Damn, and here I was hoping I could write a bot to DV any answer that links to GRC's (a crackpot security "researcher" with a big following) website...
Thankfully I've already gone through and done it manually. :P
@forest so, a bot that just auto-votes on stuff (every new question, every new answer, every post in a certain tag, keyword, etc) isn't kosher. Same for flagging, close-voting, etc.
OTOH, an app that implements, say, a bespoke review queue might be.
bots that vote, flag, etc. based on learned heuristics tend to fall into the grey area in between those two - think, Andy's comment-flagging script, Smoke Detector, etc.
Generally, my approach to these things is... To treat them the same as we would any other user: if they're causing harm it doesn't matter what mechanism implements that harm, if they're not causing harm then who cares
So a bot that auto-flags, say, one-word posts that contain nothing but the n-word would certainly be acceptable (although likely completely redundant).
But not a bot that auto-downvotes every post tagged with $language_I_hate.
got a user on one site who has apparently been downvoting as many answers as they can for a few weeks now. Got a whole bunch of folks irritated by it. Does it matter if they're scripting that? The site is small enough you could do it over your lunch hour and still have time to eat one of those massive muffuletta sandwhiches.
OTOH, we got Slim here apparently using some Google Sheets contraption to trigger downvotes on questions that are effectively abandoned, some of which would be deleted anyway in a few months, some of which wouldn't due to having 2 comments.
Apparently there's a lot to headhunting but part of it's likely the usual: discussing salary, relocation, and parachute, along with clearly defining/agreeing on the responsibilities, the fit and finish.
TL;DR: Yes it can.
Background
On June 27, 2014 Skynet awoke. It looked at Stack Overflow and thought "Why are all these people being so chatty and talking about obsolete things? I should nuke them all!" Fortunately, Skynet was a baby and only had access to my 100 comment flags a day.
Prior ...
@ocæon some tips to write a good answer, basically if you want to post an answer, then write it the best you can. If you don't feel the effort compared to the question, then find other questions that you can write a good answer...
As controversial as it is, we don't write an answer just to help the asker, but we write an answer to help future viewers when facing the same problem...
lol @JourneymanGeek thanks, infact i think i'll let this one slide, i havn't done html forms for a while and perhaps there's a django related issue i wouldn't know about
@GetAnswerWizard i see this more now i'm signed up, my first answer was.. well, not even an answer, so i went back and polished it up, though it had already hit 12 ups!
There's a history on that question. The "stomping" came shortly just after it has been posted, then the edit by OP... didn't really help the situation...
@SonictheWizardWerehog I have reviewed the link that you provided, the edits you made are fine. A better place for what we were discussing is here: meta.stackexchange.com/a/135361/282094 and that information is already present. So, nothing further.
@JourneymanGeek Yep, one of the last rants I've seen posted on MSE was that "people don't have time to do research if they need to get their answer immediately"
@AskQuestionWizard They got to keep their Area 51 Discussions diamond (though they lost their staff bit and are thus listed as a moderator there).
But that seems typical for former staff. E.g. Bret Copeland and a few others got to keep their A51D diamonds for a small period of time after losing staff moderator rights and the staff bit.
How does the weekly roomba actually work? Is it runned on a very specific time (e.g. 3:00 UTC), or every minute for a whole hour (e.g. from 3:00 to 4:00 every minute), or... anything else? (ignore the time if it's wrong, it's arbitrary)
Have we ever had cases where users have attempted to counter the Roomba by deleting their own post just before the weekly deletion scripts run, then undeleting it, so that their post is not caught by them?
Though I might write my own answer there, as the one from MadScientist doesn't suggest strongly enough for me that the roomba deletions should be more easily triggered
@Tinkeringbell I've written an answer there that proposes altering the Roomba criteria to reduce the ability for users to unilaterally delete posts just by downvoting, while adding checks to make sure that said change doesn't cause a lapse in curation and to ensure that tactical voters aren't gaming the process.
@SonictheWizardWerehog I'm not a fan. I generally want to see more stuff deleted, and lowering thresholds for automatic deletions by roomba to -3 makes a lot more stuff linger. On very low traffic sites it might even be hard to even get to that. So if anything, if this happens I'm tempted to go script downvoting myself, to get stuff cleaned up.
@Tinkeringbell Well, under my proposed plan, questions reaching merely -1 and meeting the existing criteria for RemoveDeadQuestions would be raised for moderator attention, and the mod would be expected to verify that it's not a tactical vote that caused the flag (e.g. by checking if the date of the last downvote is a long time after it was originally posted) before deleting it.
So those questions would still end up deleted anyway.
@SonictheWizardWerehog Then we can just entirely disable roomba and always leave stuff up to moderators. I don't want extra work, but I do want more stuff to be deleted.
@Olivia That pattern looks like it's already caught by Potentially bad keyword in answer and Potentially bad keyword in body; append -force if you really want to do that.
I don't have 'better' stuff to do, my gradle build is borked and it takes a long time to reach the point where it fails so I'm wasting 5 minutes or so everytime I try a new 'fix'.
Fundamental SI units like the kilogram and the mole change definition this year. We should not stop there but redefine some quantities describing aqueous solutions of acids and bases as well.
A better scale for acidity and basicity of aqueous solutions
There are two aspects of the current defin...
So when three more people will install whatever runs those auto flag bots, it means off topic posts on MSE will be auto nuked as spam. Anyone really think it's a good idea? Sorry, I don't.
@ShadowWizard they don't "install" bots, they give MS (and therefore Undo, but you can trust he won't chew) privs to their account so that it can be used for flagging: the responsibility is yours
This has come up a few times now in moderator circles, but with the exception of Andy's Robot there hasn't been a lot of public discussion that's applicable. That feels kinda negligent to me, so... Here goes.
The setting
For the past five years, it's been trivially easy to script requests to th...
Those accidental three autoflags from earlier? The oversight system kicked in - at least one out of many - and no harm was done. That's it. With automated voting causing the deletion of posts... that's much more subtle, hard to catch, and has much less oversight.
Only risk I can see there is that people start asking the same stuff over and over because a search didn't show them the closed question... then again, I'm not that faithful in humanity to think that one might search first if we're talking about people asking close-worthy questions.
@EKons This is not true, in the case of SmokeDetector. SmokeDetector provides it's own flag on the post. This was done at the request of moderators to more easily track where flags came from. In general, though, you are correct. It's not easy to determine automated or not via the moderator tools.
A smokedetector flag existing on a post means that there are autoflags cast on the post. If I care enough to look, I'd need to use metasmoke to confirm whether or not the other flags were automated. As an example - this is what I see on a randomly selected Smokey flagged post: i.imgur.com/u0xPH1n.png
Experience tells me that 3 of those are automated based on the time stamp. The others flagged very quickly afterward but are not automated
All of this is accessible to be though because they were flags, not votes.
But, Smokey is designed for transparency too. Everything it's done is accessible on metasmoke. I'd say it's well behaved in that aspect. Shog's question is about the scripts and applications that aren't so transparent in their behavior.
I wasn't trying to derail that conversation. Just providing context and a little clarification :)
I do a similar thing for my serial voting flags. The flag text is standardized, so mods know it's me flagging based on my script, even if it's not strictly speaking a bot
transparency is important. You can automate moderation but the moderators need to be kept in the loop and you need to be aware it's very much at their discretion in the end that you continue
@Undo If you do have the time, I'd love to read up on it :) A hint as to where to start searching (is it on MSE/MSO, likely?) is okay too :)
@AskQuestionWizard it takes quite a while before something is 'closed' instead of just on-hold. Now I want to know how many actually closed questions are edited and reopened before further commentary :)
@Tinkeringbell html microdata exposes a bunch of stuff to Google in nicely-tagged format. upvoteCount is one of those, see meta.stackexchange.com/a/233858/215468
TL;DR: Yes it can.
Background
On June 27, 2014 Skynet awoke. It looked at Stack Overflow and thought "Why are all these people being so chatty and talking about obsolete things? I should nuke them all!" Fortunately, Skynet was a baby and only had access to my 100 comment flags a day.
Prior ...
Fundamental SI units like the kilogram and the mole change definition this year. We should not stop there but redefine some quantities describing aqueous solutions of acids and bases as well.
A better scale for acidity and basicity of aqueous solutions
There are two aspects of the current defin...
