Tavern on the Meta

12:00 AM

(of course, at least two of those steps are "submit a ticket to IT if your access is rejected")

@Ano neither one of those was your question

tl;dr: the template chosen does affect the public reason. But moderators cannot readily choose a template based on the public reason, and generally don't try.

Ano

@Shog9 Yes it was, just for the record:

12 hours ago, by Ano

@ShadowWizard I believe the template mods use when sending the mod message that comes with the suspension also dictates the public suspension reason. Whoever suspended that guy probably thought the template attached to the "rule violations" public reason was a better fit, and so the public reason is shown as "rule violations".

Shog9

Also, sufficiently-clever moderators can provide whatever public reason / private message combination they wish to have.

So you'd need someone motivated enough to make more work for themselves just to create a banner that likely no one reads... But not quite motivated enough to just fake the request and pick the banner.

Ano

@Shog9 Yeah, if I were a mod suspending a user, I'd choose one, copy the template, choose another, delete the other template, paste in the one I copied from the first template, and fill it in.

Catija

But it really messes up the diamond notifications.

Shog9

I would just pick whatever template fit and not worry about the rest of it.

Half the time I just delete the template and type "knock it off" anyway

Catija

12:04 AM

I have a google doc with my own templates.

Ano

-1

Q: Does unaccepting violate site rules?

A few days ago, I unaccepted a lot of answers to my questions just to test if I could exceed the reputation cap by accepting more than 100 answers on the next day. But I couldn't ... because of suspension. A moderator decided to put me in the penalty box for three days with the reason "rule viola...

That user took his public reason very literally, @Shog9. But it wasn't a role he violated, just common sense.

Shog9

> Dearest user19857342728,
STAAAAHP!

You know what you did,
-the people who also know you did it

Ano

@Shog9 "Two, there are more suspension reasons than those in the top answer ("rule violations" and "plagiarism"); can that be updated?"

Shog9

no

Ano

@Shog9 Can you explain why not?

Shog9

12:06 AM

I'm lazy and don't see the point

2

Ano

@Shog9 Is the current list of suspension reasons considered private information?

Shog9

it's considered subject to change

Ano

@Shog9 What is the current list?

Shog9

I don't have it handy

Ano

@Shog9 Anyway, what do you think about this? I imagine the mods have already tried to talk to you about the issue here: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/306694/…

Shog9

12:11 AM

There's zero point in trying to maintain a public list. The only people who can use these templates are moderators, who have a list already; they can also write their own and modify the default templates at will - there's neither a guarantee that you'll ever get a default template nor any value in generating complaints from people who get a customized one and can't find fault in the actual wording beyond the fact that a moderator modified it.

Finally... There's a big ol' pile of translations for these, which I'm definitely not trying to list.

(though that does suggest you could get the full list if you wanted to spend lots of time in Transifex)

@Ano I'm not sure that really makes the situation any less weird

Ano

@Shog9 ?

Shog9

The point of a bounty is to exchange reputation for publicity

clearly, a deleted question isn't getting any publicity

Ano

@Shog9 Did you take a look at the comments on the MSO question?

Shog9

the answer retains the reputation because of the rules regarding reputation retention and deletion, which was intentionally chosen to compensate folks losing answers that had been on the site and well-received for a long time

So we kinda need to decide which problem we're trying to solve here

Ano

> Finally, while this issue can be resolved by also excluding bounty rep changes from the statute of limitations for answers, I think it's fair to keep them included because, as I said, such deletions are usually unrelated to the quality of the answers themselves.

Shog9

12:16 AM

52 secs ago, by Shog9

So we kinda need to decide which problem we're trying to solve here

That's really a very important step

Ano

@Shog9 Isn't that quote related?

Shog9

We can play "what arbitrary changes seem reasonable" all day long. Doesn't mean we should go making arbitrary changes.

hichris123

@Shog9 aka people got mad after the great rep recalc if I remember correctly? After a while you realize everything all has a long and twisty history...

Shog9

@hichris123 right. For almost four years, most folks never lost any reputation when something was deleted. Then suddenly, everyone lost reputation when something was deleted, or if something had ever been deleted.

Ano

I would have to agree with @MartijnPieters here.. If bounty is not removed from recipient then it makes no sense to give back to asker — Suraj Rao 11 hours ago

Shog9

12:19 AM

I don't really have a strong feeling about this. Everything connected to bounties is ugly in some way.

If there's a problem, we should figure out which strategy will fix it without causing more problems.

Ano

I would phrase that request as a bug, but since the question I linked at the top is tagged as by design, I phrased it as a feature request.

@Shog9 How will my proposed solution cause more problems?

Adam Lear

Yeah, refunding a completed bounty seems weird.

John Dvorak

@Ano recalc, and thus meta activity

Adam Lear

On the other hand, I hesitate to add any more complexity to an already incredibly complex system.

John Dvorak

I also don't have high hopes the achievements widgets will be useful to tell you where your rep went

Ano

12:22 AM

@JohnDvorak Why not make this not apply retroactively?

Jon Ericson

@AdamLear How complex could it possibly be? ;-P

John Dvorak

Any code change can blow up. Even a capitalization bug fix.

Ano

> Without this, you can have two copies of the same rep that the bounty owner spent initially and awarded, with one copy refunded due to the question being deleted, and the other kept by the awardee due to the statute of limitations.

> There are many reasons why this should be done. First, this has a very high potential for abuse. The bounty rep is now doubled in the system, and the rest is obvious.

Adam Lear

@Ano Absolutely not. We're not adding (more) obscure special cases. And having any rep calc change not apply retroactively basically requires rewriting how rep calcs work altogether.

Catija

There's a reason they don't like fixing pulrality bugs...

Adam Lear

12:23 AM

@Catija The bigger pain point there is translations. :)

Ano

@Catija plurality?

Catija

3

Q: "Added 1 comments" in moderator flag queue

A picture with freehand circle says more than a thousand wordS: (names have been covered to protect the innocent)

bug moderator-tools plurals

John Dvorak

Czech language has a special case for 2-4 items

Ano

@JohnDvorak Hence the freeze on new localized sites

Catija

@AdamLear Yeah, I've seen the ones that alexolut posts ... often.

John Dvorak

12:24 AM

most translation systems have no idea how to handle that

Catija

I don't think there's a Czech version of the site, though?

John Dvorak

Plus, there's a special case within the special case for 2+ items if they form a pair of organs

Ano

@Catija If there were to be

1 min ago, by Ano

@JohnDvorak Hence the freeze on new localized sites

Adam Lear

I have to re-read the code (I looked at it earlier today, actually, and already forgot how half of it works), but IIRC the problem with bounty refunds is a rep calc for a given user does only (and IMO realistically speaking can only) look at the events that happened to that user. There's no sane way to really consider the "well, there was an answer with a bounty here, but that user gets to keep the bounty, so we're not gonna make this change apply here"

John Dvorak

Wait, is there a Czech SO in the making?

Adam Lear

12:26 AM

@JohnDvorak eh, we have that

Catija

@Ano I'm pretty sure that a lot of that's due to issues of moderation...

Adam Lear

Russian has more special cases for numbers

John Dvorak

And of course, genderized numbers

Catija

> When we first announced Stack Exchange 2.0, we didn't have the awkward problem of having only one person in the company that could even read certain sites, much less help guide them through their very critical early stages. We don't consider this an acceptable problem to have for the longer term, but there's a limit to how fast we can hire and grow responsibly.

Ano

@AdamLear Why not just include bounty rep changes in the statute of limitations from questions, as they are for answers?

Catija

12:27 AM

@JohnDvorak No.

Adam Lear

unicode.org/cldr/charts/29/supplemental/…

Ano

There will still be one edge case: if the question does not meet it but the answer does, but this should resolve most such cases.

> Second, it doesn't make sense to me why rep changes from bounties are included in the statute of limitations for answers, yet excluded in the same for questions. It would make sense to have them both included, or both excluded.

Adam Lear

13 mins ago, by Shog9

the answer retains the reputation because of the rules regarding reputation retention and deletion, which was intentionally chosen to compensate folks losing answers that had been on the site and well-received for a long time

On that note, it's way later than I thought it was, so it's time to head home. Later all

Ano

@AdamLear Questions also have the statute of limitations, as pointed out by a mod comment. Why not just include bounty rep changes in that for questions? This would not involve changing anything for answers.

John Dvorak

Oh boy. It seems Czech is quite tame in that respect.

Shog9

12:31 AM

Oh yeah, there's another wrinkle to this too: migrations don't preserve bounties, even if the rules for rep preservation would otherwise apply. So if you delete an old, +3 answer that earned a bounty... The author keeps that bounty amount. If you migrate it, the author loses it (but then whoever offered the bounty gets it back in ~30 days when the stub is deleted)

Anyway, who wants to make this a lot more complex just for the heck of it. Show of hands!

John Dvorak

o/

Catija

But by definition, migrations happen before the 60 day cutoff for rep changes anyway?

Shog9

@Catija no

Ano

@Shog9 I really don't care whose hands the rep falls in, I just don't want a case where two copies of the same rep falls into two different users' hands

Shog9

that's usually how it works, for reasons that should be plenty obvious from the rest of this conversation. But that's not enforced for everyone, nor in every context, nor has it always been true for anyone.

Ano

12:33 AM

@Shog9 Also, any migration performed after 60 days would be by an employee

John Dvorak

Proposal: reimplement reputation on top of a cryptocurrency system

Shog9

I mean, I migrated a whole pile of old questions from MTV to SFF just yesterday.

Catija

@Shog9 you did... but regular users and mods can't...

Shog9

And there were... What, 5-6 years of Stack Overflow <-> [other] migrations before that rule was put in place

Catija

But those are pretty damn rare now.

Ano

12:35 AM

@Catija Yep, that's what I'm saying.

Catija

@Ano Your entire request is pretty rare... so ...

Ano

@Catija Did you read the MSO post and its comments?

31

Q: How a user received 1000 reputation for a removed post?

I see a user who scored 1020 reputation in this week, so when checked his reputation tab I see there is a strange reputation entry in that. He received +1000 for a removed post. I thought he may offered 1000 reputation bounty for a post, due to the post was removed the reputation back to the us...

support reputation

8 mins ago, by Ano

> Second, it doesn't make sense to me why rep changes from bounties are included in the statute of limitations for answers, yet excluded in the same for questions. It would make sense to have them both included, or both excluded.

@Shog9 Can you also clearly explain to me and Martijn Pieters why refunding the bounty on deletion is an intentional and by-design feature?

Catija

@Ano Doesn't really make it not rare?

Ano

@Catija Now that I've publicly reported the flaw, people are going to start abusing it.

Shog9

@Ano again, I don't feel strongly about this. But I also don't particularly want to screw with it unless it fixes a concrete problem

Catija

12:39 AM

@Ano By putting bounties on questions, awarding them, waiting 60 days and convincing the community to somehow delete them?

Shog9

I mean, there's an easy solution, right? Don't delete questions that had bounties.

Catija

How is that abusable?

user315433

A great thing about Meta is getting direct answers from those running the sites.

user315433

It's a good question, Brent. — Community ♦ Jan 19 at 22:36

user315433

But who is Brent? A pop culture reference I'm missing?

Shog9

12:40 AM

They're good references, Bront

Ano

@Catija Yep, and then you can award that duplicate rep back to yourself

@Shog9 In addition to explaining the above, it would be very nice if you commented on my question and the MSO one.

Catija

@Ano That's just crazy. How do you convince a community to delete something that they didn't close/delete before the bounty was posted or in the 60 days after it?

Ano

@Catija Ask a mildly off-topic question about an obscure topic. Once the bounty is in place, it cannot be close-voted. After the bounty and the 60-day threshold of age expires, VTC or RC flag the question, using one of your socks to comment why it's off-topic, and others will follow on.

On SO you could use a sock to post a request onto SOCVR, then argue it should be deleted

Shog9

@Ano I'll think about it. Kinda want to hear from Adam as to whether this is even intended behavior first.

As I see it, there are pitfalls no matter how we handle this.

Ano

@Shog9 You could also ask Nick Craver; he was the one who tagged it as by design.

Shog9

12:44 AM

I could ask lots of people. I did ask Adam

Ano

@Shog9 Two is not lots.

Shog9

3 is lots. 4 is many

Ano

41 secs ago, by Ano

@Shog9 Two is not lots.

Catija

Yes... because there are only two devs in the entire staff at SO...

Ano

@Catija No, it's because "he was the one who tagged it as by design".

Shog9

12:47 AM

Nick & Adam just finished a multi-month project involving tons of work on the reputation system. I figure they're probably the most familiar with that logic right now.

I have confidence this is in good hands and plenty to keep me busy in the meantime.

Catija

@Ano That doesn't mean that he's the only one who knows what's going on.

Shog9

We're done talking about this particular matter for the evening, in case that wasn't clear BTW.

Ano

1 min ago, by Shog9

Nick & Adam just finished a multi-month project involving tons of work on the reputation system. I figure they're probably the most familiar with that logic right now.

@Shog9 I understood that. That deleted message was just my pressing the wrong key.

@Shog9 But yeah, it would be very nice if you commented on my post and the MSO one to say that you are verifying it with them.

Ano

1:04 AM

5

Q: Truncating post title in search results?

What is the reason to truncate the post title in the search results? Seems there is a bug in width calculation to fit title into single line. But this is just my speculation. Hence not tagged as bug yet.

support search

@Shog9 Can you explain this, please?

user168476

Why not just....wait for an answer? Isn't that why we have MSE?

5

user168476

(I know I'm not in here often, but I just popped in and it seems like you're trying to circumvent a system that is in place and works for a reason....)

user168476

(mind you, like I said, long time lurker first time caller so maybe I'm missing some sort of secret Bat signal allowance or some such)

Mazura

1:42 AM

Did the user who was awarded the bounties lose 1k?

Ano

@Mazura No; the two users who were each awarded 500 rep got to keep it.

user315433

2:52 AM

10 meta questions vs 40 main site questions: clearly, Constructed Languages is an inside job (a proposal built around existing SE users).

Shog9

OTOH, constructed languages are pretty meta to start with

I have to assume that they'll eventually devise their own language purely for use on meta, and the main site will become then a place to ask questions about how to ask your question on meta about a problem you had with your original question on main.

Catija

3:09 AM

I think there's too many layers of meta there for me to brain tonight.

user315433

3:36 AM

Or they will become a Star Trek fan club.

user315433

Maybe LOTR too.

Catija

It's like the war between the Sci-Fi and Fantasy people... who can fill the site with more content, sooner.

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