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00:00 - 12:0012:00 - 00:00

12:22
@JourneymanGeek so I can complain angainst mods for merging my second account ?
hm.
No
Cause mods can't merge accounts :)
Can I request mods to seperate my account?
hm
No
Probably needs someone who works for SE, and its kinda messy from what I heard
@Fawad That was either automatic or a CM did it
and there's usually a good reason for account mergers
12:24
So your best bet is using the contact us
Did I mention its messy to undo?
But my advice is don't bother unless you enjoy getting lectured on why you don't get to have second accounts :p
so the template is
hm
No
<message>
got it
> Thank you for contacting the Stack Exchange Team. You should receive an email response shortly.
12:33
> Welcome for getting contacted by Fawad. You should sent the email response fastly
@andrew you ate that elephant? 🐘 😱
Not all at once
@Fawad don't get your hopes up it might take months
@Magisch only hours if @oded is involved :D
@Fawad err... dude. DUUUDEEE...
Not cool.
12:37
also, too soon
Adam is the expert for a/c related things
I guess
@Magisch need citation
Please read the transcript from Tim's starred post.
or, if you're on mobile:
Nov 2 at 16:13, by Tim Post
Today was a rough day for us - you'll notice that some folks no longer have diamonds. We had to make some tough decisions and cuts in order to continue to advance toward some pretty critical business goals. While we're usually very open and public about our operations, please allow some privacy for folks that have been affected; the biggest thing for anyone to take away from realizing what happened is that we're taking exceptional care of the folks that had to leave us [1/2]
Tim’s post didn’t mention names hmm
That is deliberate
to protect the privacy of affected people
Nov 3 at 12:43, by Jaydles
All, we need to ask that folks not post lists of employees that appear to have lost their jobs in here. What’s happened isn’t a secret, and we’re willing to talk about the situuation, but a list of people who (presumably) lost their jobs being posted in public isn’t fair to the affected employees. I’m 100% clear that no one here meant any harm - the goal was just clarity, but we need to take the links down.
12:40
@JourneymanGeek Has Mannekenpix reopened his tavern?
neckbeard
@Derpy who?
It means.... are they got fired or relived themself?
The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (Les Douze travaux d'Astérix) is a 1976 Belgian/French animated feature film based on the Asterix comic book series. René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, the creators of the series, wrote the story and directed the film themselves; with co-direction by Pierre Watrin and the screenplay co-written by Pierre Tchernia, a friend of Goscinny and Uderzo. The movie was directed, produced and animated at Goscinny and Uderzo's own animation studio, Studios Idéfix and is the only Asterix animated film that has used the Xerography Process.. At the time the film received polarized reviews...
@OptimusPrime basically "You're awesome but we had to adjust our headcount..."
12:42
> Finish a meal by Mannekenpix, the Belgian. The chef is famous for cooking gigantic meals for the Titans - the task is to eat one of his massive three-course meals "down to the last crumb". Obelix devours <CUT> and an elephant stuffed with olives. This exhausts the kitchen, but disappoints Obelix, who considers it "starters".
Hope thing become good.
waffles
Grr, bluefeet ....
bluefeet ate the waffles
It's confusing. Joe didn't had a diamond previously. and still he don't have one.
Blue waffles? What blue feet and waffles?
12:44
20K appium meta.stackexchange.com/questions/303072/… /cc @Bart @ShadowWizard @JourneymanGeek @TravisJ
Ok. Bye now 👋
@rene wat??
he's complaining that you deleted the post using your diamond and hence wasted his del-request
@OptimusPrime he did not want one.
Hmm... the chat is suspiciously not auto-scrolling...
I hope it's just my imagination
12:59
@AndrewT. or does it have anything to do with your spects
@bluefeet you deleted the MSE post the moment I posted the here ... so I should have said thanks instead of Grr ... sorry about that ... ;)
added Grr as a synonym of Thanks
that should work I guess ...
rene is still miffed that a different blue feeted boobie ate his petals once
@rene Grr works, I ruined all your extra typing.
13:10
I wonder bluefeet
do you get a lot of bird jokes at work
only from you all
I think it's just me at this point
I can't help myself, puns and name jokes are my second nature :/
@Magisch I wonder if @blue uses linux....
The Stack Overflow repo commit log gets a little more interesting every day:
I think SO might have broken @balpha a little
Nah, that's just the daily life of programmers,,,
13:14
many of my commit messages looked like code committed and pushed
future visitors have to check the files changed to get an overview of what happened
13:25
can't stay here for so long
gb cya
\o/
@OptimusPrime had once used "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" as a comment....
I'm vanilla I always write what exactly I changed and who requested/authorized the change
heh. I'd be boring when we used git for system config management management and yanno "Changed this in this file"
I call it covering my behind
So in case someone says I should do something and it wrecks something I can prove who wanted it
13:42
git blame
13:57
I have a .bat file for that
git add .
git commit -m "code committed and pushed"
git push
just double click it and it will do the job for me
14:21
Huh? Welcome back @Sag! /cc @Opt
/me writes batch script to punish Optimus Prime
@bluefeet I was going to say "obviously they don't know about your nickname at your work" ... then I remembered who you work for and that I'm tired and need coffee.
@OptimusPrime on purpose, he tries to mingle.
@Bart blue coffee?
Blue is not the new black, so no
Blue top bar!
Blue top Bart?
14:31
@Fawad it is @6'whitemale's fault, poor @Andrew could not find a matching name.
@Bart blue on top, yellow on bottom? Sounds like some exotic fruit.
Ooh, now I want those
@Bart I'll fight you for them
^ online harassment!!!
I'm but a frail pair of glasses. Any rumours that I'm a 2m tall guy of sizable proportions are lies!!!
14:43
just like rumors of my feet being blue have been greatly exaggerated
you... you don't have blue feet!?
:O
and somewhere right now @shadow is probably wondering if I really have a yellow mane/hair.
15:23
@bluefeet Madam are you aware that you are a bird?
(Joke adapted from the "Sir are you aware that you are a cat" meme)
15:59
A wild @Oded appears o/
@Fawad might take me a while... As soon as I figure out how to do that without access.
@Bart o/
16:34
@ShadowWizard thanks @ShawizDowArd /Cc @ShadowWizard
@Bart don't forget with shoe size 50 i.e. huge feet... ;-)
(wrong glasses)
@Derpy I know it is.
Plot twist: Derpy's actual rl job is delivering mail
even bigger plot twist. Had a stomachache no more than two weeks ago because I ate too many muffins.
17:09
@Derpy sounds real enough... :/
17:22
Anyone around who wants to help me with a SEDE query? I'm trying to see the historical number of answers per post on TWP over time. Back in 2014 they had a notice (unintentionally) added to their questions with more than two existing answers and I'm trying to ascertain if this actually affected the total number of answers per post. I'm guessing this may already exist? workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2899/41738
@Catija Give me a couple minutes and I'll try my hand on it
@Magisch Sure. :D
Ahh, it seems to already exist
If that one is good, I'm not sure that the feature does much?
We're not talking about generally fewer answers, just fewer duplicate answers
Imo
17:30
I don't know that there's a way for SEDE to determine that... I suppose comparing number of deleted answers before and after? But... a lot of dupes probably don't actually get deleted.
Yeah
Btw
Is the flag queue on IPS backed up?
@Magisch There are 12 pending right now. I've been working on other stuff.
Do you have a specific concern? I'm about to go get some lunch.
18:12
@Catija Nah I just flagged something this morning and was wondering
18:36
we turned into a dating site
now gone
also gone
19:24
@rene Well, that's certainly something we hadn't tried before. Maybe they can use the Jobs infrastructure for it.
Does that bring in any money?
eHarmony seems to be making a good amount...
I met my spouse on a dating site... though not one I paid for.
I can think of at least two "SE Couples"... :P
@Catija Did your spouse also met you on that dating site?
@rene Meaning - did I stalk him on a dating site and track him down in real life?
something like that. Or was he looking for someone totally different to date ...
19:28
He contacted me through the site. My profile was pretty much "don't contact me, I'm here for the quizzes".
lol
22
A: How do I phrase an introduction on a dating website?

CatijaI'm Catija. I'm female and I met my (male) spouse on one of these dating sites. We met about 11 years ago and this is what made me respond to his message... and what made me not respond to others. First off, when I joined said dating site, it was because I wanted to take the quizzes. Yeah, I k...

An excerpt from my profile, if you're curious.
Well, he was brave contacting you then ... :D
Yep. He's a good guy.
Good to hear it worked out.
19:40
It has. :D And we have a small adorable person out of it, so it's even better than just two happy people. Though, right now he's got a big bruise on his forehead. :(
19:56
Maybe you should stop hitting him ... oh wait ...
20:07
:( He's climbing a lot right now and hitting his head.
... when he falls.
Well, with boys that is all part of the contract ....
At this age, I don't know that there's a huge difference between boys and girls. They're both pretty adventurous.
That is all good and needed for later.
20:22
At this point, he seems none the worse for wear: i.sstatic.net/JAr8n.jpg
He can always become an understudy for Harry Potter ...
21:20
I'm here.
What did I miss?
@AaronHall Hello Aaron
@Magisch Hello Magisch.
has decided to make a cup of Trader Joe's Organic Ginger Turmeric Herbal Tea
Flagged as spam.
mmm... that's good tea. Now what has everyone been up to?
I noticed they're playing Christmas music pretty hard in Starbucks.
Ah, yet another reason not to go. I have a very strict "no holiday music before Thanksgiving" rule.
To be clear... I love the music but it has to be contained.
21:36
I've been learning me some Haskell. It has a strictness... function?
If you're prim and proper, you'll probably want to avoid clicking that link...
tries being prim and proper... fails
adjusts his posture
22:08
Read up on the Abilene Paradox, but my takeaway: - don't go along to get along - but that doesn't mean to be uncooperative - above all don't suggest anything you don't want. https://twitter.com/ThomasWictor/status/929106103807311872
ok, I've made my impactful comments - but now I must fly. Up up and away! gets up from his desk... but has nowhere to go
22:42
"Answer" linking to the hyphen site: stackoverflow.com/a/47232221/578411
@Catija No offense but that profile description comes across as mildly arrogant
At least from an outside view. I'm not familiar with dating sites so maybe I have a skewed perspective, but I would find that awfully off puttingly self confident
@Magisch It was supposed to.
The point was to get people to not contact me.
Why would you be on a dating site if you didn't want to be contacted?
Did it force you to fill that out and you wanted to look around on your own?
@Magisch It's OKCupid... they have quizzes... I needed to know which Star Wars Character I was.
Oh
Heh
22:47
And which punctuation mark (elipsis).
I've never felt drawn to dating sites. They seem akin to a meat market for me
I couldn't imagine dating someone I haven't known for a long time
I've never used one for the purpose of dating.
@Shog9 Since you asked. I think it would probably be nicer to focus more on engaging the community and community efforts. A lot of people's moderation depends on the perception of how effectively they're being assisted, so I think a lot can be gained there.
I see @JeremyBanks got his diamond (again/back) on SO. Thanks for helping out.
Also a higher focus on delegating some tasks currently only CMs can do to the mods or even the community could work - there is some cruft that has accumulated that could be opened to moderators to deal with in limited capacity.
@Shog9 I think stack could also benefit from something between users and mods. People that you can get to do stuff for you. The community is a vast ressource and has thousands of people willing to take work off your hands, and that willingness is not going to exhaust itself. What I think can be improved upon the most right now is to empower the community to pick up the slack for the more mundane parts of CMship that don't have to have an employee doing it. If y'all can delegate more that
frees up loads of ressources for other things. Ideally you could have the whole meta monitoring thing taken over by trusted regulars and focus on the stuff that really does need CM level access. It's a noble goal to be personable and reachable by the community at large, but it increasingly looks like the ressources and staff planning just doesn't support that at the moment, and that other necessary tasks are suffering from it as a result.
From my limited outside perspective it seems that a lot of tasks are done by CMs and not moderators more as a "because they've always been" rather then because they need to be. One example of that would be vote invalidations. According to current moderator tooling, it doesn't seem like that would need a set of CM eyes for the vast majority of cases.
There seems to be so much ... completly mundane stuff that CMs currently do that could be handled by volunteers instead. There are already so many people who (mostly) know what they're doing that would gladly spend their free time doing the stuff you guys are probably so sick of by now so you could focus on keeping the network together more
23:16
@Magisch mmm, yeah. There's a pitfall when designing tooling to skip the work necessary to make it safe and just limit who can use it. We've made that mistake a lot - giving tools to mods instead of enabling more folks to use 'em, giving tools to CMs instead of enabling mods to use 'em, leaving things dev-only instead of enabling CMs to use 'em...
@Shog9 One thing you could do right now would be to hold an election on MSE
I wager every second a CM spends on mundane MSE flag duty is wasted
@Magisch that... Is rather a lot of work.
None of us handle all that many flags.
Or appoint some people
Does it really need a lot of work to let some people do that?
@Shog9 Yes. Which means that I rarely actually flag anything because the flags usually go ignored.
The most time-consuming thing I had to do flag-wise this past year was move answers off that Sandbox post, and I finally just wrote a script for that.
23:18
I imagine the job can't be very complicated since it's essentially what users are already doing with some more immediate effects
I'm pretty sure the hour or two it would take to figure out some people to appoint would pay off rather quickly
When I see the amount of times employees are pinged here for one MSE thing or another
@Magisch I thioooonk flag handling is semi trivial taking into account the tavern posse. In theory the big timesink is answers.
Yeah
But unless there's serious sphaghetti code going on, I don't see how moderating MSE could be any more difficult like any other site minus the community building
So it sort of boggles that employees still have to lord knows they have better things to do
@Catija oh fine, I handled your flag.
@Shog9 Am I missing something that would make appointing a couple even mse moderators a time consuming process?
@Magisch it's not. There's really not very much to do; tons of folks have gold tag-badges, which covers the bulk of closing. Tons of folks have delete privileges, which takes care of the worst answers. Deleting the odd off-topic question and deleting comments are the bulk of the rest.
23:26
@Shog9 I wasn't talking about NAA flags. It's been a long time since I've bothered to flag much other than spam. Maybe it's different now but I remember some flags from the past that seemed like they took a long time to be handled... but it was a while back.
@Magisch appointing mods on any site is a time-consuming process.
@Shog9 Why is that? Do you guys comission full background checks?
I only look at MSE flags once in a while, but IME most of the work there is actually subjective (especially when it comes to flags on things posted by employees)
Or is it because the formal process has to be adhered to?
I was under the impression you guys literally just choose people based on how you feel about them when they say they want to
@Magisch that's not how elections work on graduated sites, no
23:28
@AdamLear Well we're not talking about an election there
the usual process is:
1. compile a list of candidates.
2. email the first one
3. wait for a response
4. if response is affirmative, go to #7
5. discard name from top of list
6. goto #2
7. appoint mod
@Shog9 I guess #1 is where 99% of the work lies
@Shog9 There's 101 20K+ users on MSE and a good chunk of them are either staff (17) or inactive.
@Magisch ah fair, I misread what you said then
@Magisch and #3 is what burns most of the time
23:29
I would take a guess
That if you decided to pick 3 people from mse at random that you think are up for it
2 would be up for it
We used to email the top n people simultaneously, but that had other issues
MSE is a spcial case since very few people are active on there
highly active, that is
@Shog9 When Robert contacted me about IPS he said that they contact more people than they need, so not everyone asked gets appointed.
@Catija that's for the first set of pro tempore mods (and even then, not always done)
I can't imagine that it'd take much time to get info back from your top choices... provided it wasn't like ... Friday.
23:31
Ah well then
I assumed the process was simpler
still might be worth it in the long run, though
@Magisch for certain values of better things.
@JeremyBanks I see this situation addressed itself but I would have said yes ;)
I imagine coming up with a list of people on MSE wouldn't be terribly difficult, and the #3 part is just waiting, no?
@Catija you'd be surprised
The main regulars of MSE are in here like almost literally every day
23:33
Course some people never read their email.....
You'd probably have better luck pinging these people in chat tbh
some people don't read their email, some people have aggressive spam filters, some people used a throw-away address, some people just don't respond to emails...
I wonder though
@Magisch honestly, this would all be a lot easier if we just contacted folks on-site, via something like the mod-message system
Is there anything that can be done short term on the side of us users to alleviate the amount of work the CMs are buried under
23:35
@Shog9 :( I guess it depended on whether they were expecting the email or not...
@Shog9 Or like a chat system
You know, chat :p
If they were chat regulars, you could ping them in chat. :D
@Shog9 Why not then?
Public pings have other implications, though.
Aren't moderators able to make private rooms?
@AdamLear I hear y'all can make fancy rooms on MSE...
23:36
I know they are on chat.SO
@Catija We can make them anywhere. ;)
@AdamLear Sure, but the regular mods have access to them otherwhere.
Yeah, I guess you could do a private room. Feels like overkill, but maybe not.
(shog basically told me to check me email when I was made SR pro team)
Email's nicer for us because it's just one place we have to search later if we need to.
23:36
@JourneymanGeek So... don't check your email much?
It'd be a shame to lose so many good people in a MSE election due to me having to thin out my competition
devious
@TimStone I don't think an election is in the cards, anyway. :P
I don't envy the CMs having to deal with the incessant bickering from everyone including us right now
@Catija no :p
23:38
@Magisch Who's bickering ;)
Well not intentionally
but when you get like 1000 pings a day everything can seem like bickering, no?
Oh, I only ping them when they're actually around... usually.
I try not to.
@Magisch quite honestly, the work we're buried under right at the moment mostly involves figuring out which work we're gonna drop - that is to say, what sort of things we're just not going to do anymore at all. Or to put it a different way, what we're gonna focus on doing to the exclusion of everything else.
The bit folks can help with is the bit y'all invariably do and always have: disseminating information.
@Shog9 I think reworking handling systems to enable users to do them sounds like its far off
I imagine Dev time is even more costly then CM time right now
Calling it a night here. Y'all have a great Friday and/or weekend.
23:40
you too
good night adam
Have a good one!
@Shog9 The problem is, can you drop anything without serious problems resulting from that?
Like imagine y'all just stopped invalidating votes. That'd be a disaster once word got out
@AdamLear have a drink ...
I understand the concept of "something's got to give"... I... I think we all just want to figure out how to help with the work.
23:44
It's a bit ... frustrating. I have all this time and all these ideas but all I'm doing atm is making more work for mods and CMs with the serial voting thing
@Magisch well, that's ok - as long as you're sticking to recent votes, it does actually help.
I have my doubts about that
If we get backlogged (and... we may be backlogged a bit...) it'll get cleared eventually.
SO didn't collapse before I started doing that, and the effects aren't very obvious
that's sorta the point
23:47
So all I've realisticly done is ruin the day of some mostly indians
And of course piled another couple hours worth of work onto JNat's day
@Magisch poor Bharghav
Honestly, the most trouble I've seen thus far is someone taking one of your scripts and running it on a tiny site, and then thinking they'd uncovered some big plot when, uh, the 20 people who comprised the entire voting and primary answering populace turned out to be voting for each other.
That's... One of the things that's kept me from rolling out some of this tooling more widely: you gotta be really careful when interpreting the results.
It's like yeah I understand voting fraud isn't cool and it'd be PR suicide to not treat it as a big deal but it feels like most of the reaction from the team so far has been more along the lines "Not this guy again with his pointless extra work we can't publicly say really just delays more important work"
I mean, we do totally say that
but not just about you
But not on meta
Because I had to be a complete git and make 3 meta posts about it
Like an absolute tosser
23:51
The blessing and the curse of being involved with a large group of talented, curious people... Is that they tend to be curious and talented even when it's inconvenient.
I would like to do something to use all this effort I've put into understanding the that actually helps and is not just not openly bad enough to get me shafted :p
So you gripe about it and then you go fix things, and secretly you're glad you don't work on stuff that no one uses or cares about enough to break.
Right now, my biggest problem is that I kinda have too many irons on the fire, and I'm being forced to stop lying to myself about getting them all hammered out any day now.
That sucks, but... Ultimately, it'll be a good thing.
And none of us can help with that
Not even a little
Actually...
Asides from stopping wasting your time in chat, I presume :p
23:53
You want a project?
Is it actually useful or something you hand out to stop me from talking to you so you can get something done?
If it's actually useful shoot
67
Q: Let's rescue wayward resource requests! (trial run)

Shog9A few months, back, Stijn raised the issue of old, closed resource-requests: When searching for a library/tool/... with my favourite search engine, there are often results from Stack Overflow. Since these questions are (in theory) closed and/or outdated, they pollute my search results and cau...

That's been on my list for... Ages.
An ad-hoc meta post worked pretty well for, uh, 200 questions. It wouldn't work for 20,000
We need some sort of... Review system, but one that isn't like /review in any way.
Something that'll track multiple opinions on a post, multiple actions, and decide when a given item is actually done.
m0sa dug up this deal, and I had it in my head to try building something on it, but... Time.
This makes me think it could fit really well into just becoming a second smokey clone
fed by a SEDE query...
Metasmoke, I mean
Art even already made a framework like this for my serial voting query..
Get feedback going on that like it does for metasmoke, and slap some thresholds on that
hmm
Here's the critical bits:
- gotta auth folks with SE API to verify they actually know something about the topic being reviewed
- gotta get a decision from at least *n* (3-5) reviewers before pushing a task to the second stage
- allow editing to go hand-in-hand with a decision
- gotta record that decision for auditing purposes
- second stage is deletion or reopening - only allow folks who are privileged to do it
- record final outcome per post, and stop assigning it
- link audit info to the post itself somehow (comment, revision, etc.)
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