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3:00 PM
@ShadowWizard :D
@Tinkeringbell you summoned me? :3
@PrincessLuna Don't blame me! that was @ShadowWizard ;)
@Tinkeringbell Sure it was ;)
@Tinkeringbell Still to late :> :p
I usually don't pick fights with other SE users until I know they deserve it XD
done
3:04 PM
@Tinkeringbell Lol
And I thought Shadow was as fast as me
@Shadow Are you able to use Chaos Control on it, since you voted to close it back in 2012?
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Misleading link: Correct address format by charlie137 on bitcoin.SE
3:27 PM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Misleading link: Correct address format by charlie137 on bitcoin.SE
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in link text in answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer: I am replacing my countertop and sink. How do I choose a new sink that fits my existing plumbing? by Charles Kimotho on diy.SE
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer: Is there any way to get free internet on airtel? by Rahul Meena on security.SE
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported question: Is there any way to get free internet on airtel? by Rahul Meena on security.SE
3:48 PM
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog chaos control just moves things around. At least, please switch to Chaos Spear. Or Chaos Blast, if you really want to quote the game that should never have be.
4:05 PM
@Derpy Closing as duplicate causes the question to serve as a pointer, in effect moving around people who navigate to it. Thus, it's a correct use of the word.
4:17 PM
@Derpy Still needs more rainboom :>
4:35 PM
@Shog9 Got a second? Have something to ask your feedback on
@Undo I have approximately 20 minutes
@Shog9 We built a Comment Evaluator 5001. comments.dvtk.me. We (me and @thesecretmaster) plan to try to reproduce the staff-only project with moderators & regulars, making all the data public-ish
With feedback-ers anonymized so we don't skew data that way
@Undo define "all the data"
Everything except the link between our user records and real people
(Anonymity for people grading comments)
so, "top-10 worst comments on Stack Overflow" is gonna be a thing...
@rene you around? Sounds like something you may have Opinions on...
4:39 PM
Taken from a batch of posts spread throughout February. Digging out a top-10 list would require downloading & parsing a bunch of CSV files, it's deliberately a little bit hard.
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog can't know for sure now, but I think we can re-cast expired votes, yes.
@ShadowWizard I believe that votes cast prior to the change allowing expired votes to be recast, can't be recast.
@Undo so what's the intended output?
There was a bug report where someone tried to recast a vote in 2016, but got an error message stating that they cast a close vote back in 2011
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog hmm... if you can find another old expired vote that I cast, I'll check.
4:41 PM
@Shog9 A few things: (1) Public data for people to play with to help quantify the problem, (2) I'd like to see how well results from SO moderators, network moderators, and non-moderators correlate, (3) maybe we find some comments to cleanup.
Mostly, linking to comments on-site is a necessary evil b/c CC-BY-SA
People won't like their comments to appear there. @Undo
some might
You can't anonymize live comments, anyone can just Google it to find the author in an instant.
(that's what I did with the recent blog post prior to it being fixed.)
We did do some stuff to hide it:
in a certain sense, this doesn't matter; anyone can go spin up a SEDE query and find comments to flag now... and lots of folks have done / are doing exactly that
4:43 PM
in another sense... gotta be careful that you're not designing a tool that encourages witch-hunting
@Shog9 sure, but they don't go and publish what they flag in a public place.
@ShadowWizard I mean... lots of you did, in this room, a few weeks back...
Note that users are masked (to keep a bit of privacy, and to avoid discrimination based on not-comment-next) and that link at the bottom goes to the comments but invalidates your review. So it's possible to link, but inconvenient.
I think this is about as good as any project can get while fulfilling attribution requirements.
Also, we tried to match SE's implementation as much as possible just in case the results are interesting between staff and non-staff
@Undo Right click and copy the link, and then navigate to it in a new tab.
4:45 PM
@Shog9 here we only hunt spammers and trolls, not people who post comments which only might upset other people a bit.
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Doesn't work
@Undo What does it check for?
You could also mouse over the link and memorize the comment ID
@ShadowWizard some us did, by sharing the SEDE link
Link goes to another page that maps a CE5001 ID to a native SE ID
Anyway, that's my abstract concern. The proper solution is, as always, to be public about what you're doing: make a meta post (on MSO if you're pulling SO data) and describe your goals, what data is going to be exposed, etc. and be responsive to feedback.
4:46 PM
@Undo Open up a new private window and navigate to the copied link from there
@SomewhatMemorableName that's still not outright posting the comments and pointing on them as being bad.
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Not gonna work if you're not logged in
@thesecretmaster Use an alternative account
My concrete concern here is... Julia's fixing to email a bunch of mods & ask them to participate in evaluating comments using Punyon's tool. It'd really kinda suck if folks didn't participate because they'd already kinda burned out on evaluating comments via your thing, @Undo...
Yeah, wondered about that. What's your timeline?
4:48 PM
@ShadowWizard and a few of them did paste the permalink to the offending comments here, essentially one-boxing them. I believe they have been moved/purged after that.
May 7 at 12:14, by Catija
Please refrain from posting flaggable comment content in here, either in plain text or one-boxes. Links are fine but we don't need a permanent record of the not nice stuff we find in comments long after they've been deleted.
What would also really suck is if we gathered a bunch of data and it never got released, or was released in a near-unusable way because of privacy issues
@SomewhatMemorableName oh. Well, for the really nasty comments I agree, but for borderline cases... it's not really nice. Though still.... posting it here is whole different league than posting in official blog post or on some external website that might be viewed by many people.
@Undo no idea; I've pinged Julia regarding this
Hypothetically, it could be arranged to send Julia whatever data we gather.
4:52 PM
That might be hard to integrate
plot twist: @Undo trying to get hired to SE
;)
Yeah, would require some coordination.
Considering non-mods won't be invited... I'm tempted to start the task, but I believe it'll just make me angry & sad just like reviewing Triage/H&I/VLQ queue...
@Undo My advice here would be: start with a meta discussion. Try to define your goals (that is, what data you want to end up with) as clearly as possible. Solicit concerns from the community. And then go from there.
The tooling itself... is not a big deal. It's what happens to the data that makes or breaks something like this.
Another aspect of this: SE kinda has a problem in some people's eyes. A non-SE project might be the only way to turn them.
4:54 PM
@Shog9 I'm now
@Undo Considering it says mods and regulars, any chance for a particular cactus to partake?
It's in a testing phase right now; isn't on a final domain and data will probably be thrown away between now and whenever it starts for real
I mean after the dust settles
I can't even consider myself SO regular either, after giving up answering & moderating the content...
Meta SO lurker regular though...
honestly... I doubt it. Folks aren't on our case because we have a history of playing fast and loose with data analysis; they're on our case because
1. we've promised a lot of things we haven't delivered on
2. we've ignored a lot of problems that directly affect people using the sites
3. some people are going to be resistant to any suggestion that they can't just write whatever they want without repercussions
#3 is unsolvable.
#s 1&2 are our own damn fault and are solvable but not without actually, y'know, doing the long and arduous work
out of time for discussion; meetings abound
5:00 PM
Thanks :)
@Undo I'm going to repeat what I have said earlier in this room: I don't mind that people classify comments. I do mind if the comment and the classification are published enabling it to be tracked back to an individual. That was and is my main concern with any of those experiments.
@rene CC-BY-SA essentially makes it impossible to publish usable data without a link back
Best I can do is make it inconvenient; I can't make it impossible
Stuff like 'not having a page of review results on the Internet' and 'you'd have to load the CSVs into SQL and write queries to get data' is the best I can do
SE is also going to have a rough time doing this without linking to comments, at least in the tool. They may choose to only publish data in aggregate, but that loses any utility for independent research.
@Undo Yes, we have seen the results of that
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Voluntarily deleted
5:06 PM
Gotta remember comments are also cc-by-sa
So attribution is actually required for any published dataset
Done 5 threads for experiment. I don't know what to expect as a participant, since I really have to use one of the many magic 8 balls to guesstimate the context, like whether it's posted on Q or A. It's easy enough to know OP's comment though...
@Undo Nothing happens when I click any link on a review page there
screenshot?
@Undo Never mind; nothing happens when I click "Submit"
Let's say... browser-dependent bug...
5:13 PM
I've done a few as well.
@Undo Names are given away
So... I'm really afraid/confused if I can continue with such bias, assuming which comment is OP, or is it on Q/A, or is the question heavily downvoted/closed, or...
In the above screenshot, I can tell that "userO" is tripleee.
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Probably fixable, good catch
Also carries a weight of "what happens when you modify CC-By-SA content", but we'll see
Just let me try this on all of you: suppose one of your own comments is classified by 100% of the respondents as I feel angry or upset. How would you respond/what would you do? Now imagine it is featured in a twitter post. What do you do now?
5:19 PM
I would start to cry
uhh.. I will feel angry too?
@AnneDaunted That is a valid response, certainly
@SomewhatMemorableName right
@rene Resist the urge to ban everyone and go out in a blaze of glory?
Not the right response?
Honest answer: Be surprised, then delete my own comment.
All options are open @Andy
5:21 PM
OTOH, also preparing the popcorn because it's on Twitter
@Andy the comment has 20 upvotes. Still delete?
It will be very hard to analyze what actually happens on the site without being allowed to use site data.
@rene Looks like a certain user's comments on Meta SO...
If welcoming-ness is that important, we should be able to handle a bit of pain in the short term.
@SomewhatMemorableName I can't help I'm awesome ... on MSO that is ...
5:23 PM
@rene In that case, probably. I imagine that my upvoted comments are more snarky than my unupvoted ones. I don't track my comment upvotes though, so that's just a guess.
nice data project
@SomewhatMemorableName Have at it. I'm all for being called out. If I did something wrong, let me know.
@Undo sure, and I don't mind looking at my own crap and trying to learn from it. It becomes much different if a whole bunch of other strangers value my contributions out of their main context and disqualifies them while I can't give feedback or interact or clearify.
and I don't think I'm the worst commenter, still ...
@Andy AFAIK, the user has never made a message in this chat room, so all of you are clear...
Alternative project: do this experiment with comments on MSO :O
deletes all comments
I learned yesterday that is limited to 30 per day
so if I start now ... give me 6 to 8 weeks ...
5:36 PM
@Undo We don't have a firm release date on fielding the classification task more broadly, but plan to ask for volunteers from moderators, the list of folks who voiced interest in contributing via Jay's recent blog post, and probably a random selection from the research email list we have. I would expect probably... in the next month or so?
How can you contribute? Writing unwelcoming comments?
@rene truncate table comments
3
Problem solved! Anyone can sleep now!
@Taryn again? ;)
ALWAYS
5:38 PM
:D
It'd solve ALL THE PROBLEMS
@JuliaSilge that's 6 to 8 weeks ...
Except for the problems caused by not having comments any more?
@Catija That's what Answers are for.
Writing comments?
5:41 PM
Sorry, the sarcasm tag didn't make it through the internet.
</sarcasm>
@rene It's MUCH shorter. And we have a Trello board! :)
Ohhh fancy ... ;)
@Andy Oh, it did. I was being obtuse.
We have not ruled out sharing this kind of data publicly (comment IDs + ratings + rater IDs) but it's complicated, as is obvious from just the interactions right here. I think a lot about user privacy, the value of open data, etc etc etc and it is almost never simple.
blame GDPR
(I'm probably drunk, I better sleep now...)
5:54 PM
@JuliaSilge maybe the goal needs to be reversed. Which comments are considered welcoming, friendly, make people happy. Those you can publish. Comments that don't have common characteristics found in the happy ones are the bad apples.
those bad examples can then be anonymized
@rene we kinda did that once
I agree that it's probably better to show how to do it.
they're... mostly "thanks"
yeah, that is not helpful either
I don't mind that users would recognize their style of commenting.
@Shog9 But what if you restrict it to useful comments (i. e. comments that meet the requirements)?
5:58 PM
@AnneDaunted how do you do that?
add a second axis for evaluation?
@Shog9 Restrict the examples to them
@AnneDaunted so, we have to curate the inputs?
...for some reason, The GIMP defaults to a font named "Sans", which has serifs
I really don't agree with how those comments are classified.
sorry, Shog's Comment Classifier 5002 only accepts classifications from one person.
3
That would seriously fix a lot of problems though. One person makes for a very consistent standard :)
6:11 PM
Yes. My histogram is immaculate
While I do see the benefit of having that classification the useful / useless now really depends on context, meaning you need the post with it I think.
Yeah, I'm kinda joking here. I don't think this is feasible.
I'm also... Kinda philosophically opposed to the idea of keeping useful-but-offputting stuff around.
That's why we have editing. Keep the useful, remove the offputting.
and... that's why you don't put critical information in uneditable comments
So if I see a comment where the first part is off-putting... and the second part useful, very useful, like a request for clarification... is that why moderators can edit other people's comments?
I don't know Workplace's commenting culture well, but they hide a bunch of stuff by default behind the "Show X more comments", right? Does that cut down on the snark?
well, it cuts down on the initially visible snark
They delete a shocking number of comments though
actually running a bit of an experiment there right now:
38
Q: Experiment running: a comment by any other name

Shog9Last year, Robert Cartaino relayed this one weird trick to fix comments: I also flag dozens-to-hundreds of posts daily simply to remove misplaced answers and other minutia from comments which simply don't belong there. It's very time consuming, and largely ineffective. But it never stops...

6:16 PM
Oooh. I'll go read that.
(the title is a reference to shakespeare's romeo and juliet, where as you'll recall the titular characters kill themselves by inhaling comments)
Lots of people end up dead in that play.
Just like all across SE if the new code of conduct comes through
The code of conduct isn't going to kill people... just a lot of comments.
6:22 PM
kill, suspend. Same thing.
i mean... people will be annoyed by it, but most will remain and just continue like nothing happened.
I'm thinking of running a survey of my own, on Sunday, classifying questions. maybe:

No-effort homework dump
No-effort requirement dump
Contrived, ridiculous code from h/w or tutorial site
'Time limit exceeded'
Pan-Galactic Gargle Duplicate
Basic language syntax, easily find on tutorial sites or textbooks
No debugging attempt at all described.
'Is is possible...'
'How can I'
Bad formatting /indentation
Won't compile because transcribed incorrectly from printed material
Error-message self-explanatory
I've done that exercise. It is super depressing.
Very few people get suspended just for comments in my experience... and it takes a lot of ignoring comment deletions and warnings to get there.
... and yet we're supposed to be all cheerful to newcomers ... at gunpoint...
6:24 PM
I doubt there will even be more suspensions, considering that requires mod intervention and we have a limited number of mods
I mean... I wouldn't be.
@JuliaSilge Great! I really don't want to preempt your efforts; I'm mostly concerned about making sure some form of useful data is available. Hypothetically, how feasible is some form of data sharing? I would be completely open to adjusting our methodology and preparing data in a useful form for you to import.
It's far too easy to ignore comment deletions. You get no notification about your deleted comments. Or any indication they ever existed, I think.
more flags? maybe, but that'll just slow down the processing of all flags.
@Undo The concern about burning people out early is a big one; totally understand why it'd make you nervous.
6:26 PM
Look... I've said this here before, but... It's really easy to get yourself into a groove where you spend a lot of time looking at the worst stuff on SO. And the average isn't all that good, so... This starts to really mess with your head. It did mine at least. After a while, I was looking favorably at questions where the title was free of typos. That was the high bar. I had to just stop visiting SO for a while.
That's why review has per-day limits. It's just super unhealthy to see that stuff in quantity.
So, how do I find the questions actually worth looking at?
my favorite approach is the 10K tools
but, you can also go back a week and start filtering by score, views
@Undo Here's what I said earlier about data sharing: chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7095647#7095647
@JohnDvorak And maybe that's a change that needs to happen somehow... I'm not sure how... but if people aren't aware of comment deletions (and I'm not saying they should be indicated in a granulated way - for every comment deleted) but sort of like flag warnings...
> Several of your recent comments were deleted as Rude/Abusive. Please review them here before commenting...
Tweak as needed
6:28 PM
@Undo I think it's a complicated issue, and we (internal SE folks) and the community at large have not yet landed on the right call about making data like this available.
The idea of flag warnings is to point you to a list of flags, so that you can learn from specific cases. It's borderline useless without those specific cases
Well, they'll see examples of what was considered rude enough to be deleted as r/a... as opposed to just deleted as NLN...
And if they have questions, they can ask about it on meta.
if a comment is flagged as r/a and it's not r/a, but is nln, does the flag get changed to dictate that, or just deleted and validated
That would be useful. I expect a lot of new meta posts once the list goes live.
I don't think any mod wants to suspend a user for comments unless they're blatantly horrible but the tooling for mods is such that, often, we don't even see those comments when they're blatantly horrid.
@KevinB Depends on the mod. I can decline the flag and then delete the comment anyway, yes. But it requires actually noticing what the flagging reason was... it's easy for mods to miss this when they're going through dozens/hundreds/thousands of comment flags... I've talked about it on MSO...
6:32 PM
@JuliaSilge It's at the intersection of a bunch of super hard problems - you've got CC licensing issues, statistical significance, and concerns about what happens when you do identify comments (like the license requires). Not easy.
21
A: Can we do more than just delete rude comments?

CatijaI'm going to preface this answer a bit with some information about myself: I'm not a SO user. I'm a moderator on two sites including Interpersonal Skills which, in the time it's existed until now (~9 months), has had over 15K comments deleted. This is nothing on SO scale but I think I know a bi...

I believe the biggest worry is new moderators, blindly following the code of conduct without regard for what's useful for the community. Why should the CoC encourage more suspensions than actually should be done?
I'd love a compound feedback mechanism which would allow you to optionally specify multiple qualities/deficiencies in a post, e.g.: "shows no research", "missing critical information", "no MCVE", "unintelligible mess" (joking), etc... and show that to the OP. No exposition from the voter... just bullet points.
@JohnDvorak you know the existing moderators are pretty free with comment deletions and suspensions, right?
@Catija I already mentioned what we can do
55 mins ago, by Taryn
@rene truncate table comments
:)
6:33 PM
@JohnDvorak This goes back to a previous minirant:
23 hours ago, by Undo
Are our policies wrong, or are we failing to enforce the policies?
@JohnDvorak The CoC doesn't actually encourage suspensions.
Can we just listen to Taryn's solution already? When has she ever steered us wrong before?
truncate doesn't stop new comments...
so we run it weekly...
@Catija Hm... then why is the community so worried they'll now happen?
6:34 PM
I already feel perfectly fine suspending someone after one nasty comment - doesn't need a policy change; I already know CMs will back me up on that decision.
@JohnDvorak I'm still trying to figure that out... why are you worried?
@JohnDvorak that's an excellent question!
we have already truncated that table three times: chat.meta.stackexchange.com/…
not enough
If I'm not being completely stupid. Moderators' ability to suspend people for nasty comments is unrestricted.
6:35 PM
@Shog9 hourly
I'll defer to your expertise on the matter
Absolutely... a bad enough comment will get an immediate suspension... a bad enough anything will get that... but snark doesn't usually cross that line.
Usually.
@JohnDvorak here's my take: this stuff is traditionally very opaque. Folks are maybe dimly aware that suspensions are a thing (although I'd suspect even that knowledge is rather limited), but have no idea what sort of stuff leads to them.
@Catija I read the CoC as proposing a zero-tolerance policy for unwelcome comments - and many share that reading with me. I'm glad it isn't intended - but a rewording would be welcome in that case.
6:36 PM
@JohnDvorak Yeah... zero tolerance for leaving them around on the site for people to read...
That's not what I meant...
So you read a CoC that says, "bad comments == suspension" and you immediately start having doubts: "uh... how bad? how many? Is 1 comment on a bad day enough to get suspended? 5? 10? If I post 15 over the course of a year, do they delete my account?"
'zero tolerance' is often associated with school bullying policies. Kinda has a bad history.
I'm actually completely unaware of that
@Undo all the more reason people hate the CoC
6:37 PM
I associated it with weed on school grounds. Which also has a bad history.
@Shog9 Really? Ever read one of those /r/AskReddit threads about school stories?
@Undo no
I'm old
5
Yeah, I tend to equate it with drugs/guns on school/workplace campuses.
you kids & your reddits and bullying
Always a story about someone getting bullied and someone fighting back, both get suspensions for fighting.
6:38 PM
back in my day, folks just talked about how they were gonna put on trenchcoats & show them all
I've seen it. Happens all the time; administrators take the easy road of not rendering judgement beyond "yeah you were fighting"
ah, yeah... That's tricky
we have examples of that on SO of course
really? shudders
Whenever someone says "zero tolerance", I (and probably others) hear "we'll just suspend people without using our brains"
@Shog9 create trigger discard_comments on dbo.Comments instead of insert as print 'comment > /dev/null';
6:40 PM
Now, I know that won't happen with the current mod crew. Most folks don't.
sure. One of the first things I recall after being hired was having to contact two users who were perpetually getting into it over edits, and telling them both to knock it off
one went on to become a moderator
so... YMMV?
probably. Just a heads up that 'zero tolerance' can have weird connotations. Especially around younger nerd-type folks.
a more visible example would probably be that thing with, uh, sorceress-somethingorother that blew up on meta a few years back and continues to get griped about on Twitter regularly
@Undo zero-tolerance scoring pens?
@Undo FTR this younger nerd-type has never heard of that
6:43 PM
@Shog9 can I star that 10 more times ;)
Some context on the above. I guess those connotations aren't as widespread around here as I though
@Taryn hey, you're the one with DB access, I can't stop you!
@Shog9 I won't abuse my privileges that way
neo-Atwood: "I'm gonna STAR YOU AT THE DATABASE LEVEL"
Are there any logs of SQL ... privileged access?
6:44 PM
...is that an internal reference? I forget.
@JohnDvorak there's like a whole audit thing for Teams / private info. Probably not chat.
@JohnDvorak access to the actual servers is limited
@Taryn Wow, that forward-reference is really weird.
@Shog9 Ever tried reading through 700 spam posts in three hours? It's actually fun... for some definitions of "fun"...
@Mithrandir y'know how most sites allow low-rep users to post images now?
6:49 PM
Up until about 5 years ago, they were blocked with < 10 rep, same as on SO
all the memes...
in preparation for enabling that, I pulled 8 months of logs, and reviewed 3738 posts by new users blocked due to images
I never want to do that again
That sounds like a horrible idea
However, I did learn in the process of the existence of a site named "bestgore" (intentionally not linked). So presumably if you were on the lookout for the best gore on the 'net, today is your lucky day.
(though really, if that's your thing... is any day really lucky for you?)
6:52 PM
I'll stick to my "scourge Medium of pharma spam" plan :P.
Just think of all those poor facebook employees who have to police content...
"poor"
Isn't that just contemporary Hollywood?
in the sense that their job is to flag and delete beheading photos, kiddy porn, etc
wonder what the turnover for that position is
has to be rough
six to eight weeks
6:55 PM
@JohnDvorak so, they can never leave...
on a happier note... Who likes giant snakes? Colorado is your place to be right now!
They can check out any time they like, though
@Shog9 still not as chilling as the end of this video.
@Shog9 actually pretty sure that site is illegal in my country
(as long as they fulfill their 54-hour quota ofc)
6:58 PM
I love giant snakes
Snakes in general are so cool
@canon I learned that the Dutch employees have the largest queue ... we post the most filth ...
I like spiders. I like them so much I provide them plenty of opportunity for home innovations.
@rene Dutch... Dutch... those are the wooden clog people, right?

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