto

php, android, javascript...take your pick

durron597

8:33 PM

@TravisJ edited

TylerH

haskell first please

josilber

Though looking through your list there are plenty of highly upvoted questions with non-clever titles. So maybe not a factor.

Travis J

Can it be added to the title?

user213963

1

Q: How do I write a program to make the bug-eyed 'Case-of-the-Mondays' red head woman stop scaring me when i use this site?

I checked the 'community wiki' box... just seeing what that does.

comments

Andy

user213963

8:35 PM

1

Q: Paypal Integration

HI, can any one guide me to integrate paypal with php?

php paypal

Undo

@MichaelT The answer is bad too

user213963

1

Q: What is the concept of menu?

Actually for what purpose is menu used?

android

user213963

It's really easy to find these.

Shog9

@josilber hence the [feature] part of this.

durron597

@Shog9 Do you think that this "tag locking" is the same thing as blacklisting, or do you think a "locked tag" should be it's own thing separate from blacklisting?

Travis J

8:38 PM

@MichaelT - But what harm is a closed question doing? Also, apparently that style of question can generate a lot of traffic.

durron597

@Shog9 I mean, I can't ever see a reason for legal or software-tools to come back one day. I've always wondered why tags get approved for burnination but not for blacklisting. Can you explain?

Travis J

@MichaelT - " don't have an Android phone right now. But in my application I need to use the accelerometer values. So I need an a simulator capable of it. How can I do this?"

(from the same user)

30

Q: How can i simulate accelerometer in android emulator?

I don't have an Android phone right now. But in my application I need to use the accelerometer values. So I need an a simulator capable of it. How can I do this?

android accelerometer avd

27k views

user213963

Traffic on crap is not a good thing.

Travis J

It isn't the question, it is the answer.

The answer is where the quality comes from in almost all cases.

If the question elicits an answer which helps thousands of people, then was the question worthwhile?

Was the answer crap in that case?

user213963

And those are closed question I linked. Do they have good answers?

Travis J

8:41 PM

Nope, burn 'em

user213963

If not, why are they still around?

Travis J

They aren't causing any problems. Time was better spent creating good content than it was finding these small outliers.

Ideally, do they all get removed? Yes. In practice, does spending time removing them detract from the amount of time you can share your knowledge? Yes. Which do you choose? Constantly remove content you feel is crap, or constantly creating content which you know is gold.

user213963

Do you want search queries instead of examples? I am saying this is too prevalent. That scripts rather than votes should clean them up.

Travis J

What prevented roomba from getting to your examples just now?

user213963

Up vote on the answer

Shog9

8:45 PM

@durron597 historical reasons, mostly

blacklisting prevents submission of any edits containing the tag

Travis J

Perhaps roomba should allow very old posts to have their upvoted answers weighted against time.

Shog9

so once it's blacklisted, you cannot edit questions in the tag without removing it

Travis J

Maybe allow 1 upvote per year to age away in the calcuation

That would have caught your examples

user213963

yep.

durron597

@Shog9 That's a good thing, isn't it?

SmokeDetector

8:46 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Pattern-matching website in answer: What is the meaning of "heap burning coals on his head"? by Linda on hermeneutics.stackexchange.com

user213963

36

A: What should the system be deleting automatically that it already isn't?

Old zero scores with comments These are questions that got duped, or solved elsewhere and ignored, or homework that passed its due date. Sometimes they have answers, or a few comments. The 365-day script will not delete a post that has an answer, or two or more comments. Change this to a slidin...

durron597

@MichaelT Most of your examples should be downvoted because they are terrible not because they need to be roombaed.

user213963

The More aggressive deleting of 'one up vote' closed question section.

Travis J

@Shog9 - Would it be bad to let 1 upvote per year age away on answers to negatively voted questions?

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in title: Web redirecting to porn site by William Calvin on security.stackexchange.com

Travis J

8:49 PM

@durron597 - Well, the answer shouldn't be downvoted if it solved a problem at the time. I think that is just gaming the system in order to remove the question. Address the problem of the question, not the answers. Downvoting the question is fine if it was posed incorrectly.

durron597

@TravisJ Why age the upvote? Why not just have roomba delete if q.score < 0 and a.score < years of question

Travis J

That is what I meant

Perhaps I didn't articulate it properly

user213963

How many duplicates do we need? stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1

user213963

A year ago it was 400 long.

TylerH

@MichaelT Most of those are probably XY questions anyway, which can be in infinite configurations

Travis J

8:54 PM

heh, that looks like the results of a NullPointerExceptionFactory in Java.

Does roomba not remove duplicate posts?

user213963

Nope. Not if they have an answer or two comments or an up vote.

TylerH

no

they remain as "pointers to good content"

which is useful, though maybe not 2,000 of them to the same question

josilber

@tchrist I think I prevailed on this one (that is, unless you haven't yet slept) -- ell.stackexchange.com/questions/69408/…

Shog9

@durron597 it's confusing

FWIW, I'm sick or ate something bad or something. Gonna stop trying to be lucid for a little bit; will catch up later.

josilber

@Shog9 feel better!

SmokeDetector

9:06 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive answer detected: Finding number with prime number of divisors? by Penis in pussy love on math.stackexchange.com

durron597

@Shog9 feel better!

rene

You all made the poor man feel sick...

TylerH

What did he expect, being a decapitated head...

3

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector ] Blacklisted website in answer, pattern-matching website in answer: Ошибка в файле mysql при распаковке из архива by markmiheev on ru.stackoverflow.com

bjb568

9:32 PM

@TylerH that's a floating head to you

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in answer: Python Login to remote website by Raha on stackoverflow.com

DragonLord the Fiery

@SmokeDetector sd trueu-

Common spam pattern, user asks question then provides own answer with spam link.

Frank

9:48 PM

3

DragonLord the Fiery

<trash style="display: none;" />

tchrist

The database load for the next First Answer question is quite slow.

Frank

National coffee day y'all

like, every day is coffee day here...

durron597

in The Whiteboard on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, yesterday, by Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens Head's up. Every day is Coffee Day.

Frank

smart man

durron597

9:59 PM

in The Whiteboard on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, Jul 23 at 19:45, by Jimmy Hoffa

room topic changed to The Whiteboard: General Discussion for http://programmers.stackexchange.com Pants optional when telecommuting. [coffee-day] [facedesk] [good-booze] [grog-nerds] [horror-stories] [monads] [my-code-is-compiling] [parsing-errors] [the-other-monitor]

Frank

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in body, pattern-matching website in body: reducing waste and fraud by malinijuriya on drupal.stackexchange.com

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Frank The small version of your avatar looks like a hamburger.

Frank

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M ha

SmokeDetector

10:34 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Blacklisted website in answer, pattern-matching website in answer: Как восстановить файлы (.ai) от Illustrator cs4? by maksfrolov on ru.stackoverflow.com

DragonLord the Fiery

sd trueu-