@V2Blast The first ine is from Mi Yodeya because that’s where I had an available screenshot from. The second one is from Meta here, but it’s the same on other sites as well.
They are also not exactly the same page, as one is sorted by tag popularity and one by tag newness.
But that only affects minor details (such as which stats are displayed), but not the overall layout.
@user1306322 I had started building a LED cube that could be animated, looked like a fun project...my soldering skills are not quite there though. I need to get back to it
I’m sorry.
The long-standing repercussions of the fall are something we’re still recovering from. The moderator situation on Writing and a handful of other sites is something we need to address - and we are but we’re not talking about it publicly so I can understand why y’all feel ignored. Whil...
tl;dr elections were supposed to be on hold until the new moderator agreement was ratified and posted publicly. This will probably take until at least march, so it won't be ready in time. First election of 2020 will be on the workplace, supposedly starting nominations today
By the way, @JourneymanGeek, would you be willing to help assuage some of my curiosity? I'm really curious to know what happens if you try to visit user #3 on the Mod Team :D
but my best guess is that they'll make you all sign a formal nda, maybe if legal or marketing is really bold it'll also be a non disparagement clause or a indemnification clause
@Magisch on the other hand, well I don't think that massive moderator attrition was something that was planned for. (Even if that sometimes feels... dubious)
Also... uhm
interesting part is, there's nothing there that says I'm bound to a new version :D
they know they might have to drop a steamer on their mods soon with a new mod agreement everyone needs to agree to as a precondition to continuing, would you rather elect new people before or after that?
if 4 well qualified candidates run, a 5th might not because they don't see the need. If all 4 of those object to the new mod agreement, there's no candidates left. but if the 4 knew beforehand and wouldn't run, a 5th might run because nobody else does.
@Magisch The fine print: "... we’ve been hesitant to hold new elections while waiting for the update out of concern that some moderators, including just-elected ones, would step down rather than agreeing to the new terms.". --- So they're only selecting specific people whom meet special requirements. If you have to "can't even write that here", well what is there to say.
@Rob They wanted to hold back on elections. Now they've decided they can't hold back any longer, so they're holding a normal, unmodified election. They're not selecting specific people at all.
the reason for that is that the new mod agreement takes more time to finalize, and they don't predict it'll be ready until march. The community team seems to have made a conscious choice that the risk of having people resign after being elected is for now lower then the risk of not having enough moderators in that timespan
probably also because they want to give themselves more time to do the updated mod agreement right, and having the looming spectre of holding back elections until then is probably not helping
I said earlier I understand the train of thought that went into holding back elections until now, it's a legitimate argument, but it doesn't seem to be what they've chosen to do now, which I also understand.
they're caught between a rock and a hard place there
@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog I'm also at 20k now, if you want you can ping me also for these
@JourneymanGeek It's not a good idea to lead with a bunch of conditions that no one will accept and then have to drop them all and come begging. It may end up that they'll have to hire and pay big bucks, or do without. Take for example Wal-Mart, they can't hire Cashiers; so they've replaced half the checkout lanes with self-checkout. --- SE will end up lowering the thresholds again:
@Rob Cashiers is bad example, they're being replaced all over, regardless of their quality or what they do - they're simply not needed anymore, as whole, with the self-checkout becoming simple and cheap. Mods can't be replaced with AI just yet, maybe in 6-8 years.
With "self checkout being so cheap" they can have "self shelf stocking" too. Just bring the stuff out from the back with a forklift, dump the pallet on the floor, leave a crowbar on top of the crate ... --- Just like CostCo.
@Shadow9 Security and Janitors aren't "employees", they're 3rd party, contracted. Bottom line is that "employees" don't get the money. The Janitorial Firm is whomever will work for the least and security only detains the elderly, Workplace Insurance won't let them confront someone whom may be armed.
I see that Trashcan is often used for messages from this room - and it was inactive for 13 days, so it might get frozen. Perhaps some user who has access to that room might prevent it from freezing - if it's worth keeping.
@Rob It's a bad sign that the changes they are considering to the mod agreement are likely to lead to mods to resign. I hope that SE is simply fearing that some people won't sign that they'd enforce the Code of Conduct including the pronoun issue. But if it is some clause beyond the CoC, that would indicate something ugly
@SEisevil Informed reading of the post says that at least something about adhering to and enforcing the CoC will be in there. I don't know beyond that (and Catija doesn't say - understandably) if they'll put anything else in, but my guess is there'll be at least a formal NDA contract in there to disincentivize leaking and maybe some other industry standard clauses for volunteers.
> I sincerely hope that the new mod agreement is something that all of the current and future mods will agree to - that it’s written in a way that recognizes what moderation means on this network and that it asks moderators to agree to a set of things that aren’t onerous and takes their volunteer status into account.
The passive language in that suggests they're in a tug-of-war with legal and management over this. It could be that they want a non disparagement clause or similarly odious language in there
maybe the line of thinking was that, and the CMs intervened and argued to continue sharing stuff with mods in advance, and the compromise is making mods sign a NDA
@SEisevil The quote from a CM that I referenced makes it sound like they are adding stuff they know people won't like. -- Don't you want Mustard or Ketchup with your Coffee?
if legal is having a say in this it'll probably be 18+ only because it's not worth the money and time (to them) to design a process to get guardians to sign off
Thats just it isn't it. Technically speaking I'm not even sure if the current lack of a NDA complies with GDPR. If this was my company (where I advise on such matters) I would insist on a NDA before any personal data is handed over
@SEisevil Yes, if you want to be precise. But not really also. An Auftragsverarbeitungsvertrag (Data processing agreement - dpa) is a business - to - business level agreement
@Magisch I don't think an NDA would be sufficient if mods are seen as a separate entity. But you're also right that it's more B2B, and I don't think it would be feasible to make this kind of contract with volunteer mods. My strictest interpretation would essentially mean that mods can't have PII access at all
going into pedantic prick mode (which is what I do to prep myself for audits) it would mean each mod would have to sign a DPA through an intermediary entity (e.g the mod itself wouldn't get PII, only a LLC the mod sets up or something) but that would be super inane and stupid. I don't actually have enough caselaw knowledge or legal expertise to make an informed argument either way
The other thing is that SE would also have to require mods to provide proper identification. In many cases they don't necessarily know the real name of the mod
personally I'd probably sign a standard issue NDA covering PII in particular, but not a b2b level DPA with damages and level of service provisions (like auditing and request production).
@Magisch And the prize for the understatement of the year goes to...
I sure as hell wouldn't sign an NDA, since that would require me to enter a legal agreement with SE, sharing my real name with them. Not to mention that any company that requires its volunteers to sign NDAs (instead of ensuring these volunteers don't have access to sensitive information) isn't a company I want to volunteer for.
@Magisch I think anything that would create legal risk for yourself in any case except intentional misuse of PII (or maybe gross negligence as well) would be a bad idea to sign. SE doesn't even provide 2FA for accounts, you don't want to be liable in case your account is compromised, or your PC is and PII leaks that way
@Magisch It's probably enough if I dump PII from my site and spam the users or try to sell the data. Not because of the agreement, but because I'm likely violating the law while doing these things
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003, signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, established the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions.
== History ==
The backronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill's full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. It plays on the word "canning" (putting an end to) spam, as in the usual term for unsolicited email of this type. The bill...
@terdon se voluntary mods already have access to PII. They probably already have to sign some paper about it. So, if I understand your post correctly "requires its volunteers to sign NDAs instead of ensuring these volunteers don't have access to sensitive information" is already happening
> Personal data is any information relating to an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional or public life. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, your posts on social networking websites, your medical information, or your computer's IP address.
I sure as hell wouldn't sign an NDA, since that would require me to enter a legal agreement with SE, sharing my real name with them. Not to mention that any company that requires its volunteers to sign NDAs (instead of ensuring these volunteers don't have access to sensitive information) isn't a company I want to volunteer for.
In any case, an NDA would be irrelevant here. The GDPR requires user consent, and user consent is given. It also requires that the user be informed who has access to their PII, which is something SE could indeed make clearer.
However, there is no requirement for me to sign any sort of NDA in order to have access to PII. The GDPR just means that I may also be liable if I do anything inappropriate with that PII.
@BlueSoul Oh no, on the contrary, it is but it shouldn't. Or, well, that isn't entirely true.
We do get a bit more than strictly necessary, but not much. And some of what we do have access to can be very useful in identifying socks and fraud.
But yeah, we should have better methods for that based on abstractions of the data instead of having access to the data directly, even as limited access as we have.
@BlueSoul Weeelll... why? I mean, I certainly trust SE employees less than community-elected moderators. And, on a practical level, that would never work. Finding socks is complex and time consuming, having employees do that for all sites of the network isn't really feasible.
Not unless you somehow manage to automate things that are very hard to automate (fuzzy human intuition is often involved).
@BlueSoul which employees? There aren't enough CMs left, and even with the old numbers doing all the vote fraud investigation by CMs would have been impossible
@terdon for the simple reason that in case a) you are giving access to your email to someone that already has it from the moment you subscribed. Yep, we are talking about company and not specific person but that should suffice in that case. For volunteers instead you are giving access to my address to random, could disappear tomorrow people.
note, I don't mean that I fear the dog will send me spam but....
in the unfortunate event that a certain user manages to become mod thanks to lack of options....
considering he already managed to show his "quirks" with leaked addresses in the past....
@BlueSoul Sure, but that's why we have multiple emails, right? I mean, this is pretty standard every time you give your email somewhere for a new account, you are giving it to some rando online.
I received a strange mail from a well-known SE user with the following body two days ago:
HALLO EVERYONE. I am writing to you from Kenya. I have recently come into contact with a great bunches of Viagras -- roughly 15,395.5 bottles worths! That's FIFTEEN THREE NINE FIVE and a half bottles. Th...
@BlueSoul I have deleted my account in two cases after specific mods won an election. And I have a few times told SE employees that they should just nuke my account in case Evan wins one, if they would actually give him the diamond (it was never clear to me whether SE would do that or not)
But, anyway, you're preaching to the choir. I would far, far prefer to have tools that let me investigate fraud based on PII without actually showing me the PII. You could, for example, just convert the user's email to some random string and show me that.
I mean potentially you could misuse the tools like this: create multiple accounts with emails known to you, use the tool to match these accounts with the target account's email, see what the tool says, if it's a very close match then you can figure out that target email
Especially if you need to work with different scripts (alphabets) and cultural norms. For instance, I might know that "Pucho Montaña" is the same name as "Jose Maria Mountain" but I couldn't explain that to a computer.
I saw this post, and wanted to chime in. As I haven't officially introduced myself, my name is Yaakov Ellis, and I am a developer on the Community Dev team. Before that I was Team Lead for the Internal Dev team at Stack, and have been working here for nearly six years. As you can see from my user...
I don't have high expectations for SE on this kind of privacy issues, especially after nothing happened with my complaint about the mass export of emails that is possible as a mod
You'd have to know things like "Μήτσος == Δημήτρης" or "James == Ιάκωβος" or "Francisco == Paco", you'd have to know that "michael@foo.com" is similar to "jordan@foo.com". These are really non trivial to do for machines.
I'm sorting French language words in some text files according to frequency with a focus on insight rather than statistical significance. The challenge is about preserving accented characters and dealing with the article forms in front of vowels(l', d') in the context of shaping word tokens for s...
hashing emails or otherwise obfuscating would hurt finding some types of sockputtetry. eg jimbob@gmail, jim_bob1234@yahoo.com, jimmyb9876@hotmail.com and jbob@companyname.com These all look like the same person to an eyeball check, but linking them as similar via code would be a tricky problem at best
@DanisFiddlingbyFirelight the guy that took the time to use different addresses for different socks hopefully would be smart enough to use names that don't look similar to each other....
@BlueSoul I'd expect a lot of 1st time sockers to just reuse the email addresses they already have; and only try being sneaky after their first set of accounts all get ban hammered
One thing we continuously speak about in the programming community is impostor syndrome and how to cope with it, but no one talks about tangible steps on how to solve it within yourself. What if instead of learning how to endure, we learned how to cure it? While It’s something that happens to everyone at […]
I have faith in infinite stupidity, laziness, and arrogance. Starting from the assumption that "no one will catch me using sock puppets" taking the time to create new email addresses for socks instead of just recycling ones the cheater already has makes perfect sense. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant fraction of bad socks are in the form of user+1@gmail, user+2@gmail, etc.