Tavern on the Meta

2:00 PM

上 that's my feeling right now :/

@JourneymanGeek even after you rephrased it the question still has issues. I doubt you can fix that without changing tactics and if you do, you'll invalidate existing answers

Journeyman Geek

@rene It probably does

rene

You might try one with toxic in it and see if that goes any better ;)

Journeyman Geek

I don't want to

I don't think there's any ill intent

and its perfectly fine if someone's idea of what's best is different.

Its on me to convince them, eventually ;p

rene

Yes, well ... you need better arguments to win me over then ;)

Journeyman Geek

2:07 PM

Its always a work in progress

And I'd like the word toxic in "Hey, we're much better and friendlier than we used to be X months ago"

Anne Daunted

There's a reason I don't vote to close etc. on MSE anymore. If you do, you are just an easy target.

Journeyman Geek

that's to say, not at all. Its lazy

@AnneDaunted No one should feel bad for voting to close if they feel it is appropriate

Anne Daunted

@JourneymanGeek Not even when people gain reputation by posting questions complaining about curators?

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted I'm not going to tell people how to vote

rene

@AnneDaunted But we need those posts so we can curate ...

Journeyman Geek

2:11 PM

And honestly - I'm pretty happy with taking the hit if it ends up unpopular too

rene

after all the curators are at the top of the food chain ...

Anne Daunted

@rene Closing the question complaining about close voters, editing the question complaining about editors, downvoting the question complaining about downvotes etc.?

rene

@AnneDaunted yep, you can have so much fun with those. Irony is a powerful message.

The limit is probably when you're called out. Then you better sit on your hands

Anne Daunted

@rene That's true

rene

@AnneDaunted just for the record: I think you're doing fine on MSE. Don't worry about it.

Meta Andrew T.

2:16 PM

I'd love very much closing MSE as a dupe of MSO...

Anne Daunted

@rene Thanks! I still flag spam, though. For as long as it's allowed. I guess the spammers didn't understand yet that all they have to do is to complain more.

Journeyman Geek

._.

@AnneDaunted Honestly - the main reason I post on MSE is to try to influence things

MSE rep is worth pretty much nothing

Meta Andrew T.

@JourneymanGeek try MSO then ;)

Journeyman Geek

@MetaAndrewT. I've no interest in SO for now

Anne Daunted

Speaking of MSO:

142

Q: Declaring a Review strike until efficiency improvements are implemented

Reviewing (together with interlinking existing content) is one of the key tasks for the SO community now that the site is past its initial growth stage. And the infamous overload of review queues and other community feedback shows that the current mechanism for that task is not efficient enough. ...

2

Journeyman Geek

2:18 PM

Chunks of the rest of the network, sure.

Meta Andrew T.

@AnneDaunted wut, MSO has psa? TIL...

Anne Daunted

2:29 PM

@JourneymanGeek I understand that this is one of your pet peeves. But your post comes across as mostly criticising the MSE curators (specifically those voting to close as dupes). It might have been better had you instead focused your post on how to use dupe votes (talk about the tool, not the user), how to handle possible duplicates (before / instead of closing them), the FAQ as a dupe target etc.

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted but I don't want to tell people what to do

That's worse.

No one likes being told what to do

I want people to think even if their conclusions are not what I want them to think

Anne Daunted

@JourneymanGeek I understand, that's why I advocate not doing that but rather having an open discussion about the problem you perceive. "Could we be a little less eager with the dupehammers?" comes across as criticising a specific group of users and trying to tell them what to do.

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted Well - I laid out what I felt was the problem

I narrowed the scope as far as I could

Meta Andrew T.

The post is already in a deadlocked state, as rene said...

Journeyman Geek

@MetaAndrewT. can't win em all.

And if a dupe close feels like the most useful thing, that's what people should be doing

Anne Daunted

2:34 PM

@JourneymanGeek And it looks like in your eyes the problem are those users and what they do, so they have to do it differently or not at all. I'm just trying to tell you that you might have gotten better and more constructive results and less hurt feelings with a different approach.

Sonic the Anonymous WizHog

@AnneDaunted To be honest, his post didn't come across that way to me at first (the edited version even less so).

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted Well I'm not sure what that is.

Its an issue people are going disagree on

Sonic the Anonymous WizHog

And I do often use the duplicate reason if it's more helpful to the OP, i.e. voting to close something closeable as one of the other reasons as a dupe instead, to point the OP to an answer

Anne Daunted

@JourneymanGeek I was apparently unsuccessful in pointing you towards a better approach.

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted I think I'm seeing in your pointing the same thing you're seeing in my post.

I can't discuss dupe closures without the people voting getting annoyed

and that's a risk I need to take

Sonic the Anonymous WizHog

2:38 PM

As an aside: the most interesting abuse of MathJax I've ever seen.

Journeyman Geek

There's no safe option

Anne Daunted

@JourneymanGeek But maybe a better one than, for example "I've noticed that quite a few folks tend to be really enthusiastic with their dupe-hammers."

Instead, you might have left out dupe voters entirely and just focused on whether to keep possible dupes open or not etc.

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted True - but I felt that was the case

I'd even say that's to some extent, over a longer period of time, my call to action.

So having that seemed like something I wanted to do

And critically it didn't feel correct without it

Meta Andrew T.

Well, I just decided to read the whole Q&A, and I think the question vector was a bit missed... but que sera sera~

Anne Daunted

I just wanted to add another persepctive. That a community moderating and curating content is a good thing people should be glad about. But maybe you only know that when you have seen what it leads to without that.

ShaWiz

2:51 PM

@MetaAndrewT. knock knock

Meta Andrew T.

@ShaWiz meow meow?

ShaWiz

@MetaAndrewT. woof woof!

Meta Andrew T.

@ShaWiz "woof woof" meow?

Journeyman Geek

@AnneDaunted Which is fine. I've seen what happens when a community is too hung up on quality control, and what happens when we have too little

Sometimes a little nudge is useful.

Mithrandir

@MetaAndrewT. buddy you're a boy make a big noise

Meta Andrew T.

2:57 PM

@Mithrandir playing in the street gonna be a big man someday

Journeyman Geek

You got mud on your face you big disgrace....

rene

3:58 PM

Well, How Stack Overflow upgraded from Windows Server 2012 kept my attention till the end. That was an awesome read. Thanks @Taryn ...

I specially liked the plot twists ...

Feeds

What a very bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

Sara Chipps on July 18, 2019

“Caustic community for new users. There is no excuse for not being kind!” – 6 years coding

“It feels too scary and unaccessible for new developers” – 3 years coding

“People could be less brutal” – 6 years coding

“The attitude is not beginner friendly. Askers are expected to have done a lot of research before asking a question (re: both question format and content), even if they are completely new to the community or topic. Not everyone can understand or even know to look for documentation when they’re completely new to programming.” – 12 years coding experience …

Kevin B

4:17 PM

meh

Shog9

4:30 PM

ok, that onebox makes the post look.... not great. It's really better than that.

rene

all one-boxes are not great when it comes to the blog.

@Shog9 evidenced by chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7821404#7821404 as well

Kevin B

shouldn't it be presenting, like, the headers of the post, not a list

maybe the title and first paragraph

or hell, the title and the description

rene

@KevinB if anything, it shouldn't pick text from somewhere near the middle

Kevin B

it's already in the meta tags

hmm... why does the og:description have so much of the article in it? it should just be a sentence or two, or in this case the first paragraph or somethin

same with the twitter description

it's massive

rene

I suspect that an </closingtag> went missing somewhere when an WordPress template got updated.

Kevin B

4:38 PM

oh, it's not using paragraph tags, that could be problematic for my proposed solution

rene

I think there is a semantic conflict between what the Feed bot expects and the blog designer created.

Kevin B

i suspect if it were, it would just work, considering how it stopped at the first ul it came across

the onebox though, no idea

why would it ever choose a ul/li rather than a bunch of text, lol

rene

@Shog9 maybe related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329450/…

in that same timeframe: chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7780337#7780337

On Feb, 14th it seemed okay: chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7555714#7555714

Let's hope WordPress keeps revisions as well ...

Kevin B

If you view the source, you can see that the one on the 14th has paragraph tags

and a lot of other markup

Recapping Stack Overflow’s First Ever Make-A-Thon

Rich Moy on February 14, 2019

After an exciting end to 2018, we kicked this year off with the first “hackathon” in Stack Overflow’s 10-year history. Unlike a traditional hackathon, it wasn’t just for our developers. Any employee working on our products or directly with the Stack Overflow community was encouraged to participate, which is why we dubbed the event a “Make-A-Thon.”

Employees from our engineering, design, and support teams spent a full week working on projects outside of their typical day-to-day responsibilities. For our inaugural Make-A-Thon, participants brainstormed improvements to our power user and moderator experience on Stack Overflow. …

Might just be a case of how the person making the post put the content into the post, for example copy pasting from app A or app B

vs just curating it using wordpress

rene

Or maybe which template they use for the post? I assume that is how WordPress works: select template, assign content source, and done

Kevin B

4:56 PM

i have a wordpress install sitting around, i can test that theory.

well, not the template part i guess, but whether or not it puts in paragraph tags or what triggers them in the base post making tool.

for example, shift enter vs just enter

rene

what does that do?

Kevin B

dunno what it does in wordpress, but in other wysiwyg editors, it was the difference between getting a new paragraph tag and a break tag.

eh, can't get the thing to even load

lol

Ooooh. it's after 12:am, it shutdown.

rene

@KevinB Ah, that makes sense

Magisch

contrarian cactus: I like the new blog post

it's actually a pretty nice and insightful breakdown on how system design affects user perception even when everyone involved is acting in good faith

Kevin B

Hmm... wordpress has quite a different post editor now

it uses "blocks", which when rendered are paragraphs

so.... i dunno what they're doing to end up with post content that doesn't contain a paragraph tag

Magisch

5:06 PM

It gives me some hope that they've honed in on the real problem that causes unfriendly interactions and frustrated new users, which means they can start working on correcting that

rene

@KevinB it is beyond our debugging abilities. The magic ball is foggy

Kevin B

unless ofc my install has a plugin that wholesale replaces the editor

(it does, but supposedly i'm not in that editing mode atm)

rene

@Magisch lesson learned: more policy change announcements on Friday ...

Magisch

obvs it's not guaranteed that its going to work

but it just might

Mithrandir

5:20 PM

@Magisch I like it too

Kevin B

I'll just wait for the results

Meta Andrew T.

5:59 PM

TGIF!

Tinkeringbell

Whaat? No... still a good night's sleep to go before it comes to that!

Meta Andrew T.

Oh, right, I have to sleep first...

Mgetz

@Shog9 no... it's worse than that news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471428 the cynicism is sadly well deserved. I read the post, and I don't disagree but this has been addressed multiple times on various metas. At the end of the day it comes down to the powers that be deciding what they want SO to be: A site with the authoritative answer or the site that helps those that don't know what they don't know.

Mgetz

6:15 PM

Holy phishing email batman:

> Dear Software Engineer,

We hope this email finds you well. We are a group of software engineering and data analytics researchers from Concordia University and Queen’s University in Canada.

Currently, we are conducting research on the evolution of Stack Overflow. We are hoping that you could help us by filling out a short survey about your experience of using Stack Overflow.

The survey contains 24 questions and should only take 5 to 10 minutes to complete. We really appreciate your participation. Your input will help our research towards understanding and improving the Stack Overflow…

Tinkeringbell

First question: What's your social security number?

We need it to determine your social class/background and possible biases

Mgetz

@Tinkeringbell didn't even click the link but yeah I suspect it's that sort of garbage, reported it to gmail as phishing

A) how did they get my email? B) why are they sending me a google doc (I omitted that because potential security risks)

rene

@Mgetz see meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/387146/…

Tinkeringbell

@Mgetz A) Getting your email is easy smirk. B) Because it has security risks!

rene

[displayname]@gmail.com?

Meta Andrew T.

6:24 PM

@Mgetz that email found you really well...

Mgetz

@rene oddly no

@MetaAndrewT. I'm paranoid as is, also amused they are sending from a gmail account to make it look legit by using an "on behalf of" header for the user manik.ruet08@gmail.com

whomever that is

I'm guessing someone who now needs a password reset

Meta Andrew T.

@Mgetz someone who has a WordPress blog and posted his academic result on there...

Mgetz

Well I suspect they are about to have a very annoyed conversation with IT from their Uni then as all of that uni gets marked as suspicious

Meta Andrew T.

6:52 PM

Looks like I can't even have a good night sleep... 5 mosquitoes and counting... (where did they come from suddenly???)

Tinkeringbell

@MetaAndrewT. stagnant water pools nearby?

Meta Andrew T.

I believe no stagnant water pool inside my room...

no open window/door either...

Tinkeringbell

Hmm. They must've used some mission impossible tactics then

Meta Andrew T.

:O

Mgetz

@MetaAndrewT. they can fit through incredibly tiny gaps

Tinkeringbell

6:56 PM

Yeah... but you can avoid that by turning mosquitoes into elephants!

rene

7:09 PM

then you have 5 elephants in the room. Not sure if that makes sleeping easier for @MetaAndrewT. ....

Shog9

7:24 PM

Tinkeringbell

7:55 PM

@rene Ehh. Yeah, the recommended approach is to do it before they enter your room, so that they're prevented from entering through incredibly tiny gaps.

rene

Okay, fair enough.

Journeyman Geek

11:36 PM

@KevinB oh . I think the classic editor is a plugin and Gutenberg a default

I prefer Gutenberg though

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