« first day (2055 days earlier)      last day (2949 days later) » 
00:00 - 20:0020:00 - 00:00

12:41 AM
Stack Exchange is fundamentally not about help. It's about data; about creating a repository for lasting knowledge. Users are here to build this repository, SE just offers a framework to incentivize this behavior. Helping users is a side effect of the system. An unclear question isn't the failure to categorize the question based on what help the asker happens to want, it's a failure of the system on SE's end and complete misunderstanding or outright abuse on the user's end. An unclear question simply one that is not conductive to this repository of knowledge. — bjb568 36 secs ago
 
Stack Exchange is fundamentally about kittehs with sunglasses
3
 
@bjb568 I feel like I've had a discussion with you about this very topic...
 
@bjb568 Think about it from the user on the end of the close message. What's more likely to get them to edit their question into a form useful for the knowledge repository: "We can't tell what help you need" or "Your question is not conducive to building a repository of knowledge"?
I agree that SE isn't about help, but offering help is a useful incentive to building the repository, in the same way that SE isn't about rep or badges.
 
Unclear means crap. I don't think any close reason can get a crappy user to polish their own turd. But making the close reason emphasize help will just make the user feel more frustrated and entitled.
User will just say "I edited meh spellinz. is clear need you write all me code? y u no help?" rather than just leave confused.
 
... I feel like you need to create a sock puppet account @bjb568 and work your way up from 1 rep.
 
12:55 AM
(deleted message was above, just know that it was really good and totally made my point)
 
also gave a lower bound on your age
cats mature quickly
 
@bjb568 I saw it. ;)
 
Good.
 
I still miss bjbot
!bjb !bjb !bjb !bjb !bjb !xkcd ping bjb
 
:p
 
12:58 AM
[ SmokeDetector ] Few unique characters in body, repeating characters in body: Combination logic gates by Reyensz on physics.stackexchange.com
 
Self-vandalism of an off-topic question, looks like.
 
how hard is it to start a bot? will it take me more than 10 seconds? I know a chat room that’s in need of a bot
 
Depends what you're trying to do.
 
grab somebody else’s bot and run it
 
Just make a userscript, it's easiest.
 
1:02 AM
would be nice if I could run it without a browser
 
If you want to be fancy, you could use a hapi express 1337 virtual-jQuery node.js script on a .io domain.
 
hmm 🐱
 
> It's broken. Oh well, I'll fix it tomorrow. Tomorrow will be good. a year ago
 
tomorrow never comes
 
1:09 AM
@amaretto Well what do you expect when it comes creeping in this petty pace from day to day?
 
I need a Shakespeare bot
 
> Thanks for answering and sorry if my question doesnt make any sense at all :/
 
1:39 AM
[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer: Buying a home with down payment from family as a "loan" by Jhon Lelby Adames Cruceta on money.stackexchange.com
 
@SmokeDetector k
 
user315433
1:57 AM
in Spades on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, 2 hours ago, by Shog9
I know it seems hard to believe, but weeks where we don't have to watch individual people are joyous weeks. We can work on those projects that everyone gives us crap for never making progress on.
 
user315433
Or, watching individual bots.
 
user315433
@AndrewT. Monitoring is too strong a word. I sometimes care a bit. About Android in particular, or I wouldn't have 2400+ helpful flags there.
 
user315433
But I was referring to
 
user315433
19 hours ago, by Infinite Recursion
@balpha and @Shog9: any conclusion on this? ^^
 
user315433
My personal preference is to remove SD from Tavern completely.
 
user315433
2:01 AM
In other news: a long and winded story featuring @Undo's mod message: SO Mods deleted my 'JSE comments', so I improved 'joomla' tags in return by Mikan on meta.joomla.stackexchange.com
 
2:16 AM
@404 I'm moving more toward that point. Or some other method of reducing the # of Smokey posts in here.
 
Replace smokey feed with twitter.com/NormalHumanSE, see how long nostalgia takes to kick in.
 
@Shog9 I think twitter.com/NormalHumanChat would be better. Especially since the messages are wildly out of context. :P
 
@hichris123 I'm being selfish. NormalHumanSE is useful, since otherwise I tend to miss coworkers' posts.
Agree NHChat would be more entertaining
 
@Shog9 So that's why you follow it...
On a related note, apparently y'all aren't musing much:

 CoGro Musings

A text file for community managers to publicly muse in public....
 
@hichris123 that, and the occasional opportunity for narcissistic retweets.
 
2:21 AM
I'm sure that suits your fancy quite well.
 
@404 oh yay
 
@Shog9 Did you reach a conclusion on Smokey? Or would you just prefer we resolve it as we see fit?
 
@hichris123 if y'all are happy to handle these from within your own room, why not try it out?
 
user315433
Yeah, let's try it.
 
Can always re-add it (perhaps as a digest?) if stuff isn't getting enough attention.
 
2:26 AM
Maybe re-add any post that sticks around for more than N minutes (and hasn't been confirmed a false positive).
 
@JeffreyBosboom Oh that's actually a really good idea.
I'll just stop the posts into here for now though.
My favorite solution for this would just be to reduce the amount of spam that gets through SpamRam. But that would be a large amount of work for SE devs.
 
@hichris123 CI is unhappy with you :P
 
yep...
 
user315433
@hichris123 No, that would be the worst. How would we get Marshal badges then?
 
Flag stuff? :P
 
2:31 AM
I need to take time to analyze patterns. My gut feeling is that spamram is being neutralized by fast IP-hopping in cases where we could identify the likely networks to be hopped to based on past data.
 
user315433
Yesterday, a user (same network account) posted 10 "questions" with identical titles (URL only) on 10 sites, from 3dprinting to bitcoin, in rapid progression.
 
Alright, Smokey will no longer post reports in here. :(
 
user315433
There appears to be no cross-site rate limiting.
 
We'll see how this goes.
 
@hichris123 Where should I go to keep getting reports?
 
It's not going to hit a NilError or something weird when it tries to post a message to a nil 'room'?
 
@404 uh, OK... That's some low-hanging fruit.
I'll add that to my list for next week
 
@Shog9 Yep, I've seen the same user post things cross-site within minutes.
 
@Undo ? I just made the conditional check for posting reports in here into if False. :P
 
@hichris123 oh, well that works
Kinda surprised Flake didn't complain, but okay
 
2:35 AM
Commands will still work though.
!!/alive?
 
@hichris123 Watching this endless list of new questions never gets boring
 
user315433
And so will manual reports (with no confirmation back, but whatever). Good.
 
oh yeah.
Allspam reports will still go through here though. :/ But there's very few of those.
 
@Shog9 Does SpamRam do anything with post content, or is it purely network based?
I.e. would it be on the table for it to look for unique-ish links/domains that suddenly pop up?
 
@Undo network.
There's another system for content, but spammers seem to adapt to it very quickly.
That's the problem with blocking up front.
It does OK for very stupid bots.
 
2:41 AM
It might be worth (if you haven't already) looking into domain blocking. It has to take a little bit longer to set up a new domain than to grab a new Markov chain.
 
Hah.
 
They've been using this domain forever
 
First, need to block shorteners.
 
oh, well there's that
 
user315433
@Undo FR: show the number of results on the search page.
 
user315433
2:44 AM
xinyanlaw has 3 pages of results, so between 200 and 300.
 
If people are that attached to link shorteners, make them a 10-rep new-user-restriction thing.
There is basically no reason for a <10rep user to use shorteners. Probably no reason for anyone to be using them, but definitely not people who can't even post comments.
 
user202362
 
Of course, now you're trying to keep up with the (vast?) quantity of link shorteners.
 
Ban any URL shorter than N characters? Or ban (or rewrite) anything that redirects to another domain?
 
nah, I suspect we could get away with just taking the top n by volume.
Maybe look at already-validated spam for shortish links and use that as a starting point
Re: rewriting, that's a little infeasible because now posting is contingent on a server following a link.
Which makes stuff slower.
 
2:49 AM
@Undo not really. The big issue with them right now is that you can't block them because folks use them for legit purposes.
 
user202362
what a wonderful idea: that smokey has it's own twitter account
 
Eliminate that, and you can block new ones just like you'd block any other spam domain.
 
Oh, you don't have to do it at time of post. Just check validated spam nightly to build a table of banned domains.
 
@JeffreyBosboom oh, that could work. Still feels a little cumbersome, but maybe.
@Shog9 What are those legit purposes, again?
 
user202362
would it be like a garbage collector's blog?
 
2:51 AM
@Undo being lazy
tracking who follows your link
geolocating their IP
going to their house
 
@Shog9 Most short posts with a link shortener are spam. (short being 350 characters or less according to @404)
 
<10 rep users definitely don't need to be doing that.
 
and leaving a tastefully designed calling card thanking them for their traffic
 
user315433
@hichris123 By users with 1 rep.
 
user202362
Pity, wildlife can't read ... otherwise they will find garbage collectors blogs quite interesting ...
 
2:52 AM
@404 Ah yeah.
 
Actually, I'm talking about the myriad links that already exist, some in posts dating back to the early days of SO
they don't get used legitimately very often, but until they're blocked that accumulates
 
As a reader, I really don't like having to guess where a link will take me. Besides reducing spam (or at least making it more obvious), banning link shorteners will improve normal posts too.
If there are a lot of existing shortener uses, we should go fix them before they break. (That's more useful than many burnination requests.)
 
user202362
wildlife species that might find garbage collecting bloggers writing interesting might include: bears, raccoons and ibises ...
 
user315433
 
user315433
Although in some the url doesn't matter.
 
2:59 AM
Recently there were amount of goo.gl links to image on Google Drive, I haven't researched whether Google did that or not
 
user315433
@AndrewT. Are they goo.gl/photos/... type?
 
AFAIK, no.
Let me search the post on here first
 
Thanks
 
Looking back at Smokey reports, I realized that we don't post too many false positives in here anymore. The volume of spam posts has just increased a ton.
 
user315433
3:04 AM
@JeffreyBosboom It's some application using Drive API
 
user315433
According to usp=drivesdk at the end. Normal sharing does not have that.
 
Anyway, images should be hosted on Stack's Imgur account, not posters' Google Drive accounts.
 
!!/coffee, because I'm sleepy
 
@AndrewT. brews coffee for @AndrewT.
 
mornin
 
user202362
3:23 AM
did you fly to a different timezone?
 
slept in ;p
 
oh, well, shucks... Look at this: gist.github.com/KuroTsuto/8448070
 
user315433
SO probably doesn't get many short links from Forbes and Slate.
 
user315433
I went through some long list of shorteners and selected those that actually do appear.
 
user315433
goo\.gl|bit\.ly|tinyurl\.com|fb\.me|cl\.ly|t\.co|is\.gd|j\.mp|tr\.im|ow\.ly|wp\‌​.me|alturl\.com|tiny\.cc|9nl\.me|post\.ly|dyo\.gs
 
user315433
3:31 AM
(This is what Smokey uses currently)
 
user315433
> Emails to this author should start with "Dear X", where X = ...
 
user315433
^ a form on a journal's page.
 
user315433
Trying to think of something clever.
 
user202362
I thought you have found the spammers source code ...
 
user202362
truly disappointed ...
 
Bob
3:35 AM
@Shog9 Huh, there's some interesting ones near the end
 
yeah...
 
Bob
Too bad they're basically impossible to type.
 
Heh. Apparently that expression is too long for the blacklist system. Would require multiple entries.
 
user315433
Will the blacklist also prevent editing those posts?
 
user315433
(unless the editor replaces the link, of course)
 
3:46 AM
@404 yes.
 
user202362
Why does 404 (File or Directory not found) has a file as avatar?
 
It's chrome's icon for a 404
 
user202362
are you calling google dumb?
 
yes, but that's a separate point
 
It reminds me of the Sad Mac, but "sad file" doesn't really make sense for a 404.
 
3:52 AM
Google…
 
A file on a milk carton (a la missing persons photos) would make more sense.
 
@bjb568 is selling your data
 
4:05 AM
who gave their data to bjb, and who did he find to buy it??
 
If Shog is god, is bjb Google?
 
user315433
@Quill Reminded me of xkcd.com/1506 Apparently, still functional.
 
user202362
If shog is a small hog, is bjb a bobcat named jb?
 
clearly
 
user315433
> This queue has been cleared! If you're looking for more to review, view all review queues.
 
user315433
4:13 AM
^ LQRQ
 
user202362
Nobody knows that you are a cute little piglet on the internet ...
 
You want to be careful, @Telkitty...
you know what happens to people who know too much
 
user202362
That people are going to hack your accounts?
 
user202362
Too late, it's already happening ...
 
4:21 AM
It's not a hack if it's done by staff members
*puts on tinfoil*
 
user315433
That's in a different regex, blacklisted sites.
 
user315433
sh.st, adf.ly, and j.gs considered spam
 
@Quill wats dat
 
@UnikittyBlendsPeople a tinfoil hat, you know, conspiracy theorists wear it so that they can't intercept your brain waves
 
4:28 AM
Lol
Gets adb
@hichris123 then I can't tell smokey about true positives or report things
 
user315433
You can still report things.
 
user315433
Yes.
 
user315433
True and false positives... that wasn't important for a while, because CHQ gets a lot of feedback now, and whatever is missed is handled by Metasmoke review later.
 
user315433
4:38 AM
So, this room can focus on its true purpose: animal gifs.
3
 
Yep
Maybe animalgif command for chat bot
 
user315433
Does anyone remember facebook.SO? meta.stackexchange.com/q/103807
 
@404 don't forget a dumping ground for Shog's transition to writing blog posts
 
user315433
From an unwritten blog post:
 
user315433
I like var. If var could be boiled down into a syrup, i would pour it over my waffles and eat them in front of you, the resulting enjoyment plainly visible on my face. — Shog9 ♦ Sep 2 '09 at 4:18
 
user315433
4:53 AM
The question was originally tagged c#, while explains something.
 
I thought it was Java at first
 
user315433
Yep, sorry for the delay, should start next week, or possibly the week after if things get crazy. — Pops ♦ Mar 14 at 18:57
 
user315433
Apparently, things did get crazy.
 
user315433
More time to mine 150 rep points on Travel.
 
user202362
I had -5.66 on my travel card ...
 
user315433
5:48 AM
How many hours a year do think we waste on taxes that an IRS computer already does? (…how did you think they verify?) A million? A billion?
 
user315433
More than a million for sure, considering the number of taxpayers.
 
kos
7:36 AM
!!/alive
 
@kos plz send teh coffee
 
@kos Apparently even spammers have weekends.
 
kos
@SmokeDetector So no spam on Sundays!
 
@kos The bot doesn't post here anymore.
 
kos
@IͶΔ Apparently!
 
user315433
7:37 AM
@kos But it is also true that Sunday morning is spamless morning.
 
user315433
They only work 6 days a week.
 
@JeffreyBosboom There's even a 2 hours later... on Charcoal I could see.
 
The Language Learning proposal on A51 just hit 100% commitment
 
Oh whoa whoa whoa
 
kos
@404 ♫ Spamless morning...
!!/status
 
7:42 AM
@kos Running since 02:50:07 UTC (292 minutes)
 
user315433
8:00 AM
The @StackOverflow account has empty "about" field. Prefer to keep an air of mystery, eh?
 
user315433
@StackExchange has a standard blurb, but out of date (130 sites)
 
user315433
If someone still wants to know How did Stack Overflow get its Twitter account? and decides to upvote the question for some reason, I might get a badge...
 
user202362
If you have told the truth, I would have upvoted you ...
 
user202362
That you just wanted the badge & would like an upvote
 
8:12 AM
Yeah, it's only a meta question
 
 
2 hours later…
9:54 AM
@sha do you know the reason for this?
nvm
 
10:33 AM
@rene that's weird, it didn't ping me. Did I appear in the auto complete list?
@rene yeah, nice Google-foo skills!
 
0
A: 1, 2, 3...test. Let’s increase the number of reviews & close votes for science!

Alexis KingAlright, well, shoot. Whether it’s reverse psychology, the Hawthorne effect, or some other fun social phenomenon, I am only human, and I am too curious for my own good. So why not? I decided to go back into the review queues after being thoroughly discouraged since my initial post on the subject ...

falls over
@InfiniteRecursion, I can rest easier now. ;)
 
11:08 AM
@ShadowWizard I think it did
 
11:22 AM
@ShadowWizard Does this mean I should PA you here?
 
@IͶΔ now you can for a week, unless the bug returns... but Sho will kick you... :D
@rene so it's a bug, pretty sure I posted here in the last 7 days... :/
!!/blame
 
@ShadowWizard It's Shadow Wizard's fault.
 
hah
 
lol
 
11:26 AM
halol
 
11:59 AM
palol
 
balol
 
qalol
 
user202362
roflol
 
metalol
 
lolol
 
12:01 PM
\o/0\
 
|o|o|
 
<o>0/
 
user202362
@PeterJ do you know much about the road network around cradle mountains?
 
>.|o-
 
12:21 PM
oops wrong room :D
@Telkitty is it in Tasmania?
 
user202362
yes
 
You plan to climb them? Cool!
 
user202362
12:35 PM
not planning, just to see whether it's possible to do it alone if no one else wants to do it with me - with or without some support from family & friends
 
user202362
and without having to pay $3000 for 3 day hiking trip
 
user202362
My budget is $1000 max for the overland track ... consider there are 3-4 other places I plan to go in the next 20 months & some would cost a lot more than the overland track
 
Well let's hope Peter knows something then. :)
 
 
2 hours later…
2:21 PM
!!/aive
dead again.....
@Pro @Undo Smokey dead again. /cc @404 @Ferrybig
 
!!/alive
 
@Quill You doubt me?
 
Time for new machine?
 
you misspelled alive >_<
 
You spelt alive wrong
 
2:22 PM
lolz
Still, he missed obvious spam
Usually it's reported in matter of seconds on MSE :/
 
he doesn't post here anymore
 
12 hours ago, by hichris123
Alright, Smokey will no longer post reports in here. :(
 
find him in Charcoal HQ now
 
Oh.
And !!/report works here?
 
yes
 
2:24 PM
(i.e. causing it to report in Charcoal HQ?)
 
yes again
 
Thanks again! ;)
 
\!!/report test
D:
 
@hichris123 lol, that room is frozen 99.999% of the time. Once in few months bluefeet unfreeze it, just to have it freeze again. (not posting anything)
!!/test Unikitty
 
> Would not be caught for title, body, and username.
 
2:28 PM
oh god
@ShadowWizard isn't hichris a mod, can't he just unfreeze it himself?
0
Q: This question is no longer a duplicate

nhgrifI closed this question as a duplicate. It was edited and is no longer a duplicate. Apparently, despite being able to single-handedly close questions, gold badge doesn't give me the power to single-handedly reopen questions that are edited out of their duplicate status. I cast a reopen vote. T...

 
@Quill last I checked he's not SE employee...
 
@ShadowWizard mods can unfreeze rooms, right?
or is that site specific?
 
@Quill only in the same chat domain.
 
ah, right
 
@Quill domain specific - there are three. SO, SE, and MSE. :)
So in MSE a diamond equals being SE employee. ;)
 
2:37 PM
oh, the chatroom is on MSE
I thought it was on SE
/me looks away slowly
 
!!/alive
 
@Ferrybig ... did I miss something?
 
@Quill nah, it should have been a place for CM's to post their, well, musings.
@Ferrybig sorry, false alarm! I was being stupid. :/
 
oh... my... god..., wow... oops. — nhgrif 35 secs ago
It is working as intended, you just removed the [ios] tag (for which you hold a hammer) in an edit, so you don't have gold-power anymore. — Tunaki 1 min ago
@bjb568 yeah, the blog and podcasts don't seem that important in the grand scheme of things anymore
besides events like surveys, it mainly gets ignored
the recent blog posts have been ones done on personal blogs, like JonEricson's blog
and just reposted
 
user315433
2:41 PM
Perhaps they just don't have that kind of time anymore. I know my blog has slowed down a lot, but not because I don't consider it important.
 
Yeah, that's fair
if they stop fixing bugs, or don't run winterbash, then we'll have a real issue
 
@404 I think they expected lots of people to rush in and fix bugs in the blogs, or add new cool features.
 
@Quill I think you accidentally striked out the second part instead of the first...
:P
 
What would you all think of Jeffrey's idea of making Smokey wait a few minutes to post something in here, making sure it isn't deleted in that time and it isn't marked as a false positive?
 
that sounds cool
Kinda like CHQ is for the hardcore spam fighters, maybe here is for the casuals
 
2:54 PM
@hichris123 this will reduce lots of noise here indeed, Shog should be happy enough. :)
 
I think we'd cut the amount of reports at least in half. And we'd still get attention to posts that need spam flags, while reducing clutter.
 
@hichris123 +1
 
maybe you should ask the shog
 
maybe you should shog the ask
 
@tchrist It seems as if you are always lurking in here.
 
3:02 PM
Clearly untrue, else I would not have posted.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange aeons, even death may die.
 
user315433
How does one visualize a software recommendation?
 
user315433
 
user315433
@hichris123 and maybe pool a few into one message? We don't need verbose reporting reasons if it's confirmed already.
 
user315433
Sort of like "still needs flags" messages which have only links to things.
 
3:24 PM
@404 Maybe. shrug
 
4:18 PM
Smokey will now post reports in here if the post hasn't been deleted in five minutes and the report wasn't marked as a false positive.
I can bump that time up depending on how the next few days go.
 
4:54 PM
[ SmokeDetector ] Few unique characters in answer, repeating characters in answer: Are isosceles always and only similar to other isosceles? by bobby on math.stackexchange.com
 
I think the core of the Smokey problem is with the timezone, where regulars are sleeping and spammers are active.
Let's see tomorrow (today's) progress anyway.
 
5:44 PM
@AndrewT. I'm sure that's all by design.
The spammer problem would evaporate in short order if only they'd reinstitute bounties on their scalps.
 
user315433
Spam o'clock is tied to UTC, not affected by daylight saving (at least its U.S. version, we'll see about Europe shortly but I remember it being the same always). So it's based on the schedule of a country that does not observe DST.
 
6:45 PM
[ SmokeDetector ] Mostly non-Latin answer: What is the difference between anime and manga? by user63538 on scifi.stackexchange.com
 
@404 Yay! :)
 
is there somewhere that will tell me what functions data.SE allows? I keep looking up SQL functions online, only to find that data.SE doesn’t recognize them
 
7:00 PM
@amaretto It's T-SQL, so a little different
 
@Undo ok, I’ll read some T-SQL documentation
@SmokeDetector ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
 
00:00 - 20:0020:00 - 00:00

« first day (2055 days earlier)      last day (2949 days later) »