sitting here with jeans and a tshirt and a cotton jacket

@user5389107 nothing wrong with that

If not perhaps a little cold. I'd be cold in this office if I wore that

lol

I had one job where I had a director who insisted on long sleeves...

and I was running between 3 buildings so... that made no sense

Hi

Hi!

why the new teams doesn't have Meta?

Perhaps a good question for MSO...

lol, in the great 2003 aircon disaster, we were calling the lab I worked in 'Death Valley' and a thermograph recorded 48C. The servers etc. lived, but developers were wiltiing badly. Even the bosses were in shorts and t's :)

I thought to ask here as it might be silly question

Hope any @mod will answer

@Mr_Green in Charcoal the teams site is itself a Meta.

or you could add (at last!) a meta tag

nah I do want separate sites / thing for Technical and meta(related to office) stuff

@hey I can't do that on Stackoverflow. it has its own meta. I want the same for my enterprise

check with the support I guess

I wish I had an enterprise :(.

I'm afraid the answer is to have another Teams. Otherwise, the argument between technical (main) and company (meta) could be expanded to bigger demand, like each department (finance? marketing? hr?). If it's public for all employees, then tagging system should be sufficient.

And I'm honestly still not sure the scope of SOfT. Is it only for technical? Is it even okay for non-technical e.g. financial/HR related?

Think that depends on the decision by the team head or organisation

I wouldn't be surprised if the SE dev team did push for "obviously you'll have to buy two separate instances of this product from us"

probably the enterprise thing has "contact sales" instead of the price stackoverflow.com/pricing

@JohnDvorak Then the purpose of teams will be lost. I mean there will be duplicate teams

I don't think so. After looking that pricing page once again, I see Teams as an entry level for Enterprise when you only need a single Q&A. But if you need 2 or more, you have to choose between multiple independent Teams (e.g. Acme for IT, Acme for HR) or choose (migrate to?) Enterprise instead.

5$ per user per month seems rather expensive

per namespace

For a company, it seems cheap

Here we get good coffee for x/20 price

5$ per coffee seems very expensive

@JohnDvorak * Teams start at $10 per month and include your first 10 users. Additional users are $5/month billed annually or $6 billed monthly.

what's the difference? the serving people handsome.. that's it

So, two teams at ten people each cost $10, but one team at twenty people costs $60?

I don't know.. I think it is just brand that values

Jan, that is my point. If the stackexchange sites have meta why not the teams?

My team is single, I don't want to purchase the same twice.

So... how many companies will wind up with an elite team able to participate in their internal Q&A powered by SE plus an elaborate process (six to eight weeks of paperwork) for getting pleb employees' questions onto that site?

Because then you have 2 Q&A sites at a price of 1?

I won't consider meta as separate one at all

IMO, "Meta" in Teams is meaningless, because that's just a label, not a purpose. Other Teams can even use Meta for everything else except meta discussion.

stackoverflow.com/c/xyz and meta.stackoverflow.com/c/xyz

A team can have meta. Like in my case, we are organizing indoor games

we can post the results and stuff like that

So, Stack Exchange makes five bucks per head but they're stingy for ten bucks per company?

meta won't be much active as the main site.

it is too much to purchase another teams to fulfill meta.. just too much :)

That's why, why don't facilitate the tagging system? Use meta, or even better... fun or team-building or... you get the idea. You're free to "abuse" the tagging system on your own Q&A site!

I'm wondering if Stack Exchange would ever have 150*2 sites if they had to shell out 5$ per month per viewer per site.

... and promoted being nice to newbies as much as they do now.

They could have 1 ring site to rule them all instead...

Let's just increase the tag limit from five to six and call it a day :-P

we should do the same on Stackexhange sites :P

I agree we can just add a meta tag.. but my question is if stackoverflow has meta why not for teams? (Obviously, I am paying I want it all)

ok, lets call it a day.. I have lots of work :(

@Mr_Green SO volunteers are huge compared what a team size would be.

do you think a separate Meta site would even be needed in Teams?

yes

I have explained my reasoning from my point of view ("meta" is just a label -> you get 2 Q&A sites for 1 product), but I guess you disagree with me... (it's fine, I agree to disagree)

@JohnDvorak then post an FR on MSO plzzz

I'm sorry, but that's simply not something that I do

@SurajRao yes, ofcourse. Meta isn't related to huge at all. Things get automatically huge as the time passes.

@Mr_Green fair enough I guess I didnt find it necessary till now in Charcoal

charcoal?

@JohnDvorak ¯_(ツ)_/¯

@Mr_Green CHQ

I didn't get that..

btw, will we have chat rooms?

omg, are we being shown a villa and being offered a hut?

Its a team of volunteers for tracking and flagging spam posts in SE sites

^ what that has to do with my concern?

Not just offered a hut, but you have to pay extra for wall sockets

@Mr_Green Ohk..sorry if I wasnt being clear. We are using teams since private alpha for Charcoal

I am expecting the teams is private instance of Stackoverflow site. if it isn't then I am dissapointed.

@SurajRao great. got it!

Better be disappointed sooner than later: Teams is only a private Q&A portion of SO

yes, I am dissapointed :(

Business idea: create a same site as stackoverflow and offer the whole private instance for same money

become rich!!

In before Stack Exchange wonders why nobody uses Teams even though they showed interest earlier.

I think stackoverflow is providing enterprise edition from long ago

Not very long

I think they were if we contacted them personally

@Mr_Green there have been two mostly-different products offered under the "Stack Overflow Enterprise" name. The first one was a fork of the Stack Exchange 1.0 codebase (think: Area51) and was sold and supported by Fog Creek if you contacted us and we didn't manage to talk you out of it.

...we tried pretty hard to talk you out of it...

The current version is essentially the same codebase that is live on Stack Overflow, with the addition of some SSO and user-management features

It's pretty nice. And we don't try nearly as hard to talk people out of buying it.

Hey @Shog9 don't you think if the teams has chat and meta support that would be great?

I donno; I kinda doubt it.

Intra-company chat is a dodgy thing in any case, and Slack seems to have tied up the market for it pretty well

Given Teams are aimed at ~10-50 user setups, a meta site is overkill

Think... The smallest of the small Stack Exchange sites, and consider how less complicated they'd be if we eschewed separate metas for a "meta" tag on the main site.

if you get 1 question a day and 1 meta-question a week, you're not exactly drowning in noise

(we actually talked about doing this for small SE sites years ago, and then... Couldn't. But it's still a good idea.)

Heck... Channels (the functionality on which the Teams product is built) would be a better solution than our current separate meta sites for most SE sites

understood. Somehow I felt teams is whole instance of Stackoverflow, which I thought would be great, I was wrong.

some shared tags, mixed search results, separate rep...

hey do those have repution? lol

If there was a way to convert meta sites into channels, I think meta would work a lot better on most sites

if there is rep then high rep user on that team will become rockstar.

We modeled per-site metas on MSE (which at the time was MSO, the shared trilogy meta) - which got a LOT of traffic. But most sites only need a little bit of meta discussion.

@Mr_Green it will be interesting to see the extent to which rep on teams is a help or a hindrance

You could have a way to flag a question as a meta question and set it apart with a different background color and an easy way to find them all... it'd be like a special tag ... a literal "Meta" tag. :D

It wouldn't require a different section of the site, the way we do with child metas, but they'd get some special treatment.

... which is, I guess, what you already said... though, I couldn't imagine doing it on an actual site. I think it'd be really confusing for users who just walked in off the internet.

In theory you could even do fancy stuff like have per-tag metas just by sharing a tag with questions in the meta channel.

That would be really, really nice on SO

How would a per-tag meta differ from, say... a tag wiki?

Could there be a "discussion" page - like a wiki talk page on the tag wiki to discuss the usage of the tag?

@Shog9 were you involved in the drafting of that blog post?

I don't know whether to take your engagement with twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/992071592166371330 as an indication that it's an idea you're considering, @TimPost, but... for goodness' sake don't ban everyone that doesn't express agreement for some ideological document y'all come up with, especially if it's a load of vague feminism devoid of specific requirements like Jay's original blog post was.

@canon no. Why?

@Shog9 I'm curious whether you agree with it, as someone on the front-lines...

I agree with things in it.

hah

I mean... This is probably one of the shorter pieces that Jay has written, but even so there's a lot to unpack

I'm still waiting pretty anxiously to see what this crackdown on "unkind" comments is going to look like

I've been commenting here and there on meta as various bits come up. The false dichotomy thing, the greetings thing, the women thing, etc.

@MarkAmery I was thinking out loud on twitter.

@MarkAmery have you not been in this room for the past few days?

No - I've dropped in, but I'm not much of a chat user

We do need to put the be nice policy more out front when people sign up, and I think we need to call it more officially a code of conduct. That's definitely true.

Folks have been doing a review of comments across Stack Overflow

lotta cruft

But I was pointing out to April that using radio buttons alienated any reason someone might click "no" and that would be a waste.

What standard are they applying, @Shog9? What flags are they using?

I still haven't seen a definition of "unkind" and how it differs from the standard or "rude or abusive" that we used to apply

"I guess that might be different where you're from." -- Kinda unkind, depending on the context.

But nothing explicitly rude about it, or abusive.

@MarkAmery their own

here's an example: chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89?m=6923090#6923090

A large fraction of my total contribution to Stack Overflow is pointing out errors in answers, frequently with explicitly -1s in the comments, and essentially never in what April Wensel would consider to be a "kind" tone, and I worry about hundreds of hours of work I've done going up in smoke

@MarkAmery Nah, I wouldn't worry about that.

I really hate -1s in comments. Pointing out errors in answers sounds useful though.

I know you do, Shog - and I disagree with you, as I've said before on Meta, and used the leeway that the limited -1 ban allows to go against your wishes as much as possible

A well placed -1 could save someone else from being accused of downvoting :P

"Line 13 is just plain wrong, you need to deliberately dereference there, type-punning breaks strict platforms" -- nothing wrong there. Not rude. Not condescending. "Only an idiot would dereference a type-punned pointer and expect it to work on strict platforms" -- condescending asshat answer.

Hence, being worried that they might be one of the things getting targeted as "unkind"

But sometimes people say "idiot" in a combination of words that don't quite fit "rude", but hurt just as much.

I think that letting a downvoted user know what motivated the downvote is the respectful thing to do, and if I'm commenting to point out an error that it's useful to have noted anyway, then I throw in the -1

All we're asking is be aware of people's feelings as much as you're aware of their mistakes.

"unkind"? Not "unkind"?

I'm worried how many mistakes I will be allowed to make...

What's wrong with holding people to the same ruthless, withering standard to which we hold ourselves? :P

@JohnDvorak at the point where you grant the author the right to contest how others vote, you've already lost.

Them not having the right to doesn't mean they won't, and I'm not giving it to them anyways

@MarkAmery Could you have said 'incorrect' instead of 'nonsense' and expressed the same thing?

@MarkAmery -1 this is nonsense

@TimPost no, I don't think that'd express the same thing

"incorrect" => there is a factual error here

What value does the word nonsense bring that incorrect wouldn't?

brb, upvoting Mark's comment

"nonsense" => there is nothing at all factually correct here

the distinction between the two matters

that's too strong to ever be true

okay, I'm being hyperbolic

If there's nothing at all factually correct there, why not just say that.

^^^

@Shog9 because I think that's both more verbose than and either as rude as or ruder than "nonsense"?

Because if he'd said, "There's nothing at all factually correct here", you'd probably say, "did you really need to say, 'at all?'"

"There is nothing factually correct" makes me feel like I'm being addressed as a programmer. "This is nonsense" makes me feel like i'm being addressed as a nursery school child.

it's not as rude, no

Where does it end?

@MarkAmery nonsense is ambiguous. If every fact expressed in an answer is incorrect, then saying so is clear and accurate.

it sounds like I'm going out of my way to emphasise and rub their nose into how wrong their answer is

@MarkAmery that's the opposite of what is actually the case

In your words... nonsense

:)

Exactly, it's like pushing a button. Clicking downvote harder doesn't reinforce your point any better than saying words like 'nonsense'. It just makes people (and human interface devices) feel bad.

these sort of disagreements about what is or isn't polite are exactly why I don't like having strict politeness standards

see also the current conversations about canned comments on Meta

I don't think human interface devices have any emotions

e.g. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365929/… and my reply to it

we can more or less agree on what egregiously rude content looks like

@MarkAmery I think that comment just gave me diabetes. Jesus.

haha

exactly

But @MarkAmery Honestly, if your example was the worst that people would see, I'd say we were doing a pretty damn good job of keeping things civil and welcoming. It wasn't 'nonsense' that provoked us into writing that post.

Right, but is it or is it not comfortably within the boundaries of what our new standard of "kindness" should permit to exist on the site, as you personally understand them?

Nobody's really tried to articulate what that standard is yet

Only that there will be a one-strike policy against chatrooms

hey don't call that nonsense, that was unnecessary! well okay but it's still rubbish hey don't call that rubbish, that was unnecessary! stop calling my rubbish unnecessary, what do you know about my rubbish? NONSENSE, this isn't about your rubbish and isn't necessary at all well now we agree on something, was that really necessary?

^^^ If that was the worst of it, we wouldn't be so concerned.

Well, anything's more palatable if it devolves into a Monty Python skit.

with respect, that's still not an answer to my question, Tim

Needz moar parrots.

if muggings were the worst crimes in Gotham City, its residents wouldn't be so concerned

that's not the same as "muggings are permitted and will not be punished"

I read that as mugglings...

But when we get stuff like "stupid indian scum!" and "wow ur hot where u live?" .... and even when that vanishes in 5 minutes or less, it's still visible to a vast quantity of people for a short time. So we need to look at the culture.

right, but "stupid Indian scum!" was always forbidden and deleteable by the old standard as "rude"

^

there is presumably a new class of comments that are not "rude" but are "unkind" that will now be purged

How about ... just try to not be overly antagonistic or critical?

@MarkAmery but not always actually deleted

That's all we're asking.

There are a lot of "always forbidden" comments that are now ~5-10 years old and still sitting on the site.

unless "unkind" is a synonym for rude and we're just meant to mop up existing rude comments and emphasise how much we don't like them?

Wait, we can't be critical? or antagonistically critical?

@MarkAmery It's another word to help people identify things that will likely hurt other people.

closing questions will likely hurt other people

Kind: I want the person to know that what they wrote is incorrect, and I want that experience to be at least not bad for them.

So... Here's my take.

- Most of us struggle to express criticism in a way that is going to be palatable to the person being criticized much less 3rd-party readers. That's something we can all probably learn to get better at, but it ain't going to be like flipping a light switch, and there's a grey area on most of it big enough to hide an elephant. The best we can do is probably going to be providing learning material for critics and... just not keeping comments around forever.

Unkind: The most important thing I do today is tell that person how wrong their answer is

it is hard not to be antagonistic and critical towards a post that I think is useless and completely wrong, Tim. Quibbling over the right tone ultimately doesn't change the fact that being told that your work is bad is upsetting, whether it's true or false, no matter what the tone is. It upsets me when I'm on the receiving end. It's tempeting to blame tone and think the critic is being a dick; the mass of different standards of politeness means you can always make that argument

I've been wondering if there's some sentiment that flagging comments is ineffective. I had a brief interchange with someone on Twitter last night where they were aware of flagging but seemed to think that the end result was negligible, even if the comment was deleted because the moderators may not see the flag, particularly in the case of questions being deleted before the flags were handled.

@Shog9 "not keeping comments around forever" - I think there are a lot of comments that it's important to keep around forever. Comments are often the only reasonable way to point out that answers are wrong, and that is information that should be preserved

@MarkAmery That sounds like a better solution for wrong answers is needed, not the comment saying it's wrong.

I don't flag comments either, but then again I don't get to see the kind of comments Tim uses as an example of the appalling stuff that supposedly needs to get deleted faster.

\o

@Catija The comments have always worked fine. It's only now that we face the prospect of a Wensellian purge of them that I'm worried

~~~~~~\o/~~~~~~~~

yeah @JohnDvorak I think I've literally never seen a comment of that kind except via Meta

probably helps that I basically never use the front page

same here

I find questions through Google and that's it

If someone feels that the wording of a comment is not nice, they can always replace it with their own. Getting rid of a problematic comment doesn't mean the information it contains can't be replaced.

but will it?

and then we can go around in circles rewriting comments over and over according to our own personal standards of politeness, @Catija, quite possibly losing nuance and accuracy along the way. Or just lose the comment when someone flags it without bothering to replace it, which seems more likely.

@MarkAmery this ties into a huge set of concerns regarding not just wrong answers but obsolete, insecure or otherwise-harmful solutions. Which we know from experience and at least one formal study aren't effectively mitigated by comments pointing out the problem.

@MarkAmery I've long thought comments don't work fine:

I doubt that mods will go around rewriting slightly unkind comments on behalf of their posters - and if they go around deleting them, we'll lose useful information

The mods don't have to do all the work... the person who flagged the comment can easily add the same information in kinder wording and explain that in the flag.

@Shog9 It's good to know that SE is aware of the issue.

That's fair, @Shog9 - and I'd love to see more effective tooling for addressing bad answers. It just definitely shouldn't come at the price of putting the torch to the existing knowledge we've accumulated in the comments.

Plenty of answers get critical errors pointed out years after they're posted; any policy that involves those comments disappearing may mean waiting years again to rediscover the destroyed knowledge

@MarkAmery The solution to that has already been proposed to you, in an example you chose yourself.

@Catija that raises an issue of authorship. Also, reposting someone's content before it's gone will likely be perceived as hostile (hey everyone, foo's comment is unkind and will get deleted)

@Catija sorry, I'm probably being dense, but I don't understand what you meant by your last comment

Both Shog and Tim pointed out that "This is nonsense" is unnecessary in that comment and can be construed as rude.

@MarkAmery one of the ideas that's been suggested in the past is a sort of "talk" system akin to what's on Wikipedia - a way to document and discuss errata "out of band" with an eye toward eventual correction or at least inline annotation. The big advantage of this, IMHO, is that it gets rid of the false sense of being "done" when a problem is identified in a comment.

@Shog9 not all bad answers warrant correction

@MarkAmery not all bad answers warrant more than a downvote or deletion.

@Catija Do you want us to repost the comment with a minor modification and then custom-flag it?

often they're rotten to their core and "correction" would just mean rewriting them to be the same as another, better answer

right, but do we really want deletion to become the remedy for technical inaccuracies, @Shog9?

I start to think that someday SE will need to add a flag for comment, like insult, as rude leave too much place to interpretation. maybe CM could monitor that flag

that's what voting is for

sorry @yagmoth555 wasn't replying to you

hehe, np :)

@Catija I'm not sure how that's relevant to Mark's question.

@MarkAmery if the answer is useful as a demonstration of what not to do, then keeping it around is probably worthwhile. Otherwise... There are infinite non-solutions to any problem; do we need to enumerate them for eternity?

My favorite approach has always been an answer that explains why the solution presented in a previous answer is seductive but harmful. And, ideally, ranks higher than the cited answer.

no, I don't think "we" need to - but "we" are not a single consciousness. An individual posts an answer that is flat out wrong. I downvote it and point out the error. Some other people downvote. The author sticks by it, and some people upvote the answer because, though unfixably flawed, it works for them in their special case. What now?

@canon The solution to having comments deleted is to make an effort to phrase them in ways that others won't consider rude.

@MarkAmery that happens now. With some regularity.

I'm well aware, @Shog9

but I think we handle it in the right way

@MarkAmery why?

We should assume that a significant number of readers do not read comments (or even all of the answers for that matter).

@Shog9 that doesn't sound like it would pass as a separate answer but rather qualify as a NAA

my critical comment remains visible and new readers can see it, but I and those who agree with my don't have the power to overrule the other side and totally purge content that we believe is incorrect

@Catija Perhaps you mean, in a way you hope nobody, anywhere, will consider rude -ever. Because if a comment gets flagged, regardless of that flag's validity, the comment is almost always removed... because it's just easier from a moderation standpoint.

the balance of votes hopefully brings the right answers to the top

@JohnDvorak to qualify as an answer, it would need to provide a viable solution as well.

and nobody has to go to Meta and fight over how some dick called Mark Amery who didn't understand their brilliant answer went and deleted it

@Shog9 what if I'm unable to provide an alternative?

@canon I don't have domain experience on SO, but I doubt that's the case.

@MarkAmery you used the d-word! You aren't kind enough to yourself!

@JohnDvorak then there's an extremely good chance most readers will use the solution presented over your objections anyway

@JohnDvorak I'll go and flog myself in punishment for my self-flagellation

@Catija You're entitled to your doubts; I encourage skepticism.

@Shog9 I think "why do we need to keep around answers that are wrong" is a question rather similar to "what's the point of freedom of speech for wrong ideas; why don't we only allow free expression of ideas that are right"

it's because people disagree, and keeping contentious answers visible is necessary for that disagreement to play out

@canon I'm doubtful because that's not how I moderate... though we have stricter rules for comments on the site I mod than SO does.

Found the paper I was thinking about earlier: saschafahl.de/papers/stackoverflow2017.pdf

@JonEricson sorry, I just finally got round to reading your post after being distracted by the back-and-forth here. I think that, for my use case (commenting on why answers are wrong) the problem is with this :_"If you really want to preserve some information, be sure to put it into the body of a post."_

@Shog9 OK, wat.

if my issue is that an answer is completely wrong, and I comment to demonstrate that... then I still can't reasonably edit that information into the answer

@MarkAmery then we should find a solution to the need for discussion and disagreement that works better than comments.

@JonEricson The only way I could do that is to just put a disclaimer at the top saying "BTW this answer is totally wrong for [reasons], completely disregard what follows"

@Shog9 I'd support this search

which then the answerer would be entirely entitled to revert

@MarkAmery which would be rolled back as defacement... or rejected outright if you didn't have the rep to edit without queue-validation.

@canon exactly

@MarkAmery Or, write another answer and downvote the bad one. (Which works for most questions that don't have a lot of views or votes.)

I'd be really interested in a discussion about building out tools for this if I wasn't pretty certain it would just sit around undeveloped for years.

@Shog9 I'd support it too - with the caveats that 1) I think comments still do a decent job and are dramatically better than nothing, and 2) even if we do build a better system, we should absolutely not destroy the old information in the comments

@JonEricson which leaves us with no means to fix the answers that do matter

@MarkAmery +2

The problem with comments is that they have no single, well-defined or well-supported purpose. They literally exist to keep stuff out of answers - they were created for that specific goal; that they're used as a way of suggesting improvements, pointing out errors, critiquing solutions, soapbox preaching to casual readers and tangential discussions... Means it is almost impossible to fix problems with any one use without making them less suitable for another.

You can just instead "This answer has flaws like [reasons], consider following [another answer] instead"

Which in turn means that in order to fix anything, we probably need to develop more specialized systems.

@JonEricson stackoverflow.com/q/12083605/1709587 has 29 answers. All except mine are wrong, and a while back I went through and commented to point out the errors in every single one of them. Should I include 28 addendums to my answer?

And then keep them up to date as answers get deleted?

@Shog9 has that discussion already been started somewhere?

@canon repeatedly.

Thought as much.

a lot of us got kinda burned out on it TBH...

but hey, maybe this time we can actually do something

With your last few comments Shog, btw

...if you're about to point out how I'm often rude in my own comments... Yeah, I know. I try to do better. I'm bad at it.

oops sorry, I meant to write "I agree" at the start there

not sure where it went

oh. Well, good. As it should be ;-P

I'm entertained by where you thought I was going, though :)

If there were to be some kind of new "disagreement system", the trick would be to provide a way of migrating comments to it

@MarkAmery It's hard for me to see what's wrong there. Yours is the top voted and accepted answer. (It's also very detailed.) Most people won't ever read the others, much less the comments.

@Shog9 that way you could gradually, with human input, eliminate one comment use case without losing information

Defense mechanism... he gets called mean a lot. :P

I'm 100% convinced the current code of conduct needs zero change - but if you find a way to make it better enforced, I'm all ears. The second issue - comments aren't a good way to deal with incorrect answers - I'm all ears too.

Just passing by... some of us have been surfing on short comment containing keyword SEDE query and 100 recent comments on SO (the query was done just now, I haven't flagged any comments for demonstration purpose)

@JonEricson the problem is that precisely because my answer is long-as-fuck ("very detailed" in a nice way to say that, thanks), lots of people will think "wow, this is long and ugly" and skip by it for a more succinct solution