Tavern on the Meta

2:47 AM

Morning again and again...

4 hours later…

rene

6:54 AM

@MetaAndrewT. ... and again ...

Sonic the Anonymous WizHog

→ 37 messages moved to Chimney

7:12 AM

!!/notify 89 meta

SmokeDetector

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog You'll now get pings from me if I report a post on meta, in room 89 on chat.meta.stackexchange.com

7:24 AM

!!/notice me senpai

SmokeDetector

@MetaAndrewT. No such command 'notice'.

steals @MetaAndrewT.'s socks

@JourneymanGeek 404: No Socks Found

hm. eww

you can have your spleen back then

I'm almost reticulating it, but apparently wrong thing :(

1 hour later…

M.A.R.

8:54 AM

@rene K

What’s in the Works: Improving Feedback for All Users

9:04 AM

I'm still not contented with your spanless

1 hour later…

JNat

10:18 AM

@SonictheAnonymousWizHog gone

5 hours later…

Feeds

2:55 PM

stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/20/meet-the-public-qa-team

Meg Risdal on August 20, 2019

Delivering improved, private feedback to post authors

Not putting users who curate content on the spot

Giving actionable, understandable information for the vast majority of public viewers

Better distinguishing the “Answer” and “Comment” actions (due to a high volume of helpful “Not an answer” flags indicating problems with the interface).

Ways to reduce the number of unhelpful comments that are likely to get removed in the first place.

Upfront guidance for first-time question-askers

Setting expectations for what happens after asking a question …

M.A.R.

Feeds I guess if you post 10 links to the same thing in different forms, one of them is at least going to be oneboxed

@Feeds Yay, a panic attack avoided.

Actually...

How do we feedback to those things?

I posted a comment to the blog post but eh...

We don't.

oh sush.

3:02 PM

They are in charge, they know what they are doing, they are paid for it.

They have user study groups, UX experts, and stuff like that.

@404 Honestly, if I started feeling that way, I'm gone

Well I am feeling that way, and I'm 404.

So yeah, I do actually want to try to give constructive feedback rather than sitting back and going on about how things were better in the old days.

> Subscribe to the blog to keep up with the latest on Stack Overflow.

Um... how does one even do that?

@404 if only there were some way to give feedback.... ;p

No process is perfect. There's always blind spots.

And occationally critique might align with ... well the goals of the people in charge. Yanno, the ones who know what they are doing . ;p

Actually that might work out as a meta question

snort

@404 there's an RSS feed apparently

3:11 PM

And apparently, 2010 called and wanted it back?

pfft

RSS feeds are pretty darned useful

and under appreciated by these darned kids

with the facebooks and tweeters.

M.A.R.

Facebookerers.

Thou shalt not commit Facebookery.

Seems legit.

3:48 PM

Web Applications bulletin says the election ends in 4 hours --- it actually ended 20 hours ago. Off by one, or does it simply change the negative number of days to 0?

If the latter, the notice will be looping from 24 to 0 forever.

And given Office 365 and other kinds of desktop - web hybrids, the site more and more looks like a mistake. Roll whatever useful content is there back into SU. (There is no active userbase to speak of.)

It's a groundhog day phenomenon. They'll be voting over and over again until they elect the right set of mods

There is no onebox for the other blog post, "Meet the Public Q&A team"...

Remember when Jay Hanlon was "EVP of Community, Product, & Culture"?

The role does not appear to exist anymore.

"Director of Public Q&A" looks like the nearest approximation, but it's a level down from where Jay was sitting.

I guess they are not that much into yogurt anymore.

Why doesn't Google simply tell me the answer when I enter "1811 days from now"?

It's something way more practical than "plot y=sin(x^2)" for which it has a thing.

FR: Google should buy and/or integrate WolframAlpha.

It's because Google can't actually parse text. It just picks something that has the right words in the right order and that people have previously visited in Chrome.

4:03 PM

It understands "convert 1811 days into years" just fine.

And yet it has no idea what a kilosecond is

LOL at the "formula" at the bottom.

Google also, for some mysterious reason, refuses to convert seconds into seconds.

Apparently the world's largest company isn't smart enough to multiply by 1

Converting years into seconds: "for an approximate result, multiply the time value by 3.154e+7"

I would add: ""for an even more approximate result, multiply the time value by pi times 1e+7"

If something is more approximate, does it mean it's less precise? Makes sense to me.

shower thought of the day: why does "better approximation" almost invariably mean "harder to calculate"?

4:52 PM

Can you think of any non-employee-authored, heavily-downvoted posts that would've been worth seeing? — Shog9 ♦ 14 mins ago

There aren't any.

Disabling downvotes (and closevotes) on employee-authored posts would be enough.

Probably too complicated to implement, though.

Easier solution: no more employee-authored posts (of the question type) on Meta. That's what the blog is for.

5:16 PM

@404 big downside: the blog has terrible visibility.

1 hour later…

Olivia

6:45 PM

@JohnDvorak big downside: comments are even more hidden, meaning responses can't be used to disprove completely false statements :]

Sonic the Anonymous WizHog

i mean, that's not entirely a bad thing, at least for those making the false statements

;)

7:43 PM

stroopwafels

8:04 PM

@KevinB Yes, they won't be having panic attacks anymore.

not necessarily true

Radiohead - Burn The Witch

8:31 PM

> Abandon all reason
Avoid all eye contact
Do not react
Shoot the messengers
This is a low flying panic attack

(Possibly, from an updated SE guide for communication.)

►

9:06 PM

Let's plan the next iteration of:
(A) The Matrix
(B) Star Wars
(C) Stack Exchange Quality Improvement Project
(D) None of the above

Mithrandir

Production on The Matrix 4 begins early 2020.

9:27 PM

D: Kerbal Space Program

Q: Cancelling election - let's try something else? Testing three-vote question closure

9:37 PM

We regret to inform that due to insufficient nominating candidates, we are currently terminating the ongoing election here on Web Applications. Thank you to Rubén for having stood up as a candidate in this session. However, as explained previously, in order for an election to proceed to voting ph...

> 1. more questions are closed by users (no diamond moderators involved)
2. more questions are reopened by users (no diamond moderators involved)
3. fewer than 1% of closed questions go through more than two close/reopen cycles

1 and 2 are vacuous.

ArtOfCode

same tests that were used on hardware recs

3 is as well - a ghost town does not have any close-reopen wars to begin with.

Yeah, same applies.

Having > 2 cycles requires what, 3*2*3 = 18 different voters?

There are like 3-5 people who ever cast those votes on the entire site.

To be clear, I think it's the right move; just that the testing is superfluous - with these criteria it's automatic success.

10:03 PM

@404 I proposed an alternative which should be easy to implement meta.stackexchange.com/q/332474/383809 . That would ignore the "-7" cut-off only for posts authored by Staff. It would affect only a very small #posts while preventing the situations that happened with the "fingerprinting" discussion.

eh, hiding the fact that people apparently hate something doesn't make it go away, people will simply reach for the next best tool: an answer, or comments. I don't think that necessarily creates a better situation than what we already have.

@KevinB if the question has more than "-7", no activity on it would place it on the frontpage. This is exactly, why i propose to ignore this "-7" cutoff at least for Staff-authored posts.

yeah, i mean, that's good, but... unless the other problem is solved said posts won't exist anyway

kinda feel like getting the negatively scored posts on the front page is the least of the worries

Better case would be to just not allow voting at all on those posts, forcing people to provide feedback through answers and votes on answers.

@KevinB definitely not the first, but definitely not the least.

Can locked questions still be answered?

nope

10:25 PM

@KevinB Do you mean that the posts I am trying to address would be eventually locked? I guess it might happen. For some situations only. And after the majority of the regular MSE users have already seen them.

nah

was thinking about a solution using existing tools

oh :) sorry.

lock the post, disabling voting/commenting on the question while allowing answers, but, that's not how it works

yeah, I don't think there exists a combination of the currently existing tools that would enable the desired behaviour.