Tavern on the Meta

3:03 PM

15

Q: What do we know about the Stack Exchange pharma spammer?

I am creating this question to collect any relevant observations you can provide about the dominant spammer in the Stack Exchange network. More specifically, I am asking about the spammer who currently dominates the Metasmoke spam archive collected by the Charcoal HQ volunteer anti-spam effort. ...

@Michelle obviously only mods can now view deleted comments, nor is my hobby to screen them to keep a private record of deleted content. The fact they were deleted though seems to indicate that probably I recall well: there was a fight about the "the question implies all Indians are spammer" argument.

user315433

Any sort of a fight in comments ought to be deleted eventually, be it for a reason or not.

user315433

Literature had a big fight over a post being marked Community Wiki...

Bhargav Rao

Stack Overflow had a fight over whether comments can be used to have fights. All comments were gone there as well. ;)

user315433

A money mod wants to Increase Rep Level for Commenting

Elias

Compared to someone who wants to Increase Rep level for Downvoting...

user315433

3:24 PM

That "Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases" line is so 2010.

user315433

24

Q: Contradictory guidelines for downvoting

On the one hand, the behavior guidelines begin as follows (bold by me): Be honest. Above all, be honest. If you see misinformation, vote it down. Add comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong. Provide better answers of your own. Last but not least, edit and improve the existing qu...

discussion down-votes help-center

user315433

When extreme cases are half of your tag's feed, they are not so extreme anymore.

Derpy

@Elias the poor guys, still thinking that telling someone what is wrong is better that just saying "haha", Nelson style.

Sagar V

3:40 PM

whoooo

after a long time

canon

4:25 PM

hmm... I downvoted a Q/A pair on a crappy question yesterday. The 20k+ user that answered that question is now suspended. I wonder what happened.

Undo

Probably unrelated. There are lots of 20k users out there to suspend

hairboat

Hey everyone! We’re just about ready to start up today’s Town Hall Chat. I’m going to put this room in timeout, go over the plan and the guidelines, and then give the floor to our hosts. Here we go!

This room was placed in timeout for 3 minutes; Town Hall Chat; Today's topic: Documentation

Like last time, we’re keeping the format of this chat pretty informal, in the hope that we’ll be able to keep setup easy and low-pressure so we can keep having these chats more regularly.

We’ll start with a couple minutes of chat between our community managers (with special guest Vasudha, the product manager for Documentation). Then, we’ll open the floor to y’all to react and respond.

After that, we’ll open the conversation up to whatever topic you folks want. If we want to keep going on Docs, that’s cool; if there are other subjects you’d like to hear from us about, that’s cool too. Second half of the chat will be the time to bring that other stuff up if you have it.

As with last time, please keep the meta-chat to a minimum; we'll welcome feedback on the format and such on MSE after the show. We're going to do our level best to maintain a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio here, so if you're going to type words and hit enter, please keep them on topic.

So! Let’s talk Docs. Take it away, @JonEricson.

Jon Ericson

So we’re shutting down Documentation, which is a thing that’s been a big part of my life for well over a year. I personally got the news right after my vacation, which wasn’t the best welcome home I’ve had.

After the news sunk in, we got to work shutting down the feature. I have an update to send to meta later this week (maybe today) based on community feedback. I think we are doing a pretty good job ending Documentation.

But I’m a bit biased. What do you all think? How’s it going and what can we do better?

Shog9

(you have 30 seconds to read that entire shutdown post & form an opinion)

5

hairboat

still working out the timing on this town hall thing ;)

bluefeet

4:33 PM

15 seconds now

Elias

8 hours ago, by Elias

What's the percentage of Town Hall's topic to be.... SO Docs?

Jon Ericson

@Elias 100%.

Adam Lear

@Elias 100%, give or take a few.

Undo

Maybe it wasn't designed this way, but I never did get an SO Docs result in Google.

3

ArtOfCode

Nor me

Undo

4:34 PM

Don't know if ya'll purposely closed the SEO floodgates or not - curious about that

Adam Lear

That was sort of intentional.

Pops

@Elias 1000‰

Makoto

Personally, while I have received news of projects being shut down after coming back from vacation (and yes, that does hit hard), I do feel like shutting it down is the right choice. As far as it's going: I think that things have been relatively quiet in terms of its shutdown; I haven't heard of any real noise from it just yet.

Jon Ericson

It’s been kinda frustrating to read about people who didn’t hear about Documentation until the announcement it was closing. But marketing wasn’t really the critical problem. Rather we weren’t satisfied that the feature would be better than existing documentation without dramatically changing the structure we provided.

user0042

One thing I missed from Docs is that I couldn't link there to flag for duplicate questions.

ArtOfCode

4:34 PM

Debatable whether having SEO would have increased uptake, then

Makoto

I've got some feedback which I feel would make a good postmortem doc, highly informal and mostly floating around in my head, if we want to talk about its past at some point, too.

Adam Lear

We originally put in SEO-related stuff but there were a few bugs... and by the time we looked at fixing them, we realized that we wanted to fix some other issues in beta first... and the rest is history.

Vogel612's Shadow

@JonEricson looking back... what would've changed if you had had an earlier beta and had been willing to change the structure?

Glorfindel

New users weren't coming to Documentation. (from the shutdown post, not my emphasis). That's kinda hard without SEO.

6

J F

^

Jon Ericson

4:36 PM

@user0042 We'd definitely thought about how to make Docs a target for duplicate questions, but we didn't ever nail down how that would work.

Bhargav Rao

The intro post by Kevin was really good, but the actually docs turned out bad. Good trailer but the movie was poor. :(

Undo

So here's what (I think) happened with me: I didn't really know how to contribute. I'm better at moderation than content creation, and it wasn't clear how I could moderate Docs. Maybe I'm used to Q&A, but digging for abuse seemed cumbersome

4

Jon Ericson

@Vogel612'sShadow I think it would have helped to start simpler and get to SO quicker. We got tons of great feedback in the first few hours on the main site.

Adam Lear

@Glorfindel Agreed. We were trying to balance readers with contributors. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, since just landing folks from Google would accomplish "get the eyeballs" goals, but not necessarily "participate in the beta and contribute stuff" goals.

Makoto

Personally I felt like I couldn't contribute well to Documentation because what I knew how to write was rudimentary, run-of-the-mill knowledge that could be found most anywhere else on the 'Net in other formats, and the kinds of things I wanted to seen written were tougher to find or tougher to verify.

s/knew how to write/was confident in writing

Dan Hulme

4:38 PM

@JonEricson People said all along that the page structure was a huge limitation. (Though people said all kinds of things all along, and most of them were wrong.) It might have worked better for documenting individual libraries, but because of the way tags got proposed in the private beta, everyone started trying to write language tutorials, which really didn't fit into the format.

Jon Ericson

@BhargavRao So the problem still exists? I'd love to get back to it in the future sometime.

Makoto

Things like specific benefits to bean wiring versus annotation wiring of Spring beans which were glossed over in official documentation but not really elaborated on.

hairboat

@Makoto i've been peripheral to the process, but this seems to be the crux of the problem. it's just way harder to write good, in-depth documentation than it is to answer a specific question

4

Undo

@AdamLear Wasn't this true of Classic Q&A, too? Some tiny percentage of folks will stick, so it's good to throw as many people at it as possible to get that tiny percentage turned into Real Numbers.

Makoto

Yes. It's one of those pieces of inertia that is actually quite hard to get over, and without that, Documentation will have a very tough time surviving.

Adam Lear

4:39 PM

@Undo To some degree, probably. But the level of commitment is different. Q&A was also, in a way, solving a simpler problem.

Alon Eitan

It went live too fast IMO, and the reputation feasting on the first days ruined the fun of contributing

rene

Isn't the pattern between Docs and Teams that both those features kind of feel like out-of-place in relation to Q/A which where most users visit the site for?

Jon Ericson

@DanHulme We learned that definitely when we did user interviews around T-SQL. It turns out that needs a different structure than C#. (Which we kinda knew but maybe didn't know, you know?)

Adam Lear

"Just throw more people at it" is not a great way to fix content quality problems, though.

2

Henders

I was confused. I was confused about how I could add meaningful information. I was confused that some people seemed to have the ability to remove my contribution in favour of theirs and with it the rep that I'd gained. I was even confused about which box I was supposed to enter my information into. Unlike almost every other feature I'd used on SO/SE it seemed crowded and difficult to understand what they system wanted from me. I loved the concept but I just couldn't find a way to help.

3

Undo

4:40 PM

That's where you need the moderation tools for folks who are good at that.

Makoto

@AlonEitan: It was like bikeshedding to a degree. That particular and now well-infamous Java arrays post is one of the reasons I wanted to ask for language tags to be outright removed from Documentation.

2

ArtOfCode

Writing documentation is difficult - perhaps having structured collaboration available for writing a topic would have worked? I don't have any further idea beyond that (chat rooms, maybe?), but the way it was was nominally collaborative editing but in reality felt more like lots of people editing lots of bits.

Bhargav Rao

@JonEricson I really liked the intro post, the main problem which it wanted to solve was perfect. I'd still love to have SO docs. On launch, there were just wide spread plagiarism, blatant robo reviewing, copy paste from docs, etc which spoiled the entire idea.

Vogel612's Shadow

@AdamLear gonna get back to you on that when the talk is about DAG

Shog9

@Henders this. The longer we plugged away at it, the more convinced we became that it wasn't obvious what to do... Even for folks who knew what they wanted to do.

Robert Cartaino

4:41 PM

@ArtOfCode The place to draw from prior experience would have been perhaps... Wikipedia. Similar system and goals, structually.

Adam Lear

@rene A side-effect of us deliberately trying to expand beyond Q&A, that. :)

rene

@Undo add to that that SOCVR explicitly opted out for moderating Docs

hairboat

anyone have anything they want to say about how the sunsetting itself is going? we've got a lot of info to sift through about what went wrong with the docs project, but right now we're in the middle of something we haven't really ever done before - shutting down a major project. how are we doing at that?

ArtOfCode

@RobertCartaino as in, a topic page and a topic-talk page? Could work, aye.

Makoto

@hairboat: I haven't seen much noise from it, and I can't really say if things are going well or not. I don't see any major fallout behind reputation fluctuating - likely because I presume that you haven't done that yet.

Shog9

4:42 PM

@ArtOfCode we did end up with that, eventually

Should've probably had it sooner

Makoto

On the plus side, it seems like the feedback and considerations are being taken well on board. Do we have a determination on the badge yet, since that proved to be somewhat controversial?

Undo

@hairboat I don't think it'll be too big an issue. It's not all over Google, and it's only linked 3000 (?) places. That's just a meta cleanup post away from being gone.

Jon Ericson

@Makoto Well, there shouldn't be any reputation fluctuations.

Undo

Attribution is hard, but can be figured out

J F

@hairboat [status-surprised-that-it's-still-in-the-topbar]

2

ArtOfCode

4:43 PM

@Shog9 Yeah, it was getting there - it was less of a talk/discussion page and more of a list of "things that happened on this topic" (calling the discussion "comments" maybe didn't help, with their connotations on the rest of SO). If you'd had more time to work on it...

rene

@AdamLear I get the urge for that expansion, still feels like handy to have a logical connection between features .

Makoto

@JonEricson: That's good to hear.

J F

Are there any plans to migrate the design of the Docs review queue into the other queues?

quartata

@JF There's a banner when you click on it though

Jon Ericson

@JF It'll be gone once we work out the details of how to fix links and whatnot.

Adam Lear

4:44 PM

@JF Not at the moment. What do you like better about the Docs queue vs the others?

ArtOfCode

it looks fancy

Undo

So here's what I think killed it: The content creators didn't really know what to write. Q&A solves this problem naturally - people come with a problem, people answer the problem to get points. Docs seemed to turn into "I need to come up with a problem to get points" - at least that's how I started see it. I didn't see very many cases of people requesting a topic because they needed it, more because they looked through the existing API docs and mass-ported them over.

5

Jon Ericson

@JF Sounds like a good thing to suggest on meta. ;-)

Undo

We had people trying to ask questions in the suggestion box... which may have been a better way, actually.

hairboat

Mod note! OK, folks - we’re past the 15 minute mark, so now you can feel free to bring up any other topics you have in mind, or just continue on Docs if you like.

Jon Ericson

4:45 PM

@Undo I don't think it was all about points, but not knowing what to write is a problem.

Shog9

@Undo yeah, I found that interesting as well

CDspace

@Undo this. I poked around Docs a little, and saw it as more of a collection of examples rather than collaborative explanations

Shog9

Almost wonder if "write documentation for this question" would've have been a good entry-point...

Makoto

A long time ago when Documentation has its own separate Meta, I had thought that the idea of Documentation could eventually encompass how to compile and configure the Linux kernel. Just have that kind of knowledge in one, nice-to-access place. But I'm not sure if that jived with the original vision of Documentation.

Alon Eitan

It was also full of plagiarised examples

Vogel612's Shadow

4:45 PM

@AdamLear looks crisper. It's clearer what action corresponds to which outcome from the colors

Makoto

My question then would be, in an ideal world @JonEricson, what would the ultimate point of Docs encompass? Somewhere to find documentation for applications and libraries, or languages, or an amalgam of both?

Dan Hulme

I'd like to have a quick moan about the notification system. Touching Docs at all signed you up for inbox notifications on topics you knew nothing about because they were in the same tag as what you touched. Clicking on a notification didn't take you to a page about the thing the notification mentioned.

Undo

@Shog9 I just had that same thought - put existing questions in the tag into a queue, for "could this be answered in a Docs topic"

Difficult in a few ways, but interesting

Jon Ericson

@Makoto Fill the gaps between official docs and questions that need to fit a specific format on SO.

Elias

As mentioned on a meta post somewhere, it looked like a collection of examples (and thus a proposal to rename to "Examples", compared to "Docs"). What I'd expect to see on Docs is the explanation of API's parameters and how to use it. Examples are good to have, but not the main expectation...

J F

4:47 PM

compare with:

ɥʇǝS

Thoughts: Who's the best person to write documentation for x? The person/people that wrote/made/contribute to x. Why would they want to put the documentation for x in a place where they have no control over it and almost anyone can change it?

Adam Lear

@JF Ah yes. Yeah, post up a feature request please. :)

canon

I'm still a little miffed that docs rep has polluted SO.

ɥʇǝS

(of course, if X is a language itself that's somewhat different)

Undo

Docs isn't a total loss at all - we've learned a lot from it.

5

Shog9

4:48 PM

@ɥʇǝS I... Kinda disagree with that

Makoto

@ɥʇǝS: It would be the case that X hasn't written the documentation.

Undo

@canon This is one of those arguments I can't get behind until there's Real Harm being shown.

Makoto

Others are using that tool but X hasn't written very good documentation for it, nor do they support it all that well. It's more common than you realize.

ɥʇǝS

@Shog9 In what way?

rene

@JonEricson this is maybe not something you want to share but by whom and/or based on what feedback was the decision made to sunset docs? Were there targets to be met or so?

Jon Ericson

4:48 PM

@DanHulme We did a lot of work on notifications. Some of it seemed better than on Q&A, but it's really hard to get right.

Makoto

(I'm going through that right now with a very proprietary platform from a very public vendor.)

Shog9

@ɥʇǝS Often the best person to document something is the person who spends the most time using it. That can be the person who made it, but that's not necessarily true or even often true.

ɥʇǝS

@Makoto X in this case is a product, products don't write documentation.. having trouble parsing that sentence.

Dan Hulme

@Makoto is it SO Docs? :-)

Makoto

X is still a company in my scenario.

Undo

4:49 PM

Fun subjective observation: beyond about 5k, reputation makes very little difference in the chance that someone is going to do something we have to suspend them for.

Maybe lower.

Shog9

@Undo Sample sizes are too small to really tell us much, IMHO

Undo

@Shog9 Probably. I've lost my fear of suspending 100k+ folks, though

Makoto

For me right now, Docs would have helped me sift through incomplete and undetailed documentation on a platform I have to work on. However, I wonder if that is a two-edged sword; I've not heard of many people using this platform before (and Googling is a bit rough), so I can't expect others to really know about the software platform.

This means that there aren't many people around to write documentation for it to begin with.

Adam Lear

@rene We did have some metrics we wanted to hit. Some of them were handwavy like ("good examples"), some less so (e.g. "visitors and contributors").

Makoto

Then there's an even smaller subset there of people who feel confident in the docs they could author.

ɥʇǝS

4:52 PM

@Shog9 That's fair, but I think the problem still stands. Documentation is hard, seems to be allowing anyone to undo what I write would not be incentivizing.

Adam Lear

The decision to sunset was made by the exec team in combination with those of us on the Docs team after all the user research Vasudha and Horyun (our UX research intern earlier this summer) did. It became apparent that the amount of work we need to do to get significantly better at the goals we had is just too much for a team of one PM, one CM, one designer, and effectively one full-time dev (hi).

8

Dan Hulme

@JonEricson Yeah, I noticed the level of detail of the settings increased over time. I got the noise down to few enough notifications that I didn't want to spend time fixing it any more, but the thing beyond the notification never became useful.

J F

0

Q: Copy the design of the Docs review queue for the other queues

Currently, the Docs review queue has a nice table showing how the review played out: However, other review queues do not have this design: Can they be upgraded to look like the Docs one?

feature-request documentation review design

rene

@AdamLear Ok, I see. That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that.

Jon Ericson

@DanHulme Notifications are really hard. I tend to think more settings doesn't help so much. But the alternative tends to be algorithms that don't completely satisfy everyone.

Dan Hulme

4:54 PM

@JonEricson Yeah, I agree with both thosse sentiments.

CDspace

Will a similar project to Docs ever be attempted in the future?

Makoto

From the perspective of the dev team, what is the biggest lesson learned from this project? I don't deny that there are lessons to be learned, but I'd like to know what was the biggest one as a result of it now being closed?

Undo

Completely separate topic: Re the meta post about Andy's comment flagging, I wonder if we're entering an era where it'd be good to have objective guidelines for how bots should be run, treated, etc. SmokeDetector is solidly in the middle of all of this, casting flags on its own and doing great.

6

Vogel612's Shadow

@CDspace the whole future ever is a really long time...

Jon Ericson

@CDspace I hope so. But the future is really hard to predict.

hairboat

4:55 PM

@CDspace the official plan is that this is permanently shelved. but i know a lot of individual folks are personally interested in tackling the problem again someday, especially given all we've learned from this first attempt

2

ɥʇǝS

@hairboat Can we rehash what the problem is?

Because I never got that.

hairboat

@ɥʇǝS "documentation stinks" ;)

Jon Ericson

@Makoto Speaking as a non-dev, I think we are already seeing the lessons being applied:

85

Q: Help set Q&A (TeamDAG) product development priorities

You've already been introduced to the Developer Affinity & Growth team (DAG, yeah go ahead Aussies and make your jokes, but the name really is a humble nod to this line from Hamilton). The obvious question is, "What the heck is this new team going to do?" As we’ve reviewed meta feedback we have...

discussion featured new-nav notifications question-quality

Pops

@Undo It's a bit in the spotlight because of Andy's election, but that's a very special case. There isn't exactly a flood of bots coming to the site, and we've tended to follow the "create rules as they're needed, not in an attempt to preemptively address potential problems" rule.

3

Henders

@hairboat That's a shame. Every time I read poor documentation (mentioning no names) I think of how great the concept of example driven documentation is.

hairboat

4:57 PM

@ɥʇǝS i'll quote @JonEricson's meta post:

> We still think Stack Overflow Documentation is a good idea. Kevin Montrose’s initial research has mostly been proven correct. Not only did our own survey show that developers rely on official documentation to learn, GitHub's Open Source Survey showed "incomplete or confusing documentation" to be the top pain point.

J F

@Henders cough Rails?

Jon Ericson

@Henders It's easier to list documentation that has good examples than those that don't.

Undo

Rails has good docs :P

kinda

ArtOfCode

unless you want to do things it wasn't designed for

Alon Eitan

Do you think that having more positive acceptance of the Documentation by the community would made you invest more resources in the development?

Makoto

4:58 PM

Validation from the community seems to be what I'm getting. I do recall that there was a lot of...silence...from the initial implementations of Docs.

Pops

I always remember this (possibly apocryphal) story about a college where the campus had no sidewalks the first year they opened, and then the next year they decided where to build sidewalks by looking at where people had formed their own paths and killed the grass.

3

Jon Ericson

@Undo Ruby doesn't. Or at least it didn't help me as much as I hoped it would.

rene

@Undo If you're building a train...

J F

@Undo If you know which method you’re looking for, sure.

Undo

@Pops Oh, I've been to that college. Pretty obvious that's what they did.

Jon Ericson

4:59 PM

@AlonEitan Maybe? Harder to shutdown something that's universally liked, for sure.

hairboat

(one minute warning)

CDspace

@Pops I wonder how this would apply to Docs or it's revival?

ɥʇǝS

@hairboat That makes me wonder if there was a disconnect between what needed documenting and what people were writing on Docs..

2

Jon Ericson

@Pops It happened at UC Irvine.

Makoto

@ɥʇǝS: There couldn't be any larger disconnect, IMO.

Pops

4:59 PM

@CDspace Mmm how so?

Shog9

@AlonEitan this is hard to gauge. In theory, if everyone on the site had been using it... Yeah, we probably would've kept investing. But in practice, there's a practical line somewhere where the failings would've been too great to ignore no matter how many people were typing.

Pops

@JonEricson I was told University of Maryland main campus.

Undo

I'm out. Great conversation, looking forward to the next one! :)

CDspace

@Pops That's my question. What are we looking for, so we can build a Docs revival to fill the need?

Adam Lear

@AlonEitan That's a great question. I honestly don't know. The nature of meta is such that most folks tend to point out issues rather than post "this is excellent" type of answers. So it can be hard to tell what the overall opinion of something really is. Having said that, I think we were focused on fixing problems as they came up and more positive feedback would've helped, but we also would've had a rather different product in that situation.

6

Vasudha Swaminathan

5:00 PM

@Makoto Speaking as a non dev again, intuitions (stemming from anecdotes and observations) only take you so far.. To get to a product that might actually do what you need it to do - you need to continuously test, iterate and incrementally build the solution by keeping an open feedback loop with our users (as opposed to completely building something and opening it for feedback)

4

hairboat

That just about does it for time today. Thanks everyone for coming! If you have feedback on the format, please leave it on the meta post. It wasn’t a huge amount of time, but we’re trying to keep these short and lightweight so we can do them more often, since it’s important that we get this time to talk to each other directly. Next one in two weeks - watch meta for details. Thanks for town-hall-chatting, y’all!

Undo

@Pops I'd believe it. i.stack.imgur.com/eBy7n.png

Makoto

Thanks!

J F

@Undo Oh, good. Dead-end sidewalks!

Pops

@JF It's about the journey, not the destination!

ɥʇǝS

5:02 PM

Well I do hope docs can rise again someday. I liked the idea/final goal.

Shog9

amazon.com/Where-Sidewalk-Ends-Poems-Drawings/dp/0060256672

hairboat

Town Hall #5 - 9 August 2017

32 mins ago, 30 minutes total – 169 messages, 25 users, 80 stars

Bookmarked 11 secs ago by hairboat

6

Alon Eitan

Thank you for answering

bluefeet

@Shog9 best book

Glorfindel

Now that we have a room full of knowledge people here, what's your stance on having a 'how to use Stack Exchange' tips & tricks post on Meta SE as described here? It would've been good content for Meta Stack Exchange Documentation (as suggested by rene), but that's not going to fly.

rene

5:04 PM

Wait, what have I done?

J F

I probably will regret offering this but did you consider SO Documentation? It seems perfect for this ... — rene Aug 3 at 19:29

Glorfindel

^

rene

hides

Shog9

After-THC hangout: Come and watch me drink coffee

J F

@Glorfindel sure!

Elias

5:05 PM

@Glorfindel probably on MSE as CW? We have already any kinds of posts there...

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

@Shog9 wait, what?

Jon Ericson

@Glorfindel Self-answered questions seem reasonable to me. As always, make the question good without the answer. (I probably should comment there instead. ;-)

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

what did I join?

Shog9

@amanaPlanaCAnalPAnaMA self-explanatory, surely

Glorfindel

@Elias that was my intention, yes. But this kind of post doesn't exist (or I can't find it).

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

5:06 PM

@Shog9 touche

@Shog9 ha I hear the PING!

@Shog9 PING!

lol

naaah

Elias

@Glorfindel then create it? ;)

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

play some snake :-) snace.herokuapp.com ;-) @Shog9

Ha I have that mug too :-)

Elias

@amanaPlanaCAnalPAnaMA gasp, you pinged Shog, even so 3 times!

Dan Hulme

@Shog9 I'd love to but you'd have to watch me cycling home from work in the rain, and I wouldn't be paying attention.

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

I cannot talk. @ the office.

Glorfindel

5:08 PM

@JonEricson yes, but to clarify: I want to make it a generic question where all kind of 'objective' tips & tricks are welcome. Some kind of extension to the help center. Another thing which would fit there, if it wasn't already available via other means: the advanced search tips.

It could be that some users are going to close vote the question as too broad, which technically might be true. I'd like some form of support before posting it.

Jon Ericson

@Glorfindel Oh. Kinda like this?

Glorfindel

Yes, except that there are no tips & tricks in there.

Jon Ericson

I'm not sure how useful those are. How many people actually read those sorts of things?

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

oh @Shog9 unrelated to me ;-P I got my 100k swag over the weekend :-)

also am I really brought up in conversation that much? ;-P

/shrug

I wish that worked here ;-P

CAPTURE THE FLAG

I just remember that from unreal tournement of old.

rene

@Glorfindel can you give one example of a tip / trick you had in mind posting? I'm better when I can work from an example.

Glorfindel

5:15 PM

@JonEricson good question. I wrote It's just a small tip for adding comments on iOS, nothing spectacular, so in itself, the tip is hardly worth posting. But there are a lot of questions on Stack Exchange which turned out to be useful to a handful of people.

Jon Ericson

@Glorfindel That's kinda the entire premise of self-answering.

Elias

@Glorfindel At first, I can see it being useful, but on the second thought, I'm afraid you're right that it's too broad, unless you put a scope (e.g. for mobile web only).

rene

Isn't maybe all that is needed a tag: tips-and-tricks

too bad you can't tag answers

Mithrandir

@JonEricson what did you do with those parentheses??

Jon Ericson

@Mithrandir The Right Thing.

Glorfindel

5:18 PM

@rene yes. I use the AutoReviewComments script quite often, but it doesn't work on Safari on iOS, or in the Stack Exchange app. What I've done is set up a Text Replacement (standard feature of iOS); when I type wsq; it will auto-convert to Welcome to Ask Different. If you have a new question, please use the [Ask Question](/questions/ask) button. or something similar. I can make this a decent answer with some other examples and screenshots how to set it up.

@rene could work as well, but somehow I'd like the idea of having all of them in one Q&A.

Mithrandir

@JonEricson ...

xkcd.com/541 applies

Glorfindel

@Mithr ~~could you un-onebox that please?~~ thanks

Jon Ericson

@Mithrandir Getting linked to that post is a disadvantage of being correct.

Mithrandir

status-deoneboxed

rene

@Glorfindel I would really suggest to try to compile some offline first, in a gist or so and advertise in some chatrooms to invite poweruser to contribute

Glorfindel

5:21 PM

@rene sounds good, which chatroom?

J F

solution: (I probably should comment there instead. 😉)

rene

@Glorfindel Well, the main rooms on SO and the major site rooms on SE?

Elias

@JF italic emoticon 😨

Glorfindel

Oh, a couple of them. I didn't see your edits.

rene

@Glorfindel From charcoal you have a steady group of users around the network

Glorfindel

5:23 PM

true.

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

@Shog9 @JonEricson google hangout again some other time? :-) maybe a friday 😀 I would like to converse next thyme :-D Just cool to hear how people are doing around here ^_^ (how many other ways are there to make a smiley)

Glorfindel

Thanks for your ideas, I have to go now. You'll hear more from this idea in the near future (6-8 somethings).

Jon Ericson

@amanaPlanaCAnalPAnaMA Sounds good.

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

Awesome :-D

Consider it "scheduled"?

rene

@Glorfindel cya

amanaP lanaC A nalP A naM A

5:24 PM

ha

Henders

I like to use Shog's posts as my personal language development programme. The amount of words I learn from them is staggering!

M.A.R.

I still don't have a clear idea on what @Glor's tips will include

I mean, I had a similar idea in mind

But how would we know which tricks to put there? Where woukd we draw the too simple/too complicated line?

Bhargav Rao

> Y'all are idiots

:p

Henders

explodes

DroidDev

5:40 PM

two same answers : first, second

Elias

@DroidDev the first code was used in an article, which the second answer linked to

DroidDev

so second one isn't a duplicate of first answer?

although it links, but code is essentially same

Elias

It's... kind of weird case since the article referred the first answer, and the second answer mentioned the article. Accidental plagiarism? Dunno...

DroidDev

5:59 PM

hmm....got it. Thanks for input. You are right, its a weird case, and we probably should leave it as is

cazc_941

@JF is that an emotion in italics

rene

6:18 PM

@M.A.R. that is something for us and @Glorfindel to work out.

Just bring up something and we'll see

M.A.R.

@rene so dramatic

rene

thanks

M.A.R.

How are we gonna coordinate the draft?

Google sheets?

A chatroom?

rene

@M.A.R. yeah, something like that will work

@M.A.R. we can coordinate here or in Charcoal

M.A.R.

@rene But Google's services time out for me in this Android browser :(

rene

6:22 PM

@M.A.R. we could hijack an sandbox answer?

M.A.R.

@rene we could both use a chatroom and hijack an answer. Although I think we'd need more than one answer to organize things meaningfully

Sagar V

what happened to this room? flood?

Oh townhall

\o/

am I late

rene

@SagarV yes

Sagar V

crying

rene

@M.A.R. sure, but so far we have one example from Glor, one idea from you and I have nothing. We don't need 3 answers ... yet ...

M.A.R.

6:26 PM

@rene slacker.

rene

sure

M.A.R.

Well, you'd need to tell me when you're going to start

I have a terrible memory for these things

Things such as stuff

rene

when it comes to actually do something?

M.A.R.

Yeah

user0042

@SagarV There was a Town Hall meeting. But I believe the topic changed.

Sagar V

6:30 PM

@user0042 crying again

M.A.R.

@user0042 the topic did change because it was already meant to be more than one topic for discussion

It was pretty controlled actually. I might say something next time

Glorfindel

7:10 PM

@M.A.R. I'm looking for tips & tricks which are specific to Stack Exchange (not general productivity tricks) and userscripts are also out of scope; they have a better place in Stack Apps.

Another idea which might fit: some pages don't have live refresh enabled. One of them is the flag queue for ♦ moderators. I'm writing a userscript to enhance it, but Nathaniel mentioned he uses Distill Web Monitor (a Chrome extension) to watch for changes on that page and it alerts him when there's new content.

I think tools specific to ♦ moderators are too limited to be included though, but there might be other pages where this tool is beneficial.

user315433

8:27 PM

> Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

Elias

8:38 PM

Nitrous Oxide + Neurotoxin

Laughter-induced asthma works too

user315433

9:33 PM

> A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.

user315433

Making Your App Instant, by Kasra Rahjerdi

user315433

I thought this was a joke...

user315433

But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.

user315433

> No push notification

user315433

Well then, a webpage.

Travis J

9:45 PM

You are connected to a websocket.

The web is very pushy these days.

user315433

True. My point was, push notifications is what people appear to like about the SE/O app, comparing it to the mobile web view.

user315433

Take that away, and what is left?

Travis J

The mobile web app doesn't have push?

user315433

It does not have a thing that would make your phone beep or vibrate or whatever when you get a new comment.

user315433

I think the websocket connection still works, so the inbox will turn red if you are looking on the page. Not sure. One doesn't normally have the same page open on a phone for long enough for this to matter.

user315433

9:52 PM

Travis J

Ah, yeah, browsers do not have the ability to use phone notifications.

Or, at least, to my knowledge they don't

rene

11:16 PM

Not sure if someone is still around but I rolled back on this question and left a comment. I'm bound for bed, so don't want to stick around much longer to wait for rsponses ....

Town Hall #5 - 9 August 2017

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