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→ 6 messages moved to Chimney

hm. New person followed me on twitter. His https and website is broken :/

Am tempted to DM to let him know but I have no idea who this person actually is ;p

Wanted to gauge preliminary support for an idea I have: getting rid of pro-tem moderators entirely, and making all moderators "tenured" (with the same rights as elected moderators on graduated sites).

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog That vaguely assumes that there's no more betas

and being a beta mod is harder

So the tiny bit of extra recognition is nice

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog We need a way to force an opportunity for refreshing the mod team. It's a graceful way for existing mods to step down if they think they've done their bit but we also give the community the chance to choose others they think are good moderators. The beta mods are often from the first couple of hundred users on a site... they're often great mods but the next thousand users may have even better ones. That's part of why we force all sites to have elections when they leave beta.

@Catija ...and also part of why you force moderators who don't get reelected to step down?

Word choice!

When you're a pro-tem mod, there's an understanding that you'll need to stand for election

That perfectly describes why we want a new election upon leaving beta, but doesn't explain why the moderators who previously served should be forced to leave.

I mean... JG should understand, if anyone does... If I remember correctly?

yup

I'm aware of the word choice, but my proposal was to "get rid of pro-tem mods entirely"

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog so - the expectations of a pro-tem mod is basically, we're going to throw you into the deep end

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog Principle of least privilege... Also, "too many cooks in the kitchen". We don't need any more people with access than need access... and if there's not enough mod work for three people, having six is even worse. It's just not fun to moderate a site with more mods than necessary.

?

elected or not - you often don't have the depth or breadth of experience an older site has. If the community feels you're a good mod, you might win anyway (and its the one place where I guess its a recall election). As a pro-tem mod who didn't stand for election, and lost one, that's fine

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog eh, SO actually has an insane workload for mods

so that's inaccurate.

Serving as a pro-tem mod puts you at a candidate score disadvantage.

Actually they have a different set of issues as far as mod mechanics goes

rolleyes

ON THE OTHER HAND, everyone knows how you are as a mod

(I mean, there are some voters who vote purely based on candidate score)

For instance, as a mod, you are explicitly disqualified from earning Deputy or Marshal, both of which are candidate score badges

Most pro-tems get reelected if they run... People see "I've been moderating this site since it opened" and they tend to pick them over people with better scores...

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog well, you're unlikely to have as broad a voting audience (is that the word?) on a beta site

and I'm totally spitballing this - but I suspect one of the reasons SE's got pro-tem mod elections is, the network is too big for our CMs to keep track of every site in the beta track, and this means we might not miss a few folks who've done good work on their communities.

nonetheless its a very different experience. Granted it has been on each of the different ways I've gotten a diamond ;p

@Catija Also, another quick question regarding moderator terms: it was stated that the appointed mods here on Meta Stack Exchange are, for all intents, "tenured" moderators, meaning that they have right-of-return, etc. Does this also apply for Ask Patents and Stack Apps, the two other non-beta sites that don't get their main moderators through elections?

Oh, also, @ShaWiz We actually elect our sheriffs here in lots of places. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriffs_in_the_United_States

> Unlike most officials in law enforcement in the United States, sheriffs are usually elected, although some states have laws requiring certain law enforcement qualifications of candidates.

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog or MSE ;p

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog Dunno. Probably? Hasn't ever come up.

The right of return thing though - its fundamentally so a mod who loses interest, or gets bushwhacked by real life has the option of taking a long, no foul break

I think Catija stated a while back that "appointed mods don't have a right of return".

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog lets say, I get a new job. I end up realising I have no time to mod MSE, and tell the folks here "Hey, I can't do this any more"

Meaning that if a pro-tem moderator steps down, if they wanted to regain privileges, they'd have to wait till the next call for appointments or pro-tem election, or if the site graduated in the meantime, the next "tenured" moderator election.

You're in love with that tenured term

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog practically - there's nothing stopping SE from re-appointing an ex mod

and getting your diamond back isn't "automatic" - its just understood its possible

Stop thinking about the rules as written and consider the intent

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, there were two former "tenured" moderators who resigned under good terms and then later got suspended network-wide...SE's unlikely to grant them privileges if they later request it.

uhm.

The only folks I can think of who were like that had deep issues

and "good terms" might mean "we wanted to handle this politely and with dignity" over "they did nothing wrong"

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog What company is a green box an advert for?

Heh, looking at the actual tag, it doesn't seem like an actual company is sponsoring the tag. (But the question is still site-specific as tag sponsorships and icons are a Stack Overflow-only thing.)

Please be a bit careful... take some time to actually digest the real question.

Given that you're a CM, do you happen to know if this is being investigated right now?

Green box?

Sounds like HPe's logo

@Catija otherwise someone is going to need an antacid

Ah. Looking at MSO, guess not.

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog wasn't reported until most people were out for the day ...

Better late than morning...

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog I was actually thinking of writing a meta post about this recently arguing that it's a useless distinction.

The only thing that does is discourage pro-tem mods from resigning.

Useless is a bit strong. In order to have an election upon leaving beta - which does serve an important purpose - we need to require that all mods stand in the election. If you want to propose that beta mods have right to return for the duration of beta, that's one thing but I don't see an argument for not running elections when sites leave beta. They're two separate things.

That's not what I meant - I meant that for the stage that a site is in, differentiating between the mods' abilities to return is not useful. A beta mod should be able to step down and return if the site is still in beta when they want to return. Graduated mods can step down and return, and, well, the site's not going to get ungraduated. Having elections upon graduation isn't what I was talking about.

The discussion was about getting rid of the different types at all, so there's no way for me to know what you meant since you didn't specify. :)

And it's almost 2 am.

Anyway... depending on what we end up deciding is the end of beta, it's possible that beta sites won't really need right to return. The only reason it's a problem is when you have sites still in beta 3-9 years later.

@Catija Yeah. Lit is coming up on three years soon, and I know I'm going to have to step down when I head into the army... so you could say I have a vested interest in the matter.

@Catija Sorry for bothering you (I assume that you are busy with other things now). I just wanted to check whether my ping in MathOverflow room reached you.

I guess I am not asking this in the ideal time of the day - but since I saw you in chat, I have at least tried.

@Martin Yeah. Sorry. The last 6-8 months have been a bit of a juggle as it relates to site designs. I'm hoping to have more info by the end of August.

Thanks for the response!

Yep! I've got a (short-ish) list of sites that still really want some changes made to their designs and MO is one of them... just... have to get the right people looking at it. Thanks for keeping in touch about it.

I cant imagine what its like to be a CM right now

Imagine a juggler...

With about 10 balls...

plus 2-3 burning torches...

@Catija really?? Had no idea... thanks! :)

@Catija flaming chainsaws or angry cats?

and maybe a running chainsaw.

Hey don't let those balls fall, @Cat. :)

... And I'm also doing some plate spinning with the other hand.

Anything on your head?

And then apply that to all of the CMs.

@ShaWiz Balancing a scimitar on my nose?

hmm

:D

I saw that there is mod election on webapps. I'm a bit curious whether there will be some candidates over there.

And getting no sleep. Gus will be up in five hours so...

@Martin A couple of the active users seem like they might step up? But it's been only ~12 hours... give it some time. :D

Go to sleep already...

Well, as one questions in the 2019 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection pointed out, only a few users are active on meta on that site.

@Catija hire that bot:

:P

@Catija be thankful he sleeps full night.... my baby (toddler? 2.5 y/o now) never sleep more than 5-6 hours in a row, always waking up at least once during the night. (anywhere between 12 am and 3 am, no matter when she fell asleep) :/

Uhh... do we have something that might improve multiple SE chat rooms experience?

(I feel like Vivaldi will be one of the answers...)

Do we?

@MetaAndrewT. oh, depends on what you want

on larger screens vivaldi does have a really nice tab tiling option, and "web snippets" will let you run a mobile site as a sidebar

yeah, I guess a TweetDeck for multiple SE chat rooms ^_^

@MetaAndrewT. yes we have @Bart

@ShaWiz can I have @Bart?

Oh, wait, I already have it...

Just put him in multiple rooms, and they'll all be improved.

A @Bart-full room is so much better than @Bart-less room. :D

@Mgetz hey that's not fair. Why poo doesn't have the right to cool off with a fan? ;)

Hmm... putting multiple mobile chat rooms side-by-side like TweetDeck...

Beware, some might be toxic and burn the nearby rooms too.

@MetaAndrewT. ^^^

@MetaAndrewT. ^^^^

@JourneymanGeek thanks, that would be great to juggle 5+ chat rooms!

@MetaAndrewT. the left side's the web snippet option

it sends a mobile useragent

the rest - if its an odd number of sites, it will vertically stripe them, else its like that

@JourneymanGeek err, we can't manually arrange the windows-in-window?

Oh, you can

I think

yup

great! plus the "switch to mobile chat" link in the bottom right, then it might be more convenient instead of swapping tabs

well when I do this, I try to keep it one chat server a panel

it's hard to keep one char though...

@Mithrandir Awww :( Do you really have to? Can't mark yourself absent for a year or two and moderate the weekends? ;)

@Mithrandir TBH - that's something that we vaguely need a protocol for ;p

but yeah that's probably a reasonable reason to take a break from being an (active) mod

So smarter people than me....

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331854/… why is this attracting spam?

Because spammers will be spammers and post somewhere?

probably something in it trips off relevancy filters spammers use to target their posts

or a cosmic happenstance, who knows

alright, time to go work to back...

@JourneymanGeek spammer lost their keys

@MetaAndrewT. No way. Not before September 2nd :P

@Tinkeringbell you on holiday?

@Magisch Yep :)

shakes fist

@Magisch Sorry. I'll try not to act too happy :P

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@Tinkeringbell Technically, probably, but I don't think that'd exactly be fair, either to the other current mods or the users.

@Mithrandir Yeah... perhaps not :/ Blegh :(

hm

mh

@Marshmallow M

@ShaWiz L

Okay. You're all sounding pretty bored :P

@Marshmallow S

@Tinkeringbell Look who is talking being in the tavern on the meta during their vacation :D

@Magisch Well, crochet and chat and a movie go pretty well all together ;)

@Marshmallow 4-hit combo!?

@Tinkeringbell Movie? What're you watching?

@MetaAndrewT. FINISH HIM

@Marshmallow Lord of the Rings, makes good background noise :)

HIM!?

@Tinkeringbell (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

@Tinkeringbell Me? Bored?

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, you. you sound bored :P

@Marshmallow Why the table flip? Now all my threads are jumbled together :(

(I'm in the middle of a haiku install)

@Tinkeringbell No it's actually the TV. It just looks like that

you have two taverns.

@JourneymanGeek A haiku that needs installing first? Must be a fancy one ;)

@Tinkeringbell its an OS

@Marshmallow Weird tv you have :P

@JourneymanGeek Heh, wearing a kimono?

its kind of a spirtual decendant of BeOS - in the sense that linux is a unix decendant but closer.

@MetaAndrewT. Why do we need a spare?

I just installed it on a system I think is older than my dog

@ShaWiz He doesn't. He goes down about 8 and then wakes up sometime around 11 and again around 3....

hm 2006

slightly younger ;p

Oh man. Old systems. Mario. Pac man.

@JourneymanGeek 2006? Oh man, I think I didn't even own a system back then :P

Its so old It is an IBM thinkpad with a 4:3 screen

Larger than life keyboards

@Tinkeringbell one was built in another county 😮

built like a brick doghouse man

Its the nokia 3310 of laptops

@MetaAndrewT. county? :P

Andrew is a fine gentleman with a greasy mustache.

brb lol-ing

I mustache-q a question...

Good Sir, I mustache you to leave this fine establishment.

to me, "fine establishment" is a place where they determine how much you have to pay for your transgressions.

yes. That would be 200 dollars.

@AdamLear Out of curiosity, why unprotect this question?

15 minutes later, there was another spam answer.

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog Didn't feel like it was necessary (the last spam answer before that was a year ago)

Time to install Vivaldi~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

@AdamLear Are you OK with being pinged for nuking cross-site spam accounts?

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog Not really. I don't mind destroying them if I'm around/not busy/happen to see them, but no offense... if I say yes here, you'll be pinging me for every single one and I'm not into that.

@AdamLear No problem, I'll stick to pinging JNat (who is OK with such pings), but since you're here, can you please nuke this one? stackexchange.com/users/16458418/maximux-infinity

Sure, done

@AdamLear Network profile still exists

it's a stub, nothing to delete there

Ah, it's not a physical one that has to be manually nuked.

Right. I nuked the site profiles, though. Mind you, they were already blocked from posting, so this doesn't really do much anyway

Does signing in on stackexchange.com still create a physical profile that will have to be manually removed even after all site accounts are deleted? The login mechanism recently changed to being through Meta Stack Exchange rather than on the site itself, so did that change that?

I don't recall. I know we're eventually planning to remove physical se.com profiles, but not sure if we're still creating them

@AdamLear Also, another (final) quick question: meta.stackexchange.com/q/244266 was, for a long time, attributed to the deleted user259867 (as per WayBackMachine records), but I just now noticed that it's today attributed to a different user who just registered their account five days ago.

How did that happen?

A quirk in the migration code. This question was migrated over to MSE, so when this new user profile was created, we checked if there are migrated questions that belong to the account but aren't mapped to a user and assigned it over

Yeah, I did in fact suspect that it was related to migration, but I checked the migration stub and it was also posted by a deleted user.

How was that data still kept, though?

We store the account id on post migration history, IIRC

Ah, that makes sense.

Welp, I ended up with this, with the help of Vivaldi...

good luck ever being productive again

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@MetaAndrewT. I'm in the picture ...

@JourneymanGeek Spam account: meta.stackexchange.com/users/585356/oimtec

plz-delete chapter headings meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331899/… @Bart @rene @Glorfindel

gone

freeze frame high five

Kaboomed by BSR

Or RBS?

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog - I don't consider spam accounts important enough to ping me - just drop a link here and you might notice the are gone eventually. That said - I have an RSS feed of MSE and SU spam post from smokey so there's a reasonably good chance that it will be gone anyway as and when I have the time.

@JourneymanGeek Okay.

By the way, do you mind if I ping you for spam accounts that are more than a month old and were probably missed?

I am concerned though that you are slipping back into the habit of pinging staff, and it's worth remembering this is meant to be a social space for them too.

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog I read all the scrollback

Allllllll of it

So literally just throw in a link, mention it's a spammer and it ought to get eventually handled

@JourneymanGeek Well, the first ping was related to a specific moderator action he had just taken. Then the rest of the conversation was just since he was in the room.

I protected a question since it had two spam answers. Then he unprotected it, and fifteen minutes later there was another spam answer. So I asked him why he unprotected it.

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog pinging people specifically for moderation actions isn't ok

We have these things called flags.

They're amazing

@JourneymanGeek Not to request moderator action. But to ask a question about a moderator action already taken.

No difference

You flag em anyway

We have ways

I thought flags were for requesting moderator action, not for simply asking questions about already-taken moderator actions?

Uhm. Flags are for getting moderator attention

"Please decline this flag and include the answer to my question in the decline reason?"

Uhm no

"Please mark this flag as helpful and include the answer to my question in the helpful reason?"

Isn't that simply inflating my helpful flag count?

You have to use Twitter if you want an answer to any questions.

No one owes you an answer

@forest not helpful

Hey, Tim Post (I think it was him) actually said Twitter was the best way to do that!

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog It'd be hard to ask questions that way with the character limit.

I also wanted to leave a paper trail in case someone who happens to be reading the history of that question accuses me of "wheel warring".

You could add a link to a paste site I guess.

But we can have someone take a look

Not helpful forest.

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog eh paper trails are overrated

So it is against policy to ask a specific moderator why they took a certain action?

Ah, the whole "I never kick anyone without warnings" thing... Would you mind telling me if I'm saying something that you don't want me to say? I would appreciate that.