@NormalHuman No, any comments flags are cleared when the parent post is deleted

IIRC they're just marked helpful. Comment isn't removed

I gotta double-check that now; we might've changed how that works (although I doubt it)

So, nobody looks at the comment flag reason on SO; I accept that. But on other sites, moderators do. So, what is the harm to SO if obsolete remains a separate reason? If SO moderators don’t look at the flag, where is the problem? So far, the main argument was that a moderator could start declining comment flags just because they have the wrong reason. But that’s still something I do not see happening with obsolete.

@NormalHuman Not any comment, but if the comment contains certain keywords, one flag may delete it.

oh yeah, deleting a post still marks all pending comment flags "helpful"

@Shog9 Finally some time to answer this: If you actually consider having authors handle obsolete flags, wouldn’t it be harmful to remove this flag until you do so?

@Wrzlprmft not really. Adding a new flag type is easily the simplest part of that

@Shog9 Damn, I already have a Marshal badge on all sites I care about.

@Shog9 Technically sure, I was talking about the user experience.

@Wrzlprmft which we'd want to be significantly different as well

Letting authors handle any kind of flag sounds like a 1yr+ project anyway.

The lowest-hanging fruit here is just automatically handling more flags

Or just giving Andy's bot deletion privs

Yeah, that'd hit quite a few too

Either way, boils down to heuristics

Suggestion: Make replies to a deleted comment be gone with a single user flag.

Building in limited "obsolete" handling could be as simple as, "is this comment a reply to a deleted comment"?

Ha

jinx

Lotta edge-cases there, but not infeasible

I think the hard part is ensuring that it’s really a reply to another comment.

Long-term, this may be entirely backwards anyway.

Did I hear I get more comment flags? O:-)

It might make more sense to adopt a "discussion" system like Docs, where an entire thread gets closed and archived.

@NormalHuman I mean, that happens anyway.

@Shog9 Now, that sounds overcomplicated.

@Shog9 something like chat rooms?

@Wrzlprmft well, we sorta already built it, so there's that...

@NormalHuman Well that’s why you still require one human flag.

@JanDvorak yeah, except without the whole "I'm too good for chat / chat is blocked at work / third-level domains scare me" problem

@Shog9 Workplace, I think, only shows a few comments before collapsing the rest of the conversation behind "Show X more comments". Did that significantly help their comment threads (and if so would it be worth replicating elsewhere)?

@Andy I don't think there's any help for TWP

their big problem isn't obsolete comments, or even noisy comments, it's folks tearing into each other in comments

@Shog9 Unfortunately I cannot comment on this because I do not hang around on docs.

Just sayin', we're experimenting with different models here and it might make less sense to enhance comment cleanup than to just switch to a system that doesn't need as much cleanup.

I just invite people to The Tavern

That way Normal can be chatting with them in spite of his best efforts.

huh... boxes are where I put my kittens.

and the mystery of where bjb came from is solved at last

Whoa

(170) new messages in tavern. Did you guys drink a lot of coffee today?

yes

I did, actually

Two mugs, which is unusual for me

Lol

@Shog9: Okay, so back to where we left the thread a few minutes ago: So, nobody looks at the comment flag reason on SO; I accept that. But on other sites, moderators do. So, what is the harm to SO if obsolete remains a separate reason? If SO moderators don’t look at the flag, where is the problem? So far, the main argument was that a moderator could start declining comment flags just because they have the wrong reason. But that’s still something I do not see happening with obsolete.

@NormalHuman I'm listening...

@Wrzlprmft SO is kinda my focus because it gets more comments and more flags than... Most of the rest of the network combined

But, it's not the only site with problems

your mom's site also has problems

Math gets a huge number of comments and comment flags. DBA does as well. English we already talked about. And there are others on their heels.

/me contributes conversations in real time

Yeah, it'll be a while before this is an issue on, say, Quant

I've heard of a certain incident on DBA

But we usually try & build things to scale when possible

@Shog9 Sure, but the argument is actually independent of the site. If some moderators ignore the flag type and some make use of the flag type, where is the problem with obsolete? Everybody seems to agree what it means.

@Wrzlprmft most people not caring what it means isn't quite the same as agreeing

...I'm kinda bummed Shadow Wizard isn't around. AFAIK, he's the only one who commented on the other relevant proposed change here

@Shog9 most people not caring what it means – is that so?

@Shog9 By which you mean?

If your population is "people who use the site", a majority don't even know about comment flags. If your population is "people who flag comments", I suspect a majority of our comment flags, if you kick out Andy, are from folks with single-digit flag counts.

The real test here - as with every copy change - is gonna be seeing how folks react after a week or so: are comments still being flagged, are they being flagged more readily, are folks using "other" and providing context when necessary...?

@Shog9 Then you should maybe encourage them to use other more. I only started using it after I became a mod and handled comments myself.

On the other hand, other isn’t subject to automatic handling, is it?

Now there's a combination I didn't expect to see

@Wrzlprmft that's why we're renaming it

and providing guidance

@Shog9 Yes your guidance goes into another direction. It doesn’t say: Use this to tell the handling moderator why a comment is obsolete.

@Wrzlprmft there are other reasons why it might / should be used. As I said, the proof is in the flagging - we'll see how folks react.

@Shog9 Sure, I did not suggest this as an actual wording. But right now, I see no reason to expect an increase of other; it’s not really encouraged.

By the way, being curious: Do other flags trigger the automatic comment deletion?

sure

We'll probably want to change that at some point

(this system has had very little attention since it was created)

@Shog9 Actually, it’s not that bad. This way there is no difference if I use explicit other flags for all comments. (Of course I see how this can be bad, if an other flag gets auto-deleted when it really should have reached a moderator.)

Well, I got to go now.

Till tomorrow or something.

'nite

> If we assume humans are just like 80kg rabbits...

@Shog9 so you allow moderators to curse and act like children in private messages? Nice detail to know.

@ShadowWizard it's... Heavily discouraged.

But if you don't do anything against such moderators, more will do that.

I really thought SE was better than that. Oh well.

@jcolebrand I'd rather not talk about you behind your back here, if you happen to be around.

Nothing he'll say can justify saying FUCK OFF to a user, so I'll be out of this anyway. He's no moderator for me.

I've heard something about chaining suspensions ("I'll suspend you as soon as this one wears off") and suspending for legitimate comments

oh, that was a super ping? @Shog

It would be nice to know that what I heard was misinformation.

no, could be

@JasonC so can you do graph of word over time, e.g. when "brown" was said by days?

@JanDvorak at this point, I believe all the bad things users ever said about SE moderators. Sad, but probably that's how they deal with bad cases.

When attacked, attack with more force and worse words. Always work.

@ShadowWizard Sure

I'm curious, is a 1.5yr suspension not an option? I imagine there are things that would justify a 1.5yr suspension, even though "commenting under posts" isn't one of them. Plus it's clearly not the case that everyone who comments there gets suspended, I would guess.

@ShadowWizard there's no justification; it's wholly inappropriate. But I prefer not to discuss folks' private indiscretions in public if I can handle them in private. I've tried to maintain this for all parties involved thus far.

@JanDvorak I've not seen that and would not be happy if I did. We take complaints against moderators seriously and I've investigated a fair number of claims of mod suspending inappropriately. I've reversed one suspension and chatted with several mods about being more patient when it comes to comments. But more often, it turns out the mod did the right thing. They're human too, of course.

I'm glad to hear that

@JanDvorak Suspensions longer than a year are only available to employees. We normally give out 10, however. If it comes to that, we normally prefer the user to play games on some other site/network.

@ShadowWizard chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2013/12/18/0-24 was the tavern's brownest day.

@Shog9 I am now

@jcolebrand @Shadow's got concerns about the ruckus on DBA, and what it says about how moderation is performed. Whether you want to address that or not is up to you.

I can apologize to the community, and I would, if it were addressed bysl

on my phone, bear with me please

Also on a bus so ...

By someone other than the current accuser. However I have promised the SE staff I would take a moderation break AND have nothing to do with that particular user for a long while.

My behavior was less than admirable.

I also believe that the entire situation was not properly disclosed.

Shog9's seen all of it. He knows I was in the wrong. I know i was in the wrong.

There's a lot more to it and almost nothing more that I need to say except that my behavior was impolite and incorrect

I could be a lot more indiscreet and show the entire conversation that occurred but that would be an additional vast overstepping of my agreement with the SE team. Shog9 can say any more about the topic if he wishes. I know he will represent me fairly (which may not be favorable to me, but he is always fair)

@ShadowWizard it was offensive and it was not professional and for that I do apologize.

I would, as I've said already, prefer to not drag this out further if that's possible. I've already spent a fair chunk of time today (minuscule in comparison to what others on my team and the mod teams have put in, but still) trying to avoid having to publish the other side of this on meta, and I'm still not entirely certain that I'll be successful there; if I end up having to publish a full post mortem on this, so be it, but that's never ended well yet.

As I've said, just to be clear: I overstepped a professional bound, I was in the wrong, I'm taking some time off moderation, and I leave any further discussion to the CM team for now. But yes, I was indeed in the wrong.

@Shog9 well it seems like one party has gotten away with defaming someone else very successfully, by taking his words out of context. That user will soon be gone, but the defamation will last a while.

I can't defend the actions or words taken in or out of context, but it still doesn't seem.. well, fair. Perhaps that isn't important though.

It isn't.

isn't fair or isn't important?

What's important is that we continue to grow SE as a professional network

@ɥʇǝS as I told bluefeet the other day, if nothing else it's an important lesson in practical moderation... In more ways than one.

Okay I'm headed through TSA now so I'm offline for a bit

@Shog9 Very true.

This is why I shouldn't post before I finish my coffee @ShadowWizard :P

@jcolebrand I'm glad you acknowledge your mistakes, and think it's good thing you take a break from moderation. If only the world leaders will also take a break when doing horrific mistakes, the world would be a better place. :)

I really don't need the other side, I'm sure that accuser was also wrong and deserve the suspension. That wasn't of too much interest for me at any point, just his specific accusation about offensive moderator behavior.

@Shokhet so you blame coffee... too easy! :D

!!/blame

@ShadowWizard It's Shog9's fault.

See? @Shokhet ^

@ShadowWizard Always. It's a running joke among my friends. I can ALWAYS blame coffee :P

@JasonC nice... any chance for graph? ;)

@SmokeDetector Although it's good to see that the CMs are also at fault

@Shokhet so coffee is like caching for you and your friends... nice!

@Shokhet Shog isn't just a CM... he's the CM.

Kind of the "CM representative in SE"

Or, SE Spokesman.

@ShadowWizard ☕☕☕

lol

Only three? I drink my 6th (and last) now. (12:50 AM)

I have more coffee than blood in my veins.

@ShadowWizard Wow. I'll usually have 2-3 in a day; I wrote that post, groggily, in the middle of the first

With 4 hours of sleep, that's the only way to go...

I guess so

Morning

Night

Did MSE chat get a new ping sound? I thought it used to be the same "boing" as regular SE chat

@JourneymanGeek were you around in the time of morning trains in Tavern?

Nope

oh too bad

they were fun

I think I've only really been around here a couple of months

@Shokhet new? nah, it's different for years

You probably didn't get many pings before

But then came the Shadow... :D

I usually leave my machine on silent

@ShadowWizard That too :)

:D

I ping, hence I exist

@JourneymanGeek really?! Oh my

Sandbox is that way. @Jeremy ;)

So....what was this morning train business about, @ShadowWizard? Sounds interesting

@ShadowWizard being less of a one-site guy and all that ;p

@JourneymanGeek well, you don't act like the common newbie here :D

@ShadowWizard Yeah, I tend to have that effect. I mispent my youth on chatrooms and all that ;p

I had a great set of counter-role models.

@ShadowWizard Cute :)

@JeremyBanks lol... reminds me, there is some key combo in DOS that cause actual BEEP. ;)

I had that on a server once, so it beeped every time a bug was logged.

That was..... noisy.

@JourneymanGeek what chatrooms? If I may ask? ;)

@ShadowWizard small, private IRC channels, with megalomaniacal admins with no clue how to run a community

@JourneymanGeek megalomaniacal admins... sounds like something people think of SO/SE :D

I was a boy during the BBS era, wasn't into it myself, but got a friend who was.

ASCII #7

@ShadowWizard We actually lost users in good standing - people who were chanops, cause the admin had a bad day and decided to berate them for no apparent reason

@Jason not enough coffee too?

It kinda shaped my philisophy of handling people on chat, and it mostly works

The only way to treat everyone equally is to ban everyone?

@JeremyBanks rofl... guess you were all kids? Or at least those "mods"? ;)

I was a moderator in something like 5 forums.. some small, some bigger

Mike Rowe Forums was one ;)

@ShadowWizard You mean my answer?

Something like that. I had it in my head that I was responding to SLBarth, not to the question itself.

@JasonC lol, yeah... that's a tricky question though

@Shog9 that Its too much effort to be mean to people. ;p

@JeremyBanks so why not appointing adults as moderators?

@JeremyBanks hack.. lol... what did you do? ;)

I did play D&D a lot as teenager, but never took part in D&D forums for some reason.

@JeremyBanks oh. Too bad!

@JeremyBanks DALnet server admins used to do crap like that too.

Or globally broadcast excerpts from goatse.

@JeremyBanks oh, lol.

@JeremyBanks ewwwww vBulleitin.

._.

@JeremyBanks rofl... you were a bad boy! :P

Back when I was still running these things, SMF was nice

I think some of the semi cool kids were running vanilla

I remember having dynamic avatar, that changed randomly on every page load.

@JeremyBanks is that.. vBulletin?

yup

Ugh. The Ubuntu forums still runs that and their staff are super stubborn and refuse attempt to upgrade to anything newer/safer.

The one person I know who insists on running that 1. Has a tendancy of feeling threatened by the properly technical members of the community. 2. Is a terribad moderator ;p

Everyone loved to hate it, but still used it

It's had at least one major hack and several other downtimes in the last couple years.

@ɥʇǝS 0_0

At one point someone set up a Discourse test instance but got HUGE backlash for "trying to replace the forums" or something

Yeah, if we've learned anything this past year, it's that democracy means smooooth sailing!

@JeremyBanks dat bite doe

@Shog9 mostly this

@JeremyBanks ubunteros are not always as technical as someone may assume.

@JourneymanGeek anyone who can manage to use vBulletin effectively has gotta be :P

@ShadowWizard Sure, if LibreOffice stops being shitty and just uses the freakin' data labels correctly.

Again, I observe that all desktop office tools suck more every year. One sec let me do this in google sheets.

@ɥʇǝS ugh. This person tended to chase off any competant sane volunteer just so she could get things done her way. She got someone to do the install and setup I think. Then he quit

@JourneymanGeek Those situations are the worst.

Yeah

I mean y'all have some idea of how easygoing I am.

I couldn't get along with the two of them

(Mr Chevy ran the IRC channel. Mrs Chevy ran the forum)

also drove the forum to the ground, and someone talked the guy who owned the place we were fixing up into letting her take over

Dammit, sheets can't make pivot tables grouped by weeks, and libreoffice can't display labels from pivot tables properly in charts.

Sorry @ShadowWizard, all spreadsheet software is failing basic tasks. Can not do.

Promptly dumped 6 months of work cause it lacked an unimportant feature which Vbulls***in lacked anyway, and switched

I guess I could copy the grouped table from office into sheets.

Or not. Chrome crashes. Wtf. Is it not 2017? So I guess I could export the grouped table from office to a CSV and import it into sheets.

This is almost as hard as printing something.

Jesus

@ShadowWizard Whatever, screw it, here's a screenshot of a chart with barely readable axis labels. Enjoy.

At least google put the labels there, unlike certain other spreedsheet applications.

I am really enjoying this out of context, btw:

Clearly.

._.

(IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S NOT BROWN HA HA HA HA!)

I'm a dog and that's clearly grey