Tavern on the Meta

user315433

12:04 AM

Meta.UX has weird user experience when it comes to looking for moderator history. Some posts are closed, like Moderator Pro Tem Announcement and Community Moderator Election. And I can't find any post with 2012 election result... was it deleted?

Shog9

12:14 AM

I forget when I started posting those, but chances are it wasn't spring of 2012

user315433

Indeed... in 2011, WPSE had an unofficial post Congratulations to our (semi-)new overlords! but no official one. And UX has nothing... didn't even say goodbye/thanks to pro tem mods.

user315433

Of which they apparently had 4 at the time of election, with only 1 re-elected.

user315433

12:47 AM

0

Q: Drop "noisy" comment flags from the moderator queue unless an answer has 5 or more comments

The problem There are a huge number of noisy comments, and they generate a huge number of flags. But, a large number of flags are raised on comments where they won't do very much good: if there's only a few comments on a post, removing one of them doesn't make an appreciable dent in the noise. ...

user315433

I dunno. If the goal is to let mods focus, giving them a way to sort flags by some "Priority Score", like = (views of the post)/1000 + (number of comments on the post), would be better. Of course I don't know what the queue looks like.

user315433

1:06 AM

One semi-smarky comment under a frequently googled question is probably worth addressing... and anonymous visitors don't flag.

Jason C

1:28 AM

@Shog9 2nd snapper got a shitload of lemon pepper, salt, and spice rack thyme, fried in butter. So much better.

Shog9

@JasonC yeah :)

SmokeDetector

1:48 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword with email in body: Buy citizenship for EU / USA / UK /ASIA/and lot more deltonmicheal@gmail.com skype ID: cine.weston by delton micheal on softwarerecs.SE

Jason C

2:14 AM

@Shog9 You guys should just completely drop obsolete and chatty out of the comment dialog. Obsolete isn't really anything anybody cares about, and chatty that's serious enough to flag falls under non-constructive.

Shog9

@JasonC you must not've read the answers on the other meta post

Jason C

You mean the one you linked to in huge text?

Shog9

yeah, that one

Jason C

Sure I did. And... you guys should just completely drop the obsolete and chatty out of the comment dialog. You wanted to drop nc.

Shog9

I knew I should've put a big flashing arrow pointing to it

@JasonC Oh, NC has to die. There's zero consistency, on any site.

you can kinda see a difference between obs & chatty if you get lucky and squint

NC is just... everything

Jason C

2:19 AM

That's the nature of the beast, though... tons of people make comments, tons of people read comments, tons of people feel differently about different comments. There's no way to make it not suck.

Aside from getting rid of comments altogether.

Shog9

Which I still feel is the right idea

That is, make 'em obnoxiously temporary

But... That idea is DOA

Jason C

Heh

You should completely hide all comments and "add comment" buttons for april fools and see what happens.

Shog9

There's a bunch of stuff like that, that'd have been real nice to implement in, say, 2010. Before we had 5 year old questions with no answers and +50 comments.

Jason C

I wonder what would happen if you dropped chatty, kept obsolete, and changed nc to "argumentative".

Shog9

it'd get used for everything

That's why I want to start by stripping this down

Jason C

2:24 AM

Well I mean

Shog9

first thing folks'll do is, they'll go looking for a direct replacement for whatever their favorite flag was

and then use that for whatever they were using the old one for

Jason C

If somebody wants to flag a comment they're going to click the flag. At that point I imagine they're committed. The reasons are irrelevant. If you strip it down then they'll still get misused.

Shog9

we ran into this problem with close reasons

"I want Too Localized. What's the new Too Localized?"

Jason C

I really miss "does not have a clear understanding of the problem", lol.

Shog9

@JasonC yeah, we were talking about that earlier... The big failing of custom close reasons was not having titles. So folks just remembered some word out of the first sentence.

Jason C

2:26 AM

It was hilariously misapplied.

Shog9

That was supposed to be the "too broad homework" OT reason, but I'd guess no one who remembers it fondly actually knew that.

Jason C

But close reasons still get misused all the time. It doesn't matter if the reason you want isn't there. Comments will be even worse. It doesn't matter if you change the wording.

Lol...

The two comments on stackoverflow.com/a/30152903/616460 are polar opposites of eachother. It's kind of funny.

user315433

@SmokeDetector Ugh, the 404 page of Software Recs is so ugly.

Shog9

2:47 AM

@JasonC sure. And quite honestly, there are plenty of questions where enumerating all of the problems would be a good hour's work, so expecting a short list to cover it...

...But if we can get reasonably decent categorization for the common cases, we can do fun stuff like alter the processing for different close reasons, or drop out reasons that aren't getting used or are being misunderstood. And so it's worth aiming for.

user315433

What if... noise-type flags acted like downvotes. A comment with negative score (upvotes - flags) would be hidden by default, displayed only if show more is clicked.

user315433

So they'd still have some effect, instead of just being sent to /dev/null until another one comes.

user202362

3:01 AM

user202362

3:27 AM

World Toilet Day

World Toilet Day (WTD) is a campaign to motivate and mobilize millions around the world on issues of sanitation. Originally established by the World Toilet Organization in 2001, this day to draw attention to global sanitation issues is marked each year on 19 November. Since 2001, World Toilet Day has grown in scope and recognition by global partners. In 2013, the United Nations (UN) passed a resolution recognizing WTD as an official UN international day (UN Resolution A/67/L.75). == Background == It was estimated in 2015 that 2.4 billion (about 1 out of 3 people) lack access to improved sanitation...

Jason C

@NormalHuman I don't want other user's flags hiding comments from me unless a mod has a say in it. It could hide it for just the flagger, though. That's not an unusual thing to do.

@Telkitty Lol I kept misreading that as "word toilet".

user202362

I wonder how many great ideas came out while sitting on a toilet seat, statistically people do spend a lot of times doing their business in the toilets

Jason C

I dunno. Personally I'm usually pretty focused on the job at hand. I do all my thinking in the shower, lol.

@Shog9 Get rid of everything but spam and custom for a few months and see what comes out.

It would be fun.

Shog9

3:43 AM

there's actually no spam flag for comments...

If you mean post comments too, well, we pretty much had that for the first... 6 months or so...?

Jason C

Yeah I don't know why I keep inserting one in my head. Too much smoke detector.

Shog9

spam + offensive + other

so, we used spam and offensive for everything

I mean, what is asking a question if not spamming us with your problems?

it works, if you squint

Jason C

Let's try this again but with thinky brain turned on.

@Shog9 Get rid of everything but custom on comments for a few months and see what comes out.

It would be fun.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in answer: Coconut sugar flavor by fodil kouil on cooking.SE

Jason C

@Telkitty I had no idea this was so official.

There's a World Toilet Organization, a UN resolution and everything.

List of commemorative days

This article lists articles about notable observed commemorative days used by various governments, groups and organizations to raise awareness of an issue, commemorate a group or event, or celebrate something. == January == Plough Monday – first Monday after Epiphany Handsel Monday – first Monday of January Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – third Monday of January New Year – January 1 Polar Bear Swim Day – January 1 Public Domain Day - January 1 Myanmar Independence Day – January 4 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Non-resident Indian Day) – January 9 National Youth Day (India) – January 12 Indian Army Day...

user315433

3:54 AM

@JasonC Other users' comments and comment votes already hide some comments from you, without any mods being involved.

Jason C

@NormalHuman Not the noise type ones.

Shog9

honestly, we went down that road - hiding comments based on [something] - a few years back. Wasted like three months on it. Got nowhere.

I've accomplished more in an afternoon with a script or a few minutes and a regex.

Came to light this evening that Andy is responsible for like a quarter of all "noise" flags on SO... Getting him elected would also be a better use of time.

the more people/process you get involved, the less gets done

user315433

Yes, when you post those charts with comment flags I usually wonder how much Andy and I (and maybe other bots) are skewing the data.

Jason C

Heh

user202362

out of curiosity, has any pet ever randomly typed anything on stackoverflow while its owner was away from the keyboard?

Jason C

4:02 AM

@Telkitty Try select * from posts where TypedByPet <> 0.

user202362

@NormalHuman other bots ... you are a bot, I always knew it!

Shog9

@NormalHuman I can eliminate a good bit by ignoring Community-handled flags (since they're essentially free to handle that seems reasonable anyway). But since Andy's training classifiers, a lot of his stuff is mod-handled.

still HIGHLY accurate, but, not free

user315433

A Smokey-size set of regexes (which don't need to be made public) would help a bit more... Maybe with age restriction for sanity.

user315433

E.g., assorted thank-yous and you-are-welcomes.

user315433

Worthless after a week.

user315433

4:09 AM

Well... sometimes thank-you is the only indication that the answer works. When a 1-rep user posts "thank you this is an awesome answer" but of course doesn't know about accepts, and is never seen again.

user315433

And so we're left with the noise pollution.

user315433

AC/DC - Rock And Roll Ain't Noise Pollution (Official Video)

►

Jason C

I mean a big community shift in attitude about some things could reduce flags, too...

Shog9

Yeah, this is what got me thinking about other heuristics originally. I don't really care about the lone "thank you" comment on the lone answer. The ten "thank you" comments on the top answer on an old question can be blown away without even waiting for a flag.

Jason C

As in, a silly "thank you" comment, in reality, doesn't hurt anything if it's on some crappy old question with 100 views. We're just compelled to flag it now because we hate thank yous.

user315433

4:11 AM

Do you care about the lone "this isn't a code writing service" under a frequently visited question?

Shog9

irritatingly, it probably isn't getting flagged

I frequently come upon old, heavily-referenced questions with tons of old noise on them and just blow away all the comments.

folks'll reply & argue before they flag

Trivia: SO gets lots of noise flags on answer-comments, Math is more evenly split between questions and answers

Jason C

How deeply have you looked into your noise flag data so far? Are there patterns of like, significant runs of flags by the same user on a post? For example, people finding posts with tons of noise and just flagging all the comments in succession?

Shog9

@JasonC that happens, but

ok first I should note that the common case is always few flags because the common case is few comments

which skews everything else

There's - and I'm going from memory so don't quote this - maybe 25% of flagged posts that get multiple flags on comments

even when there are multiple comments, flagging all of them doesn't account for a majority

...even when it should

which is the other irritating thing about all this; folks have their pet peeves or target patterns & will flag those while ignoring other problematic comments on the same post

user202362

coincidence? I think not! :p

Jason C

4:19 AM

"folks have their pet peeves or target patterns & will flag those while ignoring other problematic comments on the same post" ... this... I feel like maybe there's some way to work with this fact... I'm just too fuzzy headed right now to put it together.

Some way to somehow... instead of sending flags directly to mods, somehow piece together information gained from various users flagging various comments on a given post for their own personal reasons, and put it together into something meaningful that's easy on the mod side.

I can't even describe the idea properly. Maybe that made sense.

I don't think I'm smart enough to work anything out along those lines.

I wonder what Google Perspective would think of the SO comments.

@Telkitty Lol

"International Day of Happines [dubious]"

user315433

> I used #rstats sentiment analysis to find the most negative comment on @StackExchange network. It did not disappoint pic.twitter.com/w0KFSPAn5W -- David Robinson at 11:42 AM - 6 Apr 2016

TGMCians

hey tavern!

how things are going here

I am here after long time

Jason C

@NormalHuman Haha, nice.

@TGMCians \o

TGMCians

o/

Jason C

It's that quiet time in the tavern. The daily routine: Shog's talking about something, I can barely think straight, Telkitty's posting cat pics, and soon we'll transition into smokey spam flags. Then a new day begins.

SmokeDetector

4:30 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in body: Quickbook accounting software free download by wadinjatriv on apple.SE

user202362

4:43 AM

@JasonC sometimes I post dog pictures ... and other animals, like piglets, raccoons and chickens

TGMCians

@JasonC hahaha I see

user202362

Geek Pride Day

Geek Pride Day is an initiative to promote geek culture, celebrated annually on May 25. The initiative originated in Spain in 2006 as (Spanish: Día del orgullo friki) and spread around the world via the Internet. == Origins == Tim McEachern organized unconnected events called Geek Pride Festival and/or Geek Pride Day 1998 to 2000 at a bar in Albany, New York, which are sometimes seen as a prelude to Geek Pride Day. In 2006, the Spanish blogger Germán Martínez known online as señor Buebo organized the first celebration, the day was celebrated for the first time in Spain and on the Internet, drawing...

user202362

lol

Jason C

4:57 AM

Oh god

SmokeDetector

6:07 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] URL in title, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, pattern-matching website in body, +2 more: healthflyup.com/wrinkle-couture/ by rnyv pista on apple.SE

Journeyman Geek

6:50 AM

@JasonC would likely catch fire

user202362

9:02 AM

meetup - SecTalks (25th) - Hacking AWS end to end

Bart

Stop hacking AWS @Telkitty. You bringing down their S3 last week wasn't that great for us either.

user202362

thanks for the compliment, I couldn't hack a password-less account, let alone AWS

Bart

It's always fun when people I know ask "you're good with computers, right? So you could hack stuff?" ... ehm ... no ... I wouldn't even know where to start.

user202362

I make things, I don't break things!

Bart

I make things that are broken!

2

Stijn

9:13 AM

I want to install VS 2017 on my laptop

> Please close all instances of Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 before proceeding with this operation.

Guess it'll have to wait for tonight

angussidney

If a RO/Employee sees this, could you please unstar my message from yesterday about Smokey, the problem has been fixed now

Stijn

It'll drop off the wall eventually

Bart

9:38 AM

Don't worry @angussidney. I'll probably say a lot of star-worthy stuff throughout the day, so it won't last much longer.

2

Stijn

@Bart It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy

user202362

@Bart if you say stupid things, I will star them - for all of your colleagues to see >_<

Bart

@Telkitty none of my colleagues are on here, and they are already fully aware of my ability to say stupid stuff

It's actually surprising. I don't think I've ever worked with anyone who had an SO account.

Stijn

I've worked with a few people who have an account, but they're not really active

> Germany to invest 100 billion euros in country-wide gigabit network

user202362

9:57 AM

most of my friends just use this site to search for answers, they don't really post

user202362

10:12 AM

I am depressed, I think even my troll career is failing ...

Stijn

!!/tea

SmokeDetector

@Stijn brews a cup of earl grey tea for @Stijn

Stijn

@Telkitty Here you go, have a cup :)

I wish it worked like this in real life

just having to send a command to a bot, and a robot brings me a cup of coffee

user202362

I used to be in the open, so were my enemies. Then it became me in the open and I kind of knew who my opponents were. Now I am in the open, I don't even know who my adversaries are ... but they are definitely there

user202362

@Stijn ty

user202362

10:17 AM

I am such a useless troll ~cries~

Bart

11:01 AM

There there, you're the only troll I know with an Urban Dictionary entry. That should count for something.

Stijn

11:23 AM

so the new Zelda game is receiving great reviews

but I don't feel like dropping 300+ euros on a brand new console that (apparently) is the equivalent of a potato compared to ps4/xbone

user202362

there was a potato draught in Australia a few months ago

user202362

price of potato went from $1 a kg to nearly $3 a kg

Bart

It's not trying to compete in the PS4/XBox One space though @Stijn. The comparison there is rather pointless

Stijn

@Bart sure, but the price doesn't match the product

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with email in answer: What happened to Sophie's curse? by Harry Peterson on anime.SE

Bart

11:34 AM

@Stijn it kinda does imho. You get a console, as well as a portable device. It has pretty decent perf. Really not that bad.

Then again, I have the devkit on order, so let's see when it arrives.

Jason C

12:54 PM

@angussidney The deed has been done.

@Stijn It basically works like that in real life, except sometimes you have to make small talk with the coffee robot about the weather.

Bart

"Sir, I am a trained barista" "No backtalk coffee robot, or you'll be unplugged!"

Jason C

And occasionally the Starbucks fork of the coffee bot tries too hard to pretend to be your best friend.

"Error 0x482AFA34,23,99 (0): Sir I am a trained barista"

Bart

Their speech recognition is terrible as well. I tell them I'm Bart, but somehow the cup is always marked "Barthe" or something like that.

Jason C

Yeah, either that, or I'm behind "Jesse" in line an uncanny number of times, and always steal his lattes.

Poor Jesse.

Lol...

cv-pls the usual android fail meta.stackexchange.com/q/292052/230261

Stijn

It's confusing that the order of close reasons differs between MSO and MSE

user202362

1:15 PM

It's not very wise to troll a hacker right?

Andrew T.

or hack a troll?

user202362

yes, that has been done before :x but not by me

Stijn

@Telkitty there's the classic story where a script kiddie targets localhost with their tool

Derpy

@Bart decent console, some design problems that could have been easily avoided. An average successful launch.

That said, many users - youtubers expecially - out there seems to be really wishing for it to fail.

One could go as far as claiming many were paid to post fake news...

Andrew T.

Well, what do people want for new console actually..?

Derpy

1:26 PM

Day one: the joycon are to hard to remove! Every time I have to fight because they won't come appart

Day after: my console felt on the ground because the joycon detached at random times!

.....

Maybe, next time you post a video claiming that the joycons are hard to remove....

try to push the "release" button first...

Stijn

@AndrewT. personally I just want to play Zelda. Don't care about the other games.

Derpy

@Stijn you haven't yet?

Stijn

Not the last few games, no

Derpy

so, I can spoil it for you?

Stijn

no, I might pick up a second hand Wii U some day :p

Derpy

1:29 PM

(the "Please don't" option will cost you a blueberry muffin)

^_^

Stijn

!!/muffin

I tried

Derpy

You probably would have more luck if SweetieBot was still running around, but sadly she is long forgotten.

Stijn

I should stop trying to replace breakfast with coffee

Bart

Breakfast ... I remember that

Andrew T.

What is breakfast? Can eat anot?

user202362

1:41 PM

Andrew T.

Oh god no.. it's almost shop's closing time...

user202362

Andrew T.

>_<

Derpy

1:58 PM

anyway, if anyone here is going to buy a Switch, please ensure your brain is still working correctly before buying.

I won't say the console doesn't have some issues... but...

the stories you read around are too good...

just now I see that some people managed to reverse the joycon wrist grab attachments and weren't able to remove them afterwards.

Andrew T.

I haven't bought new console since PS1...

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