Tavern on the Meta - 2015-09-29 (page 3 of 4)

« first day (1882 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3129 days later) »

7:00 PM

How does a user that had a score of +7 for years and then one day logs in an has a -3 know that it's not a personal attack? From their point of view, the answer they provided survived for years and was good. Suddenly, it's bad.

user213963

And misleading historical examples of scope still confuse new users.

@Andy raises a good point here; the fact that our standards change and that we vote according to the new standards is a huge shock to most.

And I totally agree; an answer that's fine for years is suddenly bad?? What the heck!

user213963

How long has the shopping prohibition been around?

In those scenarios, more prudence is required. Instead of going after the symptoms, go after the catalyst.

@MichaelT: The blog post points to circa 2010, so about 5 years.

user213963

Q&A is Hard, Let's Go Shopping!

Jeff Atwood on November 23, 2010

Over the last 2.5 years, we've identified a few problematic classes of questions that tend to get asked on our sites. Many of these are documented in our standard set of close reasons: exact duplicate, off-topic, subjective and argumentative, not a real question, and too localized.

user213963

7:02 PM

So, this is a surprise?

Again, the fact that old questions become off-topic due to policy changes isn't that much of a surprise. It happens as the site naturally progresses, anyway.

@MichaelT But how long has it been enforced retroactively on older questions?

user213963

I would have difficulty finding those stats. How old for the too localized close of something older than 2010 that was a shopping question?

This is why we should totally require a comment with downvotes, that way people will know immediately if a downvote is a personal attack

...is what I would say, after getting 7 downvotes in two weeks on a previously inactive question

I think it's a surprise when the question has been viewed almost 4K times and has 18 up/down votes across the questions and answers. It's survived. It may not be a good question by today's standards, but it was posted in June 2010 (before that blog post) and has been seen since then.

7:05 PM

@KevinBrown My thought to this is that, again, we shouldn't be attacking the symptom; we should be attacking the catalyst.

The problem was the question. If it's poor and it's off-topic, then it should be deleted.

The answer wasn't fine for years, the answer was not looked at for years. Big distinction.

user213963

The lack of tools for community moderation other than down, close and delete?

But who are we to say that it was off-topic when it was written? It's off topic now, and the answerers don't deserve any punishment for that.

@durron597 4K views disagrees with that.

user213963

And if a mod had deleted it quickly, no rep would have been lost b

user213963

7:07 PM

4K from how many years?

is this answer NAA?

-1

A: Font working fine on my PC but not working fine in another PCs

Are you sure that the font is reachable at the css file directory and you don't get any 404 errors on the console.log regarding that font ? If so, the reason you see the font on your computer is because the font is installed on your machine locally. EDIT on the link provided by you the font is ...

5 years

@Makoto the answerer is not punished, the answer is...

@Andy It's possible for 3k of those to have happened in a short period of time (I understand what you are saying though)

@Andy Unfortunately I can't see the timeline of a deleted post.

7:08 PM

@cybermonkey It is an answer so flagging for NAA would be wrong

@rene Right. I had meant things along the line of undeserved downvotes on the question.

For a definition of "undeserved".

answer*

@TylerH So the problem here is that there's no waiting period at all: a question could be nowhere close to qualifying for auto-deletion today and deleted tonight if it gets enough DVs in the next few hours.

user213963

Which wasn't the case with the op - it took a week to get the votes.

review editors: if you saw this edit on SO, would you reject it?

security.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/58944

@cybermonkey SO and Security SE have different standards for edits

7:18 PM

I know that, but I still think that edit was too minor, I ended up rolling it back.

@MichaelT which is probably why it even got noticed

@cybermonkey Objectively speaking, the edit doesn't add any value to me. The answer isn't made any clearer, and it seems really pedantic that "address" is just thrown all around in there.

I'd reject that.

@Shog9 I can't tell if you're suggesting the creation of another stage for "soon to be automatically deleted"?

@Makoto just what I thought.

@Shog9 Could we step back for a minute

7:19 PM

Or rather, why the author was able to identify the source of the votes

What is the real problem here?

I mean, think about it: how would most folks, upon receiving a few downvotes on an old answer, even go about finding out that it was being targeted by some cleanup campaign / chatroom / other group?

A dedicated community of users is attempting to remove off topic questions and tags from Stack Overflow

@Shog9 they would search meta; hopefully the cleanup post would be there, and it was, in this case.

Most folks would assume that there was a problem with their old answer, or that they were being targeted

@durron597 Really? Your first reaction would be, "I know, I'll search meta for a link to this ancient question & see if it's hiding out in an answer to a tag cleanup question"?

7:21 PM

Are we allowed to assume that users know about the existence of Meta?

@KevinBrown No

@KevinBrown y'know, most don't

user213963

@Shog9 you are (in my case) a person who has more than occasionally cast delete votes on questions he answered because it turned out they were not good questions for the site.

You have to assume they know meta exists, know that tag cleanups exist, know that tag cleanups involve mass-downvoting of answers...

@Shog9 My first reaction would be to know the only reason I would be targeted in this way is that the question is being targeted for roomba.

7:21 PM

If you think about it, what do users really use Stack Overflow for? Answers. Do they know about a meta discussion? I would wager not

I agree with you that may not be common knowledge

@durron597 You also know about the existence of the roomba

@Shog9 the majority of users don't know Meta exists, that's been proven time and time again in the past

but again, we're having the wrong conversation.

@durron597 ...oh yeah, you also have to know that the roomba exists

user213963

7:22 PM

You know the post was a q&a shopping question unless you've been under a rock for half a decade.

@MichaelT well, again, we have one example of someone who knew all this now

@Shog9 Don't forget that you have to know how it operates, since it's got very particular and fickle rules...

that's the only reason we're even discussing it

The correct conversation is "why are users downvoting answers like this? do we agree or disagree with these goals?"

"Is the problem they are solving a valid one?"

@durron597 well... We kinda already had that discussion, didn't we?

7:23 PM

if it is valid, then Stack Exchange should be helping us to be more effective at it. If it's not valid, then tell us to stop, and we will

@Shog9 When? Where?

24

A: Proposed Change to Community Deletion Criteria

I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a "good answer" to a "bad question". If the answer is good and useful it implies that the question is actually a good question too. It might be expressed badly or have suffered from some initial down-votes before it was knocked into shape, but ultimately it mus...

user213963

30

Q: Expand the roomba scripts to delete year or more old, up voted, closed questions

Currently the roomba has a criteria that deletes quite a bit of open questions that are considered abandoned after a year: If the question is more than 365 days old, and ... has a score of 0 or a score of 1 with a deleted owner has no answers is not locked has a viewcount <= the...

feature-request deleted-questions unanswered-questions auto-delete

ChrisF is not exactly Joe RandomUser.

user213963

Consider why there are only 48 posts in this search: stackoverflow.com/…

25

A: How to deal appropriately with answers posted for obvious help vampire questions?

I'm tempted to dispute your premise here, debate the whole "answering no-effort questions causes others unwilling to put in any effort to ask more no-effort questions" idea... But that's a much longer, thornier discussion and in this case completely unnecessary. See, you just admitted to downvo...

71

Q: Is it okay to downvote answers to bad questions?

I'm referring to this question in particular, where the question was clearly not of the best quality, but my answer to it addressed the issues with it. Is it okay to downvote an answer just because a question is bad, even if the answer addresses the issues with the question?

discussion questions voting

> Answers should be voted up or down on their own merits.

@Shog9 Exactly

And the definition of a good answer is entirely subjective

7:26 PM

Is a merit: blocks Roomba?

[ SmokeDetector ] Email in answer: Why don't companies buy back their own (cut-price) debt? by Christabella on money.stackexchange.com

user213963

Wrong search: stackoverflow.com/… (lots, but there is a horizon)

But this is also not the point

the point is not about whether upvoting or downvoting is the right thing to do for these answers... the point is whether the question ought to be deleted

@rene if that's the only thing you can find wrong with an answer - that is, it's helpful, well-written and accurate but in the way - then you're not really voting on the merits of the answer.

@durron597 who decides that?

if the question should be deleted, then we should have one sort of conversation about the best way to do that. if the question should not be deleted, then we should have another sort of conversation

@Shog9 You (and the rest of Stack Exchange) do!

tell us whether questions like that one deserve to be deleted.

user213963

7:28 PM

2

A: Easy Flash Tools

Swish is the easiest I've seen. It will even convert PowerPoint to Flash if you need it to.

If the question doesn't meet the standards of what is considered on-topic in this day and age, which could be determined by us laymen.

@durron597 sure, sure. How?

user213963

Is that a helpful answer?

@MichaelT: I'm not looking at that answer. Make the question go away.

@Shog9 How do you decide or how should it be communicated to us?

7:30 PM

@durron597 so in theory, the community on SO decide whether or not questions on SO get deleted. How?

There are only two chatrooms (well, three if you count ServerFault, but I don't know anything about what they do) specifically dedicated to the cleanup of old off topic questions.

How is this decision made?

"discussion in a chatroom" doesn't really work; there are millions of questions, you can't decide the fate of all of them in chat.

user213963

@Makoto two down votes will do it...

@Shog9 organically, via wisdom of the crowd

@durron597 yes, yes. How?

7:31 PM

@MichaelT: Or two more delete votes...What's wrong with just deleting the question?

I'm not trying to fault the answer here. It was asked a long time ago, when this sort of thing was okay.

user213963

Well, many people don't have 10k but are concerned with the quality of answers.

I shouldn't be dealing justice to the answer because it's answering a now off-topic subject.

I should be nuking the question since it's off-topic.

Thus, my opinion of the answer matters little.

@durron597 Looking at a question, what criteria can we apply to determine that the community - the crowd - has said it should be deleted?

@Shog9 It's complicated! But I can say this: Stack Exchange ultimately does have a hand in this, because the recent ban on tool questions instituted by Stack Exchange staff has had a drastic effect on the behavior of USERS.

user213963

More people should be nuking questions.

7:32 PM

Exactly!

This is why old tool requests have lots of upvotes but they get downvoted and deleted today.

You set the rules and most of us try to follow them.

The troublemakers get run off

user213963

Those with less than 10k can do that with a down vote when they find crap.

Hopefully the question would get downvoted, but you can't control votes.

People will vote however they damn well please and there's nothing anyone could do about that.

@durron597 funny story... SE Staff never sat down and said, "let's ban tool questions". We went through a random sample of closed questions and realized that tool recommendation questions were being closed in large numbers.

IOW, we're the tail being wagged in this metaphor

In the case of this exact question, we posted on meta that we wanted to kill all tags [third-party*] and it got 15+ upvotes (that's changed now, obviously) and so we thought it had community support

Generally speaking we want to burn off topic tags and bad questions as an example for future users.

7:34 PM

@durron597: I don't think the problem wasn't that community support was lacking or is now waning...

The bar for making a new tag on Stack Overflow is high, and we try to use that to encourage future good behavior from new users

@durron597 so it really isn't that complicated. There are three ways in which the community can express their distaste for a question: downvotes, close votes, and delete votes.

user213963

3

A: What is your opinion of the jQuery Tools library?

No, I haven't. :-)

Counter to these are things like upvotes, reopen votes, edits and answers.

user213963

Somehow these get votes.

7:36 PM

@MichaelT: Seriously? These are old.

Anubis (/əˈnuːbəs/ or /əˈnjuːbəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἄνουβις) is the Greek name of a god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depicted as a canine or a man with a canine head. Originally, archeologists believed the sacred animal of Anubis was a golden jackal. However, recent molecular work done by biologists has shown that the wild dog-like animals of the Egyptian desert are not jackals but African wolves. Golden jackals are only found in Asia and Europe, not in Egypt. Like many ancient Egyptian deities, Anubis assumed different roles in various contexts...

Of course they got votes.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Shog9 Breaking news: Late answer reviews gone wild

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I'm gonna blame @durron597 for that too

!!/blame

7:36 PM

@durron597 It's josilber's fault.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Indeed. Web Apps suddenly got 300+ posts in the Late Answers queue.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Great. Problem solved.

@Shog9 Everything is my fault :)

7

A: Can we raise the bar for reputation for late answers to enter the review queue?

Queue growth Review queues lose effectiveness if posts aren't regularly (and accurately) cleared. A queue such as close votes on Stack Overflow that never seems to get to 0 fails to provide time-sensitive feedback that aids learning. So if we raise the bar for late answers which increases the nu...

user213963

@Makoto and the up votes on old off topic questions have prevented the roomba from acting on them.

7:37 PM

Yay! Good to get more eyeballs on those late answers.

user213963

That people occasionally look in those old musty corners is the only way to clean them up.

for those who haven't seen this yet:

-7

Q: can my ISP tell my parents that im watching porn?

Can My ISP Tell My Parents That Im Visiting Porn Websites And Watching Porn Videos ? And If Yes, What Should I Do To Make My Browsing And The Websites I Visit Private ?? Im Surfing Using Private Browser .. But I'm Not Sure Is This Completely Private Or Not. BTW, Im 14 Is This Illegal In US ? H...

user213963

And anyone with 125 rep or more can help.

@MichaelT: The roomba needs tweaked. Desperately, if nothing else, to prevent genuine crap like that from lurking around.

user213963

Yep.

7:39 PM

@Shog9 If I think that an answer to a bad question detracts from the overall quality of SO, then I can express this distaste by downvoting the answer.

user213963

30

Q: Expand the roomba scripts to delete year or more old, up voted, closed questions

Currently the roomba has a criteria that deletes quite a bit of open questions that are considered abandoned after a year: If the question is more than 365 days old, and ... has a score of 0 or a score of 1 with a deleted owner has no answers is not locked has a viewcount <= the...

feature-request deleted-questions unanswered-questions auto-delete

So yeah: the system has the information it needs to determine the community's decision. But that assumes no one is intentionally skewing this information.

user213963

91

Q: What should the system be deleting automatically that it already isn't?

So this question got me thinking... We have several automatic processes in place for cleaning up cruft, deleting questions that are very unlikely to help anyone else. They're fairly conservative though; an awful lot of lousy questions hang around much longer, occasionally cropping up to annoy fo...

discussion deleted-questions automatic-deletion se-quality-project

@Shog9 We're not intentionally skewing the information. We are trying to solve a problem

user213963

That one looks familiar.

7:40 PM

@durron597 intentional or not, it is being skewed

which is: burninating tags and deleting no longer on topic questions to improve the overall quality of SO

user213963

@Shog9 do drive by up votes skew too?

If we determine that question + answer scores < some threshold are insufficient to indicate something worth keeping around, and combine with closing to indicate a need for deletion... That only works if folks don't intentionally alter the scores

if that is a good goal, then the system should be designed to make that easier.

@MichaelT they can

7:41 PM

But answer scores AREN'T enough to determine that

That's why delete votes required are now capped at 10

user213963

Read the comments on stackoverflow.com/questions/4989746/…

because super-popular questions were requiring scores of delete votes at one time

@Shog9 - I know you state in your answer to that meta post that it is hard to enforce these votes. But they are targetted. There is even a tozero being used.

user213963

Check when the votes were cast in comparison to the comments.

7:42 PM

in SO Close Vote Reviewers on Stack Overflow Chat, Sep 17 at 15:18, by Deduplicator

third-party-cleanup to-zero http://stackoverflow.com/a/8691284 http://stackoverflow.com/a/30559465 http://stackoverflow.com/a/31755599 http://stackoverflow.com/a/5869011 http://stackoverflow.com/a/15352586 http://stackoverflow.com/q/1418596 http://stackoverflow.com/q/8686429

wtf honestly? That whole room needs to be dumped. It is a scourge

@Shog9 Would you then consider making the criterion for auto-deletion less apparent, similar to how question/answer bans are done?

@Makoto well, that's the big advantage of imposing a delay... You lose that predictability

user213963

@Makoto that would just solicit a stream of down votes instead of one or two.

You can't guarantee the question you just downvoted is gonna get deleted, since the more time you allow, the more likely someone is to upvote it

@Shog9 You've said yourself that question closure is a precursor to deletion, with the limbo period giving time for review

but, people don't get a notification that their question has been closed.

7:44 PM

@Shog9 - A group of users can collude to do that though.

Fair point.

So how can they even review their own question?

@TravisJ sure. If you get enough people involved, they can downvote to counteract every upvote received.

But if every vote resets the delay...

user213963

However, if it takes more than nine days to delete a freshly closed question, you will have crap accumulate.

193

Q: Send authors an inbox message if their question gets closed

I think it would really help if you get notified that a question of yours was closed. Especially for the multi-site power user, usually (at least for me) a question is asked and then left alone for while. I rely on the network-wide inbox to tell me when someone has commented or answered, but if ...

feature-request closed-questions global-inbox

7:45 PM

@Shog9 - Same people that downvote, delete, and it is done.

user213963

That will put more work on 10k to do the cleaning.

so users don't know their own questions have been closed, and closure in many cases without voting strategies in most cases doesn't lead to deletion

and 10k+ get a very small number of delete votes

@Shog9 - Just take out the core group doing this.

@TravisJ if you were gonna vote to delete, you can just do that.

@Shog9 - Not if you are 3k

7:45 PM

it seems to me that the system is currently designed to keep most closed questions around in that state. it doesn't seem to be limbo

@Shog9 So, in my view, the issue here is that people are trying to get questions deleted without having delete votes. What can we do to alleviate this issue instead of having <10k users "cook the books in order to make a deal", so to speak? I don't think "increasing the time before a question is deleted" will fix that. I think that's a band-aid on a symptom, not a cure for the cause.

@TravisJ sure you can.

@TravisJ He doesn't need to take out anything. We listen, if he tells us to stop we will.

You gotta earn 7K first, but nothing stopping you but time

No need to use a hammer when a pen will do.

7:46 PM

Well then get out the pen.

I am tired of seeing the fallout on meta and elsewhere from that room's collusion to vote.

Should we just declare that <10k users have no right to participate in question deletion efforts? (I'm not entirely opposed to that, so long as it's a clear and unified message)

did you mean <10k?

@TylerH do you mean "less than"?

oops

@TylerH No?

7:47 PM

yes

It is a relic from a time that the queue was growing at a rate which was not sustainable.

Considering that one of the defining 10K privileges is vote to delete, that would seem to indicate they have more say in such matters...

@TravisJ the main result of close vote aging is that many crappy questions just stay open forever now.

But we can't dictate folks' voting behavior

@Shog9 typo, I meant sub-10k users, not users with the del-vote privilege

7:48 PM

Outside of truly egregious situations, that is

@Shog9 - Users shouldn't dictate each other's behavior either.

And yet, it happens in the open on a daily basis.

@TravisJ What metric are you using for "sustainable"?

What if the other rooms began to do this?

@Shog9 Our behavior is a direct result of a desire to stem the tide of terrible questions and having limited tools to do so.

@TylerH - You think that the queue growing to 6 figure + was sustainable?

7:49 PM

@durron597 so what tool, specifically, is missing here?

@TravisJ I don't think "sustainable" is an appropriate word for a stack of papers

it's a continuous flow

@durron597 - Your behavior is a direct result of a time when there was a wide spread effort to diminish a very large queue.

@TravisJ We have a very strict policy against this.

Again, there were 6 people downvoting an answer in order to delete a question that required 3 delete votes - more than 4 of the downvoters had delete votes...

@durron59 - Clearly not

7:50 PM

@TravisJ Not my behavior. That was the original goal of the room but actually I am the one who's been redirecting the room to do other things besides review close votes

This is what makes me suspect there's no purely-social solution to this. The system somehow affords this behavior right now. It's more convenient than the tools and privileges intended for the purpose.

The thing is, your room constantly targets questions you encounter in the wild which are rather new.

You aren't trimming old content, you are attacking new users.

@Shog9 Because questions with accepted answers require delete votes.

There are other rooms too you know.

We could easily take things into our own hands.

And we outnumber you.

@TravisJ well that's wrong

7:50 PM

By a lot.

@durron597 delete votes are functionally unlimited, given enough time.

If time is the constraint here, then that's something to address

@TravisJ if you think these questions should remain open you are free to upvote them and vote to reopen them

@durron597 which, btw, is not the greatest thing IMHO

@durron597 - Yes, on a constant basis that is being done as well. People complaining on meta about cleaning up your rooms mess.

@TravisJ in what way is making old questions/answers roomba-eligible "attacking new users" ?

7:52 PM

@Shog9 We could just burn the tag without getting rid of the bad questions and editing them into shape

Which is why we are here right now.

FWIW, that scaling thing we talked about WRT close votes here a while back? That already exists for delete votes. Want more, earn more rep.

@TravisJ Give me other examples of people being unhappy about this besides this case?

@Shog9 even with 30 delete votes a day, 2000 posts would still take forever.

How about the deletion ring that was going around and finally stopped like 4 months ago

@TravisJ What deletion ring??

7:53 PM

@durron597 two months, if only 3 people were voting

Which is usually the real problem in practice: only a tiny, tiny handful of people actually use their delete votes

3

6 months ago, in march

11

Q: Should tag-removal-only edits to closed questions cause a bump?

Inspired by this discussion. The intention behind downvoting-to-deletion was to remove burninated tags from circulation. The questions were being set up for auto-deletion, in part to avoid the bump that would occur if the tag were simply removed from the question. There have been previous discu...

feature-request edits bump front-page

@durron597 You could. Or you could close them and then burn the tag.

If this were implemented this would instantly stop all this behavior from us.

user213963

Because the roomba is getting all the NPE dups and crap with an up vote that is currently streaming in.

7:54 PM

@TravisJ link?

@durron597 so, not to go into detail, but there's a way for moderators to do this. Normally they don't because it's insane. But one moderator did it a lot, once

It caused some problems

@Shog9 We put each other in check. We don't vote to close stuff that should remain open

10,000 new actions on the moderator action log overnight?

In going through the queue in these cleanup efforts, I've left stuff open and edited it into shape many times.

14

A: Is canvassing for deletion votes on questions with good content OK?

So this is something at least a few moderators have been discussing lately, because we've been getting flags about a series of high-profile deletions involving the same 3-5 users. It might be valuable to have a longer-form discussion about this on Meta, so I'm going to present a few examples and ...

7:56 PM

also, being worried about bumping on Stack Overflow is like being worried about getting the ocean wet with your tears

11

@TravisJ That was not us.

I wasn't even active in SOCVR in march.

If it didn't happen in the last two months, it wasn't us.

Just about every tag we've attacked has received double digit upvotes from the community.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Grabs popcorn

user213963

Ahh yes.

user213963

... Either we have canvasing for votes (down, close, delete), especially to handle content that has a vote threshold above some minimum, or we have mods who act (rather than decline) on flags. If the answer is "neither" then there is a significant amount of moderation and cleaning of poor material that cannot be done. — user289086 Feb 27 at 1:17

"attacked"... I mean that mentality in itself should lend you to relook at what you are doing

7:57 PM

@durron597 There was a group in December though that sometimes dropped by in the SOCVR for support.

user213963

@durron597 found it!

user213963

@MichaelT Yes; you should. I'm not going to remove someone's reputation or their answer just because there's duplicate information out there -- that's not for me to do (and it's a silly thing to waste moderator time on, since we don't scale). If it really upsets you, get together 20 of your closest Stack Overflowers and have at it. Just don't ask a moderator to do it because it's very low on our list of priorities. We've got too much to worry about without worrying about duplication in the 'verse. — George Stocker ♦ Jan 22 at 14:36

wow

What an inspiring comment =/

@TravisJ let's be clear about the fact that the room is led by three users and I'm the RO with the longest history there

@TravisJ Why? We attempt to improve the overall quality of Stack Overflow using the tools provided to us

user213963

7:59 PM

@TravisJ yep.

user213963

I was inspired.

FWIW, there's a list of questions with delete votes under the 10K tools. It's probably incomplete, but beside the point: it's easy to find ways to spend your votes if you want to, and some folks have been doing this for years.

@Shog9 You can't burninate a tag that way

user213963

@Shog9 it only goes 90 days.

« first day (1882 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3129 days later) »

Transcript for

Sep '1529

Tavern on the Meta

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF STARS AND BACKLOG! General friendly chit-...

bug crickets discussion excuses support waffles

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile