Honnestly I like the commenting system on SE, I talk a lot about their moderation on MSE, but with the upvote and such I think they do their job (comment), it's just that when it come to moderate, all mods got their own view of it, of what to do in abuse, etc.. I cant even get an answer on how much warning a user get if he abuse, and especially if it's a high rep user versus a lowrep user that abuse.
and they do - because those wrong answers have upvotes
so I want to be able to slap a warning on each and every one of them pointing out specifically what is wrong with it, to warn those people hoping for a neater answer than mine
@MarkAmery Robert Cartaino has suggested in the past a system which I consider close to ideal: essentially, comments "age out" into a sort of linked chat or "talk page" where they can still be discussed but are no longer pinned under the post itself. Recent or highly-voted comments persist a bit longer on the page, but eventually age out too.
In place of where comments sit now, you end up with a sort of abbreviated timeline: recent comments, edits, etc. are summarized in reverse-chronological order as a quick guide to "what's going on with the post"
(this would also have the handy side-effect of allowing post authors to more readily see what folks are doing when they edit)
Remember again, it's extremely likely that most readers do not read comments, even if they would benefit from doing so. The fact that some of them are currently displayed below the post provides at best a false sense of security, of having done as much as could be done to address the problem.
I even see answer in comment, and why people do that, because it's lazyness to not write a full feaatured answer. Moving them will make good info to be lost
In addition to Robert's suggestion, I'm thinking of gold-tag badger able to pin a comment on tagged question. Not sure about the possible abuse/other bad consequences
Y'all may disagree, but... I don't think comments are actually solving these problems right now. It just feels like they are, because the relative handful of people who know to look for them can find the errata without much trouble.
@MarkAmery yeah, me too. I also read the Wikipedia talk pages. You think either of us are typical of the average reader or even the average Stack Overflow user?
pointing out flaws to other users that make them realise they should downvote instead of upvoting is valuable in terms of its impact on what answers rise up
BTW, did I ever get an answer on whether the staff think that my "nonsense" comment is discourteous enough to warrant deletion or did I get distracted and stop pressing for one? :P
(I don't think it'd be ideal because it moves the key piece of information - that having multiple primary_key columns was not the cause of the bug being asked about in the question - to the end of the comment, where previously it was implied by the first four words)
which is a totally unfair reason for me to criticise your choice because you can't possibly know that out of context
I guess my second question, @Shog9, is whether prior to the great kindness project you would've handled that hypothetical flag on my comment differently
oh man, talking about mods editing comments reminded me of this extremely relevant Meta post of mine on UX a couple of years ago: ux.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3130/47336
@MarkAmery remains to be seen. The problem has never really been policy, but tooling and organization to communicate and enforce policy. Comment moderation has been a shit-show for years and we've been mostly powerless to improve it.
well, I'm glad to have many of my fears mostly alleviated. I'll sleep better tonight. (My final comment at meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366969/… was not hyperbole.)
When should moderators edit comments?
Almost never. Comments have no publicly visible revision history (the changes are logged in case of abuse, but these are only visible to moderators). Therefore, it is critical that moderator edits do not misrepresent the author's meaning or intentions. Edits...
I feel particularly dickish now about my comment to Tim at meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665/… now that I know that the great purge of critical comments from the site that I was afraid of is... in fact completely nonexistent, and never intended in the first place
Like, I realised at the time after my frustration cooled off slightly that it wasn't exactly a charitable, productive comment
If it's not aware already though, @Taryn @Shog9 and @TimPost despite my (hopefully constructive) protests, I still hold you all in very high regards and appreciate what you do.
Expanding personal comment search to include comments contaning the words: nonsense, inappropriate, improper, wrong, terrible, horrible, cancer, disaster, and disastrous...
So, Forbes writes a lot on conflict resolution. Some of their articles give a decent amount of advice that would really work well at making canned comments, or comments regarding "your question sux kthxbai", into a more constructive and less combative situation.
@MarkAmery oh, this won't do at all. Buddy, we got your back - me & @Tim will circle up first thing next week & figure out a plan for a Great Comment Purge.
A major problem with comments on questions that are going to be removed is that there isn't much explanation as to how the issue raised relates to what is important to Stack Overflow.
@TravisJ @TravisJ these seem to either 1) require padding a comment with pleasantries (often not possible - we're space-constrained) or would be disingenuous and fail to achieve the purpose of the criticism (if I comment to point out an answer is wrong, it's not a "yes, but" situation and I probably want to be clear to other readers that on net I don't agree with the poster)
@Shog9 C++ is a dark, arcane, Lovecraftian place to operate. Those made to toil in the shadow of its edifice shuffle about in disheveled rage and confusion... lashing out irrationally. There is no patience. There is no decorum. There is only the darting of terrified eyes and howling madness.
While I understand the frustration of dealing with that type of question, leaving a comment there should at least explain why proper tags are important, and how that factors into Stack Overflow's goal.
@MarkAmery Some of the guidance there absolutely does not fit. But some does. For example, explaining the why of what went wrong, and how it fits into the goals of Stack Overflow.
@MarkAmery - A lot of users complain that new users, or confused users, or whichever, the users who ask questions that are definitely going to be deleted - complain that they never read the rules and don't know how it works here. It would make sense then, when directly confronting those users on their questions, to explain the reasoning of the rules they messed up on, and why those rules are in place.
@hey the image is a chat transcript that's been circulating. One of those sex bots that hit you up on, say, Skype out of the blue & try to get you to follow a link to something bad.
This kind of goes hand in hand with the reason that "What have you tried" is a one click removal. If you are not invested enough to work with someone beyond just a drive by comment, why leave on at all? So to, if you are not invested enough to try to solve the problem you are observing, why point it out to everyone who can see it while not explaining it to the OP, arguably the one person who clearly is not getting it in the situation.
> "What have you tried" is a one click removal. If you are not invested enough to work with someone beyond just a drive by comment, why leave on at all?
On that point, at least, I completely agree with you. It's also why I generally don't like canned comments; they tend to be 50% relevant at best to the question at hand, and I just read them and think *really? you cared enough to criticise, but not enough to be specific?*
OOT & random FR: I think OP should be able to remove their chat message even after 2 minutes when it gets starred, to prevent out-of-context misunderstanding
Jen Weber & Chris Manson - May I Ask A Question?: Jen Weber and Chris Manson will be live streaming Stack Overflow Q&A on Twitch Friday at 8am EST/1pm UTC.
#emberjs http://bit.ly/2FFcwhd
Here is the question. It still needs reopen votes. They seem to make that case pretty well that asking how to do this in conformance with the JSON:API spec and CakePHP framework is an appropriately-constrained problem, not particularly opinionated or open-ended.
So... There's a bigger question here... do you want a closed, unclear question, or do you want an open question that might help the asker but, more importantly, that might help a broader group of people who have the same question? Even if the new question isn't exactly what the OP had in mind, it's going to help them a lot more than the question being closed.
And, without understanding how the wording made it primarily opinion based, the OP may have no clue how to fix the question, so helpful edits are a great way of showing the OP how to frame a question well. It does require some work, though.
The edit was mostly trivial though. That it now "looks" not primarily opinion based just shows that there is a severe problem with that close reason.
Either that, or a severe problem with its interpretation.
Sure, we don't want questions about opinions. However, there has to be a line, because there are way too many situations where a question can only be answered with experience.
@TravisJ I think most close reasons have similar problems; people pattern-match based upon superficial details of how the question is asked. Over at meta.stackoverflow.com/a/311788/1709587 I once said "if a trivial rephrasing that doesn't change what the question is asking makes it clearly on-topic, then it's already on topic and nobody should be voting to close it" and I wish that I could somehow drill that idea into the mind of everyone with close vote powers
Yeah I was pretty taken aback by that from Shog, too, @AaronHall
There are a handful of specific points of policy I've strongly disagreed with Shog on - the biggest being his opposition to explaining downvotes - but "often rude" is not a claim I would ever think to make about him
oh, absolutely - I'm a prolific comment flagger, too, @AaronHall. We're talking about purging of "unkind" comments
my fear was that the call to action to get rid of "unkind" comments in Jay's blog post was going to result in comments criticising answers getting wiped out en masse
Well the thing is when you're getting rid of any comment except the arguably correct criticisms (which we should carefully keep) it's hard for... unkind... comments to persist.
It usually takes me a couple of minutes to fully parse and unwind a thread of comments on a single post though.
depends how you parse "unkind". My reading was that most criticism was innately unkind; evidently that's not what the staff intended, which is a reilef
anyway, sorry to bail mid-conversation but I gotta run; cya
@AaronHall The hardest are posts with 30+ comments, half of which are flagged... and the subject I just know is going to be difficult to wade into... It's difficult to find the energy to really dig in.
So... yeah. I absolutely do not wish that we "shame" anyone, that is a horrible way to go, but I am a bit concerned about the effects of the votes on that person @Shog9. As I said, they seem to generally think that these votes prove their point about the larger meta population, and I do start to think there have been a lot of posts like that in the last years. One can wonder what really they have learned.
was just about to continue saying that I most certainly am not aware of most of the internal discussion that have been had, and trust that y'all know what you are doing. If there is a difference between that "sorta true for everyone", it might be the different influence people can have.
For instance, I certainly have less reach than they do.
If anyone was expecting me to say, "oh, this has quite the low score, I suppose I'm completely wrong about all of this"... Well, a few people obviously did and were disappointed with the outcome.
OTOH, while I hold fast to my evaluation of the problem... it's not like I don't recognize that I could've probably approached the problem differently and gotten different results.
The amount of downvotes would decrease much more significantly than the signal per downvote would increase. You'd also likely observe decrease in the number of folks able to exercise moderation. Do you have data that corroborates your noisy downvote hypothesis?
On IPS I sometimes wish we could change the mechanic for downvotes on answers. I feel like we really need to encourage them there and, with the attention we get from the HNQ and so few people who come to the site being able to DV at all... it makes for some really lopsided voting.
The original assumption that trusted members should be in charge of these things has changed over time in that it is much easier to have amassed enough reputation to take part in moderation now. While it is just as hard to get 1000 rep as before in a small time frame, users who have posted only a few things, given 4 years, can easily have slowly floated into the rep limits for moderation privileges.
At that point, there is the existing signal that this is not useful, or lacks research. That is what others are piling on with, the signal that there is something wrong.
Regardless of if the signal is weak or not, that it exists will not change.
for a while, i had barely enough rep to downvote on metaSE, and as such, i didn't do so on answers that i otherwise would have because it would have put me below the threshold of being able to downvote at all.
I don't think downvotes on answers should be free, and would support a cost on question downvotes, but first i'd rather find a solution to the former
Lately, to kind of gauge how bad the bad really is, I have been looking at the newest list, finding a post at -3, and just watching it for 15 minutes. I haven't found a -9 yet.
I'd thought that, for questions, particularly by new users, it might be interesting to stop counting DVs at -4. Users can keep downvoting but there's no effect.
You can try as much as you want to appeal to people's sense of rationality that it's nothing personal and they should take it as a signal to improve, but people will take them personal
taking the edge off that somehow is going to make a lot of SO's problems go away imo
They are, a problem to a degree, particularly when there are so many of them. If you have -4 or -8 or whatever, and the average score of a question on a site is 1 or 3 or something low like that, you're never going to fix the question enough to get it in the realm of positive.
There is that too, @Shog9. Perhaps removing these posts faster will help with the perception that everyone hated them. On the other hand, it can also cause users to perceive some arbiter as being unjust towards them... and in practice this may actually be true given some broad interpretations of close reasons.
