Tavern on the Meta

12:00 AM

> fighting with Twitter to unblock new accounts

@AdamLear 0_0

Yeah, funny thing about that... Because we're creating a bunch of, well, bots, we used a google group as the email and the +whatever feature to differentiate between the sites. At the tail end of creating new Twitter accounts for the sites, Twitter just started suspending them outright.

Journeyman Geek

@ShadowWizard that's rather less tricky in mixed gender conscription.

@AdamLear ._.

that seems... avoidable

Adam Lear

Why? Beats me. AFAIK no terms of service were violated. They'd be unblocked given a roundtrip to @support, but because we used a google group, actually dealing with the Twitter email-based support was painful

Journeyman Geek

But I suppose it was "it seemed a good idea at the time"

Adam Lear

yeah, well... it's not like we were going to start making a new first-class email address for every site.

Journeyman Geek

12:03 AM

@AdamLear probably cause the people who handle it are like "this seems fishy" and in most places documentation sucks

@AdamLear or in theory aliases, but I have no idea how/what SE does for that.

Adam Lear

Plus the person in charge of creating those (at the time, me, but really... anyone in the company with access) should be able to see emails in one spot.

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, not sure that's any better. Sounds like offloading maintenance cost to IT and adds an extra step in account setup.

Journeyman Geek

no no

Something like support.google.com/domains/answer/6304345?hl=en

but I guess it dosen't scale

user202362

but setting up free email servers for everyone is the best way to collect data ...

Adam Lear

yeah, that's what I thought you meant. IT would have to set these up, IIRC

Journeyman Geek

(you can do the same on postfix, and presumably exchange )

Adam Lear

12:05 AM

"You can add up to 30 email aliases for each user"

that's a dealbreaker right there :)

Journeyman Geek

@AdamLear though, one off as opposed to every time.

Adam Lear

we'd be up to what... 6 users by now? :)

Journeyman Geek

ya I guesss ;p

But I'm entirely aware I'm a random internet dude talking out my posterior.... and you guys (mostly? ;p) know what you're doing.

Adam Lear

@JourneymanGeek sometimes. let's go with sometimes. ;)

Journeyman Geek

but it does sound a lot like twitter not actually doing a good job of tracking what they're doing, if it keeps happening.

Adam Lear

12:09 AM

That doesn't surprise me in the least.

Journeyman Geek

seems slightly sloppy but I can't think of a process outside specialcasing some emails (Big flashing "No NO TOUCHIE!") that would prevent that past a certain size.

Adam Lear

Yeah, hard to tell. IMO "email similarity" by itself is a poor signal, but I don't have access to their data (assuming they do track bot abuse cases).

Anyway, point being, we do want to keep doing site swag (as opposed to keep creating Twitter accounts :)), it's just that we're very limited on resources at the moment :/

And on that note, it's time to head home here. Have a great rest of morning/day/evening/night.

user315433

at the moment = for more than a year

Adam Lear

both are correct ;)

user315433

Odd that design capabilities were not as limited when Jin was the only designer.

Adam Lear

12:17 AM

They were. Where do you think the backlog started?

user315433

It's not just the size of backlog. More than a year went without a single site design.

user315433

Which didn't happen with Jin AFAIR.

Adam Lear

That has some to do with design, but more with graduation requirements.

user315433

Anyway, I didn't mean to keep you from heading home, etc

Adam Lear

For all intents and purposes, we effectively have a two-tier graduation process now. A basic graduation is available at lower thresholds of activity when we're reasonably certain the site is doing fine and doesn't need the "beta" label anymore. But with custom design also comes a privilege jump (design-less graduated sites stay at public beta thresholds).

But yeah, really heading out now. Later all

Success

12:41 AM

alexout is still doing fine on ru.SO, so yeah, I really wonder why they did unaccept spree on MSE...

Catija

@AdamLear That's sort of "new" information. I know that Robert's pushed for simply removing the Beta label without really "Graduating" the site per se... but in the graduation update from a couple of years ago, my interpretation there was that sites that were given elections were on the list slated for full graduation and site design. Now it sounds like we have three tiers which is confusing with sites like Parenting in Beta for extreme amounts of time.

If we're really going to simply remove the beta label without necessarily granting sites designs, it seems like some of the oldest sites still in beta deserve that consideration.

user315433

Removing beta and holding an election? Or not?

user315433

Currently, removing beta means there is going to be a mod election. Hence, the sites where the community is too small or weakly organized to support a meaningful election don't get out of beta.

Catija

Depends. I think Robert would want to remove the beta label once the site was stable after ~90 days... based on what I've seen him post. Then it'd just be a "site"... I think elections would wait until the site had sufficient users who met certain reputation thresholds.

user315433

So then it's beta - not beta but pro tem mods - elected mods - design

user315433

12:54 AM

Four-tier system.

Catija

There'd be no correlation between removal of the beta label and elections.

Yes.

It's sort of silly to have a 6-year-old site with a "beta" label... it's not going anywhere.

37

A: Can we do something about the "graduated" label?

I think we should consider doing away with the label entirely. The whole concept of waiting for "graduation" to get the features you need is too restrictive… no matter what you call it. Instead, we should be looking at unbundling all the features that communities can really use when they have su...

47

A: Should we rename or remove the "beta" label?

I've been a long-time proponent of removing the "beta" label when it no longer makes sense. I agree that labeling a site as "beta" creates a lot of confusion… and a certain stigma when it looks like a site is never going to <quote> "get out of beta." But let's be careful not to replace this sys...

The second one is better.

Though, I think both of those came before the New Outlook post.

This is what I was basing my initial comments to Adam on:

368

Q: Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites

Back in April of 2010, Joel shared our assumptions about the role of small sites in the newly minted Stack Exchange network: If a site does not have enough activity at the end of 90 days, it will be closed down. Any existing Q&A will be archived and made available for download, but the site...

Adam Lear

@Catija I personally agree with not keeping sites in “beta” for 6+ years. What we have now is a somewhat weird compromise between the original definition of graduation (and all the implementation assumptions that come with it) and the reality of community building/growth that we arrived at in practice.

Journeyman Geek

1:09 AM

ie "We arn't in kansas any more toto" ?;p

Adam Lear

I don’t at all mean to diminish the accomplishments of the communities that graduate with or without design. I’m also not necessarily speaking to intent. I’m just describing what we currently have.

user315433

Removal of beta label without anything else happening... kind of says the label doesn't matter.

user315433

Maybe not have it at all, then.

Catija

I think that part of the problem is that "beta" really isn't the right name for it. I sort of get where the name originated, considering the "SE 2.0" terminology but that hasn't really lasted while the beta label has.

Journeyman Geek

@Desire Post beta presumably means "the community can sustain itself" Least with the older communities, outside... exceptional circumstances, we mostly run ourselves. So removing the label vaguely does mean something

Adam Lear

1:13 AM

One side-effect of implementation is that we can’t, for example, run an election on a beta site without screwing folks out of moderator service badges because those are tied to the site state. So there’s “graduation” as a concept in the sense that “y’all have proved that you are here to stay” and then there’s “graduation” in terms of if site.State == ...

@Catija Yeah, pretty much.

Catija

I could see keeping some sort of "in development" stage for a certain amount of time.. maybe that's just a year? I know Robert is pushing for 90 days but that seems like no time at all.

Journeyman Geek

@Catija SE 2.0 was actually something though - that's basically the point at which the community proposed sites and things got biiiiiig.

Catija

@JourneymanGeek But as someone who came along far after that, I've only ever heard the term in passing without ever really understanding what it meant. I'm sure it means a lot more to people who were around at the time than to people like me... which is becoming a larger part of the community.

Journeyman Geek

@Catija I think Jeff had a good post on that

hm, was Joel?

Was Joel. My bad stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/13/changes-to-stack-exchange

Catija

@AdamLear That's sort of why I was thinking that tying elections to something other than the removal of the beta label would help. You have a metric for when a site has sufficient traffic to remove the label (10 QPD right now)... you could set a similar one for elections X users at reputation levels X, Y, Z & N total questions, minimum time, one year or something like that...

You could change the beta label metric to something else, too...

Adam Lear

1:19 AM

@Catija Yeah, but we would need to rewrite badge triggers. It’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. I don’t recall all the concerns off-hand, but IIRC some of them were alone the lines of “all the data is bad” :) Cruft that accumulates over the years when you move from one system to another, that sort of thing.

Catija

Or swap them... 10 QPD is when you get elections, but something less is when the label is removed...

Journeyman Geek

"all the data is bad" ._.

Catija

@AdamLear The trigger for the badge is a year, right? So if a year is the minimum amount of time before elections, that wouldn't affect it?

Adam Lear

Pure data metrics don’t necessarily work either. Exhibit A: Software Engineering back in the day. Very active and popular, but also pretty dysfunctional.

@Catija There’s a clause in pro tem badges: a year or graduation happened.

Catija

It'd be really interesting at some point to really dig into it. I wonder even if the site and its moderators could be involved in it. Yes, the successful beta blog post is a bit outdated but I think that metrics like having custom close reason/s, having something other than the default text on the "what to ask" page... having an active meta community... things that really show the site has the involvement to attract good moderator candidates.

Adam Lear

1:22 AM

Could possibly change that to “a year or election happened”. I don’t recall the code off-hand to know if that’d ruin a bunch of stuff. (There were mods appointed on graduated SO before there were elections, for example)

Journeyman Geek

@AdamLear I think it happened on all of the trilogy

Adam Lear

The lines between beta and graduated have certainly blurred a lot over the years.

Catija

@AdamLear Yeah, it would depend on whether the trigger is set based on the election going live or the beta label being removed.

Journeyman Geek

IIRC SU's first batch of mods predated elections or the system behind it.

Catija

But I'm guessing that killing the custom site designs may have mucked with that somewhat, too.

Adam Lear

1:24 AM

(afk again, back later)

Journeyman Geek

2:47 AM

5 more answers for my discussion tag badge ._.

Journeyman Geek

3:06 AM

@ShadowWizard heh, the story behind the "can I delete a bountied question" is interesting

User's got 2 answers, is sitting on a pair of -3 questions, and both answers are at +2

deleting the post is probably a bad/non useful thing for all involved.

Success

3:19 AM

can i haz my bountiez?

Journeyman Geek

@Success lol. I'm sitting on what might end up being an auto bounty ._.

(and possibly deleted by the user if not for the 2 votes, since it isn't really the answer he wants)

Success

actually, that bounty-giver user is a bit suspicious to me...

^ well, when you have 4 "user was removed" negative rep changes due to upvote...

Journeyman Geek

3:40 AM

oh that's a very different problem

Success

3:54 AM

I mod-flagged it. Hopefully my explanation is clear with 13 consecutive upvotes on his questions yesterday...

Success

4:18 AM

This. Is. Nostalgic.

404

A: What can we put in a question template to help people ask better questions?

How about a grab from the good old Microsoft bucket? Click in the text field to activate the assistant. $(document).ready(function(){ $('.wmd-input').one('focus',function() { clippy.load('Clippy', function (agent) { var animations = agent.animations(); $('.js-states')....