Tavern on the Meta

Magisch

2:03 PM

@JohnDvorak I don't know, I wouldn't like that

All of programming has conditioned me to expect one comparison per expression

fbueckert

@Magisch Or if multiple, a case statement.

Magisch

or seperated by an || or && or similar

i.E the principle is a comparison only has 2 side, the comparator and the comparee (?) and either of those can be comparisons if need be, but it never has 3 sides

That would become impossible to read quickly imo

fbueckert

To be fair, programming itself has it's own shortcuts that look like Greek to others.

Vote Dukakis

Yeah... Programming Puzzles & Code Golf

fbueckert

I was thinking more of our ( compare ? true : false ) type statements.

Vote Dukakis

2:13 PM

Nested 3 or more deep? Yeah, those are fun to debug.

BTW I've been browsing the Kaggle Q&A site remembering this is where a PM came from recently. It looks.... inclusive. A lot of Thanks and You're Welcome.

> My team is working on making Stack Overflow's public Q&A a more welcoming and inclusive platform for everyone who codes. Including as a resource for new coders and the teachers/experienced devs who help them. Do you want to talk about this? Send me a DM. -- Megan Risdal 👾 - 10 May 2019 - Twitter

Twitter oneboxing may be broken but my bookmarklet still works. :)

Journeyman Geek

Why not both though?

If we can somehow work out how to make SO less scary and help bootstrap folks into contributing ...

Vote Dukakis

Well, I've been reading that Twitter thread of suggestions...

fbueckert

We do need more janitors...

No Distraction Wizard

@JourneymanGeek Thanks for the encouragement!

Journeyman Geek

Hell, for that matter...

that's something we'd love to figure out on MSE ;)

Shadow Wizard

2:26 PM

@JohnDvorak probably

Vote Dukakis

And a somewhat relevant blog post: How to Know Nothing

Journeyman Geek

@VoteDukakis IIRC she was talking about it on twitter at some point

and if you think about it, for a place that's supposed to collect and share knowledge

we have a shedload of unwritten rules

fbueckert

Are the rules that unwritten, though?

Shog9

well... ok, there are even more written rules

Vote Dukakis

"When I want to contribute, I'm blocked because of low rep or something" is not an issue of "unwritten rules".

fbueckert

2:37 PM

I think most people run afoul of those we've already written down. Even the ones they say they've read.

Vote Dukakis

And that's one of the more common complaints about SO.

Journeyman Geek

@VoteDukakis I started with 1 rep, just like anyone else ;)

@fbueckert In this context though, I was thinking of someone joining SE from another place with a different culture.

Vote Dukakis

The message a user < 50 rep gets when trying to post a comment is "You must have 50 reputation to comment". Kind of terse compared to even what unregistered users get.

Maybe this could be a place to say something about comments vs answers.

Journeyman Geek

@VoteDukakis That's actually pretty true

considering a lot of experienced users don't get comments

and a few who do are sometimes guilty of misusing them. (Myself sometimes included?)

fbueckert

@JourneymanGeek Well, still. We do try to explain what to do up front.

Vote Dukakis

2:42 PM

fbueckert

And it's been part of internet culture to acclimate to an environment prior to contributing greatly.

Vote Dukakis

^^ seeing this, where do you expect a user to click?

That's about as much as my browser window shows.

Feeds

stackoverflow.blog/2019/05/16/security-update

Vote Dukakis

borken oneboxing is borken

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert But there's just so much.. you can spend a week acclimating and still not know anything

Vote Dukakis

2:44 PM

@Feeds Cool. +1 to Jeff for introducing heavy logging of mod actions.

Tinkeringbell

@VoteDukakis Shame, that's a blog post that would've fitted entirely in the onebox ;)

Vote Dukakis

So they can be sure that Roy didn't get PII or stuff.

fbueckert

@Tinkeringbell I'm not saying they need to learn everything.

But a lot of our issues could be mitigated if there was at least a small learning period before people just jumped off the diving board into the deep end.

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert I know ;) but there's still a lot and I don't think it's fixed with an hour or two of browsing any site.

Journeyman Geek

@fbueckert that tends to be something that's inherent to the person first

I didn't come here looking for a quick answer

Vote Dukakis

2:47 PM

@VoteDukakis Especially when you have an example of another user semi-answering in a comment. That pretty much teaches you what to do when you want to answer: click "add comment". Then you get a very terse error message "go away, you don't have 50 rep".

Journeyman Geek

Well SU in that case

Tinkeringbell

What I remember from being new... I read a lot of posts. But a site can have a frontpage full of bad questions, but you don't really see it until they're actually closed. (If no one comments, you may see downvotes on stuff that seems totally reasonable and you won't find out why it's bad until it's closed).. so you see a lot of broken windows

Journeyman Geek

@VoteDukakis and pointing out the lack of info

@Tinkeringbell one of the things with being an earlier user is...

Tinkeringbell

If you come here immediately thinking of asking a question, you peek at that and to ahead

Journeyman Geek

stuff was a lot laxer in the early days

Tinkeringbell

2:49 PM

@JourneymanGeek I'm not sure if I count as an earlier user ;)

Journeyman Geek

You don't ;p

If you think about it, all our written rules were made cause someone made it necessary

Vote Dukakis

It's not that ruthless today either. That if a and b < 3 example I mentioned was from yesterday's question, scores +1, and answered.

Some people still love answering the same beginner questions 7/30/365.

Journeyman Geek

Which is true.

Vote Dukakis

And let them do that. Just ... give a way to move this activity aside when browsing the site.

Journeyman Geek

SOme people manage that pretty sucessfully though

and never actually need or want to move past

@VoteDukakis technically voting should do that

fbueckert

2:51 PM

That's the thing, though; you're both at least making at attempt at figuring out the site before jumping in.

Vote Dukakis

In what way can voting do that? We don't want to hammer people with downvotes just because they are confused by Python comparisons.

Journeyman Geek

@fbueckert more or less

@VoteDukakis could you value add an answer?

Cause I find if you want to turn up a simple seeming question to 11, you try to go a little deeper

Vote Dukakis

That's a duplicate posted 7 days a week.

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert My point kinda was that the attempt isn't really a 30 minute thing right now, which it kinda should be.

Journeyman Geek

hm

why are they not closed as dupe, with an awesome main question then? Cause that's kinda what we're supposed to do

Vote Dukakis

2:54 PM

Possible duplicate of How to test multiple variables against a value? — Vote Dukakis 13 hours ago

Because that's way too much work for close reviewers.

They don't scale when you require five 3K users to review such stuff.

Notice the title ending (Beginner, Python) and the post being at +2 now.

An illustration of how ruthlessly SO enforces intricate rules.

John Dvorak

i.e. not at all, unless someone who actually knows the rules spots the question

Journeyman Geek

much like reality

Vote Dukakis

That's one site where I have too little rep to flag, but it helps with testing low-rep restriction stuff. Also, this is funny.

Ironically, the user asking this question hasn't returned to CB.SE since this question was posted. — Dan Henderson Oct 19 '15 at 16:00

Shadow Wizard

3:12 PM

@JNat cross site spammer after a few days break without spammers for your handling. Thanks! :)

JNat

gone

@ShadowWizard also gone

Shadow Wizard

@JNat whoa new record. Thanks!

Your prize...

JNat

@ShadowWizard ...and gone!

Shadow Wizard

!!/coffee JNat

SmokeDetector

@ShadowWizard brews a cup of Macchiato for @JNat

JNat

3:18 PM

what if I don't like coffee?

Shadow Wizard

@JNat lol forgot about it by now.... :D

@JNat hmm.... plan B!

fbueckert

@Tinkeringbell No issues with that. Just pointing out that acclimation seems to be optional these days, and then curators get blamed when enforcing those same rules.

Shadow Wizard

!!/tea JNat

SmokeDetector

@ShadowWizard brews a cup of earl grey tea for @JNat

JNat

@ShadowWizard me too! though I'd left a tab open ;)

Shadow Wizard

3:18 PM

@JNat lol glad you did.... ;)

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert Yep, that's a problem. So, is there some kind of list of things they get blamed most for, and that should be in the 30 minute SO masterclass? ;)

fbueckert

@Tinkeringbell Question ban? Probably the biggest. :P

If we make clear that we expect effort, I think a lot of our issues will disappear.

Tinkeringbell

Hmm. So A BIG scary red blinking warning that if your question is not deemed worthy enough, it might prevent you from asking others... Yeah, that should lower the participation bar.. :P

@fbueckert 'effort'.. is relative though. You kinda need to be very clear on which way that effort should go

fbueckert

@Tinkeringbell That's the thing, though; effort is vague. I don't know of any way to clarify that without new users attempting to rules lawyer that they did.

For some posts, just having a readable statement can be effort. For others, it needs a specific debugging process and isolating where the problem lies.

There's no one bar that says, "This shows effort."

Tinkeringbell

But you sort of expect new users to be aware of which is which, and to have put in the effort of understanding that part of SO?

fbueckert

3:29 PM

I expect users to put in a modicum of effort to help themselves.

Tinkeringbell

Of course there's always going to be some rules lawyers, but those aside, what would it take to communicate this to users?

fbueckert

With vba, that is apparently an extremely high bar.

Tinkeringbell

(for me, that was a teacher that told me to always treat SO aus nothing more than a search engine)

fbueckert

Even a statement that says, "We have high quality standards here, and we need to see that. Not doing so will result in your post not being well received." or something.

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert Oooh noes. Take it from an IPS mod, now you're sounding elitist and cliquish ;).

That message needs a whole lot of rephrasing.

fbueckert

3:32 PM

For sure it does.

But it communicates that we're not everywhere else.

Tinkeringbell

Besides, it needs to say what the standards are.

@fbueckert oh, that's true

fbueckert

I think just that, by itself, can ready new users.

That's why I liked Jeff's, "Professional and enthusiast programmers"

It communicates a set standard and expectations.

Vote Dukakis

> We're a little bit different from other sites.

s/little bit/lot/

But +1 for using "from" and not "than".

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert Hmm. I dunno, I'd as easily rules lawyer myself into enthusiastic as into 'made effort' :P

But gotta run, switching trains soon

fbueckert

What I've started doing is communicating that expectation in comments with things like, "The more you invest into your own question, the more you'll get out of it."

It's obviously not a gold standard, but I think it does a good job of conveying that doing nothing to help yourself won't get you anything.

Kevin B

3:41 PM

don't leave comments that aren't requesting clarification. leave out the parts that aren't requesting clarification.

fbueckert

If we could communicate upfront that we want posters to invest in their posts, that might do it.

Maybe not want. Need. Want is too gentle.

Tinkeringbell

@fbueckert I think you need that narrowed down to what to invest in their posts. Because otherwise we're back where this conversation started ;)

Kevin B

a JIT popup "Hey! you're post is is being poorly received! Please <whatever>" when their post starts receiving downvotes. The problem is... what do they need to do to improve it? Who knows, because every question is different. Maybe it doesn't have enough code, maybe it has too much, maybe it's a supedupe that is the first result when copy pasting the error message or the question title. Could be many things.

If only people would reach for close reasons so that a message would pop up stating what's actually wrong

Tinkeringbell

@KevinB The point is... We were talking about communicating expectations up front ;) a close reason is retroactive. And if you're new, you don't even see that a zero scoring question may have three close votes already

So you ask a similar one

Kevin B

I don't think doing it up front would be any more effective than displaying the tour up front

Tinkeringbell

3:52 PM

@KevinB Then, basically, all you're left with is word of mouth.. people that do know how to use SO explaining it to new people they're teaching programming

Kevin B

like, yeah some people will read it... a few of those might take it as a hint to do a better job of asking their question, but we don't know what problem they're having in asking their question until they ask it

you could write a novel on how to ask a question that has the chance of being well received

Vote Dukakis

Chapter 1: write a question that can be answered. If users can write an answer, they will be happy to post it, and will forgive anything else.

fbueckert

@Tinkeringbell Considering that most users invest absolutely nothing, I think a generic, "You have to invest something", will result in something better than what there is.

Kevin B

i mean, even "Why is .attr not a function" with the code ("#foo").attr("bar","baz) attracts answers and upvotes.

fbueckert

I'm not trying to communicate any specific, "This is what we want you to do" message.

I'm trying to communicate that we're different, and that how you interact with us is going to work differently than other sites.

Kevin B

4:08 PM

It seems almost as if the more time you put into a question, the less likely it is to receive upvotes

Rob

4:19 PM

That's the Bikeshed Problem.

Magisch

4:35 PM

Why is your fish not working?

Improper schooling

fbueckert

My wife keeps telling me puns like that.

And I always groan, because I hate bad puns, while she delights in them.

Mithrandir

Delight in something too much and it'll slowly go dark.

No Distraction Wizard

Why does Quora work?

fbueckert

@Mithrandir I'm going to give you side eye for this one.

I don't know how to make that in ASCII, so just assume I'm doing it.

No Distraction Wizard

No... that's not the right question... because anything can work based on their users' perspective...

Kevin B

4:52 PM

doesn't quora pay people to ask "good" questions

No Distraction Wizard

5:05 PM

migrates to Biology.SE

fbueckert

I thought it was pay to answer.

Gotta give experts some incentive to help the clueless.

Rob

6:02 PM

Reassuring words from the Blog: "We have not identified any breach of customer or user data.". Whew, and we were worried that the person had created an account and went into the review queue as a Moderator. Glad everything is OK.

Margarine

6:27 PM

@Rob I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not

Robbing @Rob's user data

Kevin B

meh

Vote Dukakis

@Rob There is no "customer or user data" in the review queue that is not publicly visible

I mean the standard review queue, which we know the user accessed.

I would not know about mod dashboard access, but it would be logged by SE if it happened.

Rob

6:44 PM

Mehr

No Distraction Wizard

There's nothing interesting about review queue as a Mod...

Vote Dukakis

What kind of an attacker uses the elevated privilege to approve a suggested edit?

Tinkeringbell

@VoteDukakis One that's either not that malicious or just really bad at wreaking havoc

No Distraction Wizard

And even then, Mods are still rate-limited (I still can't apply my edits on more than 3 posts in less than 5 seconds)

Vote Dukakis

7:03 PM

5

A: When will we launch? UPDATE (launched date delayed)

Update: At the moment, it is probably not feasible to launch next week due to ongoing security work. I apologize for the delay, but I will update this post when I have a more concrete launch date. original post: Site launches are typically approved on a Thursday or Friday, and scheduled for...

One that really hates Operations Research and wants to delay its launch...

Tinkeringbell

7:22 PM

@VoteDukakis Oi.. that's no fun for the Operation Research people :(

No Distraction Wizard

Hmm... looks like tag-only edit on on-hold question doesn't go into reopen review queue?

if that's the case, make sense though

Vote Dukakis

Yes, body edits only: Reference: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196074/…

Incidentally, this appears to be a reasonable feature request:

26

Q: Tag and title edits should not remove a question from Close queue

Any edit from the Close Queue removes the question from the queue — even if the editor did nothing but add a tag. This is inconsistent with the behavior of the Reopen Queue: for an edit to put a question there, it has to modify the question body. The edits that touch only the title and/or tags ...

No Distraction Wizard

(lost a chance to increase the stat for reopen review queue...)

Vote Dukakis

The revision history is less reasonable.

Btw, I don't see animuson around much.

> I work for Stack Overflow as a Senior Product Support Specialist.

A new position or a new title for the same one? Used to be Community Growth Operations Specialist.

Who is the product being supported?

Kevin B

we are!

rene

7:35 PM

@VoteDukakis New title. No raise

Vote Dukakis

> Handling product support tickets for Community, Talent, and Teams, community management and meta participation, and some internal programming tasks. Plus a whole bunch of other random tasks, of course.

Ah. I can imagine that Teams would take up the bulk of his time.

Olivia

@VoteDukakis SE just confirmed it was a security breach, with more details coming later

No Distraction Wizard

Breach on the beach

Olivia

If the details of the breach are breached, does that mean the breachers notify the breached about the breach of the breach in the breach?

Kevin B

7:55 PM

yes

Vote Dukakis

> At Stack Overflow we have a world class product team. We're looking for a product manager to join us on our flagship product, Stack Overflow Q&A. I'm biased, but this is definitely the coolest PM job in the world. stackoverflow.com/company/work-here/1447417/product-manager … -- Will Cole at 3:39 PM - 26 Nov 2018

If the job was indeed so cool, I'd expect people to stay on it for longer.

fbueckert

Well, it's fun to work on the product. It's not so fun to have to deal with the people who use the product.

Catija

8:58 PM

@VoteDukakis We solved that problem... we're hiring a second one so they can keep each other sane. :D

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

9:11 PM

So for normal users not clued in, a staff member's account was compromised and used to issue mod diamonds to an account?

fbueckert

@Catija Mutual trauma for everybody!

Catija

@fbueckert Fun for the whole company! :D

fbueckert

In other news, today is Antman marathon day.

Catija

Is it a marathon if there's only two movies?

Margarine

Well, we are talking about ants.

It's only 42 centimeters.

fbueckert

9:16 PM

To prep for Endgame on Sunday.

Catija

They're fun movies but they utterly fail when it comes to physics.

fbueckert

@Catija When it takes the whole evening, I'd say so.

Margarine

@fbueckert I actually like more how the second one fit in the grand timeline though

fbueckert

@Catija You don't watch Marvel movies for realistic physics.

Catija

No... but these are worse than the average Marvel film.

Margarine

9:17 PM

Some light- and bighearted colorful mishmash after Thanos wrecks half of every watcher's heart.

fbueckert

Or if you do, you turn into a gibbering mess about halfway through any of them.

I mean...Iron Man would have major concussion issues from all the hits he's taken.

Margarine

@Catija First one maaaaaybe, but second one? Come on

Catija

Hotwheels cars can not go 60 MPH.

fbueckert

Tank on a keychain?

That sounds like a fantastic way to add material to Earth's core.

Catija

It's 1:64th scale, so that means 60MPH on the dashboard would be about 1 MPH for a regular-sized human?

Is that right?

fbueckert

9:19 PM

I don't know much about how cars figure out how fast they're going.

Other than it's a calculation made by monitoring how fast the front wheels are going.

Catija

Rotational speed of the wheels gets converted to flat speed

Margarine

@Catija Actually, we have seen pretty speedy jumps from antman that would be impossible

It's not just the scale

fbueckert

But, again, you don't watch Marvel movies for accurate physics. :P

Margarine

But also relative size to the rest of the universe? Dunno.

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

Put a mark on the edge of one wheel and measure the circumference

Margarine

9:20 PM

@fbueckert IKR

fbueckert

Otherwise everyone and their dog would have nanotech reactors for everything.

Energy crisis solved!

Margarine

Rule of thumb, if you need more than a minute to think if something is consistent with the physics of the universe it's set in, then you should drop that.

Catija

Suspension of disbelief is a thing but sometimes even that is put through its paces.

fbueckert

Suspension of belief needs exercise, too!

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

Aside from the new beta site launch for OR, has anything else been delayed due to the security issues?

Margarine

9:29 PM

@Catija Well, I'm kinda a nudgy person when it comes to that. If the film starts off with something ridiculous, then I'd get skeptical till the end and even pick holes where none exist. But considering my skeptical part already being busy with the implications of things shrinking and biggening, and that no other type of ridiculousness was offered, I just dismissed it when I saw that.

@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Hmm, Europe's economic workaround to cooperate and keep Iran in JCPOA.

Holy crap, this is bigger than we expected

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

@Margarine Er…?

Margarine

Well, that was due to 'security issues' too :p

Journeyman Geek

10:42 PM

@fbueckert I have credits on the first one

@VoteDukakis one of the things I noticed is the CM team is getting formal specialisations

@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog I don't think that was what was said

forest

11:24 PM

(How does user475381 always find me the minute I join?)

Vote Dukakis

Roy Montague may try to present the attack as a case of self-defense..

Roy Montague - A Case Of Self Defence

►

I liked Traces of Her better.

forest

I think it would be real neat if SE set Referer-Policy: same-origin as a HTTP header.

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

stroopwafels

forest

:p

Still lost that 100 rep, but I don't really care. I deserved that.

Still think SE disabling referers would have saved my ass. :P

Journeyman Geek

@forest tbh

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

11:32 PM

Is it considered a successful appeal or just a reduction to time served?

forest

Successful appeal, I think.

Journeyman Geek

Totally your fault. Also security fail

forest

Tink unsuspended me after looking into it more.

@JourneymanGeek Yeah that's true.

Journeyman Geek

@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog we decided that it was ineptitude over maliciousness

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

I did some (own, independent) research and posted my findings in Shadow's Den, if anyone wants context

forest

11:33 PM

In my defense, I tried uploading it to Stack Imgur but it said unsupported format!

(Still the fault of my own idiocy though)

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

This is the most salient point

Journeyman Geek

@forest in two places.

forest

Yeah lmao

It must have looked really bad for me. I mean I triple-checked that the image I was seeing was what I thought it was before posting it again, but never thought to open up inspect element networking tab and see if it was being served through the cache.

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

@JourneymanGeek A "reduction to time served" would mean that they are still banned from running in an election for the next year, whereas a successful appeal would mean that they aren't

in Shadow's Den, 13 hours ago, by Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

Though that trap crosses the line IMO. Browser caching would render the proper image on their side but others would see the NSFW image.

I didn't post any URLs there, and since a CM redacted the original URL from the deleted post, I'm not going to.

forest

(And I swear to god if Giphy pulls the same thing...)

There, refreshed browser with cache disabled! It's safe!

@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Yeah it's not something you would have wanted to see. Shock images as a hotlinking defense. Dangerous.

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

11:42 PM

Pulling a Photobucket is enough to get them to stop, no need to go over the line

forest

What does Photobucket do?

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

@forest theverge.com/2017/7/4/15919224/…

forest

ah

Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog

tl;dr for years they allowed hotlinking, then all of a sudden they started serving error messages to hotlinkers

forest

Well this was from an imageboard (even if it was a benign one), so I'm not surprised that they would go over the line. It just comes with the culture.

@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Funny, that just gives me plain/text saying "Forbidden". Damn Tor.

Journeyman Geek

11:55 PM

@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog dosen't matter unless they stand for election

forest

I'd want to run for an election if it's on a site I care about.

Not Meta.SE though since I almost never visit it.

Journeyman Geek

And if you did - just check with a CM early

forest

cool

Rob