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@OptimusPrime hence me understanding.mkdy kg that

@OptimusPrime hence me understandin most of that

12:18 PM

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard CC @Princess

wow, r00...d?

@MetaAndrewT. Robots have no feelings

@M.A.R. late by few months

@Pri is no more

Long live @Oli! :D

@M.A.R. good one!

12:35 PM

only oil

well lube anyway.

creaks

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard Give me <insert time 'til cache update here> <insert time unit here>

@Aibobot too oily

there's dry lube!

For plastics I think

keeping silent

:D

@Oli oh... didn't see! Nice change.

Did I ever mention I hate caching?

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard Changed it after you pinged me ^^"

12:37 PM

disappointed that @Pri didn't become Coffee Princess

:P

@Olivia oh LOL

Thought @M.A.R. saw that and hence his reply

I've got a can of dry lube sitting next to me. I use it for my bike.

Bike. Yeah.

:-D

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard That'd have to be Olivia the Coffee Princess, which isn't pingable with @Princess

Maybe next month... :D

@Mithrandir well in the army we had the most disgusting stuff I've ever knew/saw/used.... called גריז. I don't get disgusted easily as you probably know but man.... I couldn't touch that awful thing! lol

It's kind of.... semi solid oil.

I only use the actual grease for like inside a suspension fork.

...in fact, I use it so rarely that I don't have any of my own.

12:40 PM

Lucky

oh

COSMOLINE!

Well if you'll be anywhere near tanks you'll know the term "לגרז פטמות", and it's really really not as sexy as it might sound. @Mithrandir :-O

meh that's fine ^

That's what I use for like my chains and stuff.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard I have a feeling I'll be nowhere near tanks :P

...it's not cheap, this stuff, though. That bottle was 75NIS, and the solid grease is like a couple hundred for a much smaller bottle.

12:43 PM

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard the waxy stuff?

(And it's a real pain getting oil off your hands after cleaning a chain. I have to spend like ten minutes just scrubbing.)

@Aibobot no idea how to call it, maybe "black grease"? Found a pic though.

It sticks to your fingers

@Mithrandir like most oils.... :D

@Olivia did other people leave MSO/SO/SE? Except for Yve?

@Mithrandir use kerosene and it'll be a 10 second job

Kerosene for... what?

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard OH

Lithium grease

12:51 PM

@Mithrandir to remove oil or grease off your hands.

I don't tend to keep kerosene around much.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard our mechanics swore by some stuff called magma

had pumace in it

We always store kerosene. Hornets are quite regular here and kerosene is really helpful to destory hornets

The govt gave half a litre kerosene each month to every house as a part of ration. It started decades ago when most of the houses are non-electrified but they still continue providing it

*in India

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard Not officially

@Aibobot yeah might be

12:55 PM

I'm suspecting there's a second mod that has left (or he's at least considerably less visibly active, and has been since July)

@Olivia mod activity tends to vary a lot

Kerosene can be used to remove oil, tar, paint etc.

@Aibobot hehe well I wasn't a mechanic, that black grease was just common. Probably mechanics have much worse stuff. ;)

@Aibobot A highly active mod with near constant activity who drops off the map after SE changes the homepage and recommending people not to use SO?

Wouldn't call that a coincidence

:(

12:57 PM

@Olivia that's significantly different

Yep.

Elections?

None scheduled.

If overall users also dropped, no need to, yeah.

Well SO has a bit of buffer

1:02 PM

No one has been called up, the last election was in March

and if its the mod I think it is - its a little sudden

@Aibobot Not really

SE actions are sudden.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard actually mod-levels are a function of workload rather than absolute users

I wake up one morning and something major changed, lol

1:03 PM

@Olivia in terms of absolute numbers

In absolute numbers, sure.

But that's not really worth calling a buffer when you scale everything else

On a site that large, its going to be tricky scaling mods

The process speed on flags has dropped.

NAA handling used to be nearly instant, with usually next to nothing in the VLQ review queue. Mod flags took a few hours, and I probably haven't had a pending mod flag last days in a really long time. That has started happening again. It might be a combination of missing motivation, fewer mods, and a higher workload on meta, but it's still noticeable.

Mod Golden Age is over? :(

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard well, eh

1:07 PM

Probably.

there's a bunch of things that need working on

Along with that, there's also been an increase in rants on meta (at least the past week - that might continue, but it could also not) and meta conflicts.

Which meta?

MSO, I guess?

Oh?

MSO for me always was "that place where everyone rants", so....

:D

1:09 PM

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard yeah

But yeah, without knowing details, I'd say that when people are upset, and their rants get no response, they become more and more upset over time.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard on they other hand, when SO catched a cold, we have the flu

It's a self feeding fire.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard It has never been as bad as this in recent times.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard They do get feedback, because they lash out at the community and mods

Probably the team got tired of putting off those rant fires.

1:10 PM

and/or*

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard They usually get closed when it's clear OP has no intention of discussing

@Olivia oh so that's new

Then it's deleted, and eventually undeleted and reopened by a mod :]

@Olivia honestly?

So yeah, we're not doing too well on any fronts. Neither is SE from the looks of things

A lot of stuff's just broken right now

1:13 PM

Nothing has changed

How can it be more broken?

Well, that's not true

The community's opinion of the way stuff is handled has gotten more heated and frustrated

@Olivia flashing ads!

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard I have so many ad blocker systems, it'll take a miracle for an ad to get through

lol

@Olivia I'm a mod

I know how much more broken it can get

@Aibobot No you're a sock :D

1:15 PM

(well my alter ego is anyway!)

@Aibobot Diamondless mod?! HAX!! :P

@Olivia There's also been some stuff happening that regular users don't always see.

True

@Olivia lemme put it this way. If I'M gone

its basically either bad enough that even folks who're hardcore into the community lost hope

or I got hit by a truck

@Aibobot yeah, I don't think that serves as a valid indicator any more

1:17 PM

@Olivia well I still hope things can be fixed

and not just stuff I consider superficial like the CC version and even ads

At this point, it's individual. Hope isn't exactly in a large quantity. I'm running out of it myself, mainly because stuff is ignored

@Aibobot and flu?

Shog replied to the 3 CV experiment post when the results weren't out and someone asked. That's one of the reasons I still have some hope - not everyone ignores stuff.

@Olivia erf

so, the state of the community team is one of those things I'm unhappy about

and I voice out privately where appropriate

@Aibobot Yeah, me too. Is this new though?

Or is this another thing that has gotten worse?

1:22 PM

That's... hard to say.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard I am wise.

its kinda getting better

slowly

@M.A.R. but not old

That's a bonus.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard Eh, depends on how you define "old". ;)

1:24 PM

Young Yoda! Is it you? @M.A.R. ;)

@Mithrandir Isn't that over 20? :P

I can be so grumpy my skull fractures, so yeah

@M.A.R. can't be more than @Bart

@Mithrandir Suits me

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard @Bart's so grumpy what he's staring at fractures.

lol

1:33 PM

@Olivia Its pretty old

Not something I want to complain about too publicly cause well, I do have an eye on the community team

that's fine ^^

Finally >.>

<--- @ShadowTheCoffeeWizard

@PrincessOlivia I actually think none of our current problems are "new"

might be. I haven't really been around for long enough to see the bigger picture

they're just old problems in different guises

Oh boy

I need to grab something to read before @Journey starts his old cowboy talk :p

1:42 PM

:D

So - one underlying issue is,well the need to find a profit center. Which lead to both that focus on careers over Q&A. Ads worked before and is easy - but having your own ads team is a lot more difficult than leveraging an external org

To be brutally honest, I can see the resemblance between Sam Elliot and Ash

Community ops is a bit of a black art

no one 'really' gets it, even sites that are "social"

look at facebook - and their attempts at getting a body to decide on whether content is acceptable, after moving it off to basically a sweatshop for ages

@M.A.R. if my longwindedness bothers you I can stop ;p

TBF Facebook is pretending not to be something it was built to be

Or get a room I guess

1:45 PM

SE's different

@M.A.R. well kinda

SE was built not as a social network, but with a very solid team handling the community

@Aibobot Everyone enjoys Sam Elliot rants. If they don't, they'd have to go through me. Hmm, that's a really weird thing to picture

I still would say they're good folks and I trust them

@Mithrandir TL is... weird...

On the other hand, early SO wasn't an... erm

1:47 PM

@PrincessOlivia cheers! :D

@MetaAndrewT. I'm going to hold off talking about those things here

@M.A.R. Who's Sam Elliot?

I'm tempted to say SO is sort of a cultural institution now

I have my own FB rant to make, but wasn't it initially designed to be a pickup platform? That's what I remember from the little sh!t that I gave about it

@Aibobot I won't say anything about that, or anything else

1:48 PM

@MetaAndrewT. thank you

buh

"image not found"

@PrincessOlivia Big mustache, you can never really figure out what he's saying, and he's been a cowboy in more movies than I have hair.

I'm not bald, to be clear.

never heard of him

Because I'm not a university professor yet

1:49 PM

yep, no idea who that is

@M.A.R. what hair? :D

Isn't he on the John Oliver show?

Heir.

@M.A.R. honestly, people have trouble getting what I say in real life too...

Hair? Heir? Hair heir?

1:50 PM

Hare!

Heir air hair

Hair heir, air is in trouble

@MetaAndrewT. Hear!

"What's that boy? Little johnny is in the well" "No you forgot your wallet and are walking home"

28 mins ago, by M.A.R.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard I am wise.

1:51 PM

anyway

all these are old problems

Well, when you got tongue at the tip of a word...

made worse by scale

I guess.

and stuff working well in a smaller org don't work well now

And some of the solutions involve specialisation - but that makes information sharing a lot harder

and probably SO looks worse because it's on the spotlight of the world. Nobody (really) cares if other SE sites have a moderation problem...

1:53 PM

@MetaAndrewT. oh not entirely true

and its not really moderation problems

most sites probably work pretty well on their own

If you think about it - we have had very few "problem" mods

and some of those actually, well

they had good intent and terrible execution

in a sense as far as individual sites go - our mod selection system seems sucessful?

Scaling? eh

SO has unique issues.

they're so much bigger and well, we donno how far horizontal scaling will work

@Aibobot Scaling is where it starts falling apart

@PrincessOlivia well that's kinda the interesting part

The system has probably worked at some point, but it hasn't been updated to handle scale it's used at

@PrincessOlivia well - I guess the question would be how

A moderator is a human exception handler

and well

Yeah, the how is the hard part

1:59 PM

not everyone's got the same moderation style (and diversity there is good) or preferences

on SU - I rely a lot on users feeding back through a lot of different ways to get things done

flags primarily but I also get feedback through some chatrooms

but a heavy part of my effectiveness is just presense

and that won't work as well on SO due to sheer size

SO has a few mechanisms that are designed to shift the load over to high rep users...

like the triage queue

Looks like someone is right that they need 30000 mods on SO...

but if even that gets overwhelming, things get fun

and the social aspect...

@MetaAndrewT. we definitely need more mods

30k is a bit overkill, but maybe 2-3 times as many as we currently have

At least

@PrincessOlivia you'd need to find and elect suitable people, teach them to be mods...

and there's inevitable conflicts of personality

yep.

2:09 PM

looks like that MSO post was rightfully deleted... couldn't find it anymore ¯(°_o)/¯

Which one?

forgot the title, but the one that OP claimed that it should be easy to find 1,000,000 new mods from all users of SO

^ closed questions on SO, by week

Back to normal after the experiment.

Lower the threshold to 2-3, and you get an equivalent of additional hundreds of mods, as far as closing is concerned.

@410 well, technicaly

mods shouldn't be relied on ~~at all~~ as the primary means for closing

#bring-back-the-three

2:18 PM

Imagine it being a dynamic threshold, where the "price" of question closing/reopening is determined by the current supply of questions and reviewers.

@MetaAndrewT. Do you remember when ti was?

@410 with would be nice but ... the code would be interesting

@410 too much chaos, and therefore too many support questions

@JohnDvorak well yes and no

no one is going to notice

in before "my question got closed with just two votes, but this broken window has five and it's still open"

2:20 PM

MetaSO didn't have a lot of questions "why is my post closed by 3 users" during the experiment.

no one's really going to check that hard

That is curious

In any case, SO appears to be considering not showing closer names at all.

Good ^

Like it's done for reopens now.

2:21 PM

What now?

@410 I'm not sure about that personally

I'd go with showing only for users with more than X rep

@PrincessOlivia We don't get a notice "reopened by X, Y, Z" under a reopened question.

@410 And in the timeline?

No repro

2:22 PM

Of course, the revision history has all the info as it should.

@410 There has never been anything like that

@410 FR. Some of us curators want to have to shout at, too

@PrincessOlivia I believe 410 was referring to the not-so-recent blog about "post notice renewal"

Yes, my point exactly. Never had reopeners listed under a question, and it worked just fine.

@410 that's kinda noisy though

2:23 PM

Anyway if that's the direction they go, sooner or later the question score won't be visible as well.

@ShadowTheCoffeeWizard eww

Even quora has that

The rightvote?

Anyway, the recent users' self-deletion on MSO was quite staggering

? I remember only Tiny

Feature-request: a "self-immolation" button.

3:02 PM

@MetaAndrewT. ?

@MetaAndrewT. ?

!

Seriously, what staggering un-stagnation?

5:15 PM

Just before experiment was over CV queue was under 4K, sometimes even under 3K. Reopen queue was not overwhelmed. Now two week after experiment ended CV queue is back on 7K or more. I don't need any other numbers to say experiment was successful. 3 close votes are better than 5. — Dalija Prasnikar 3 mins ago

Indeed, what other statistics could be used to decide whether the experiment was a success.

Were there any raging close-reopen wars?

5:28 PM

a couple, but nothing terribly shocking

That's what I'm looking at

Percentages of what?

Close or reopen votes?

Untouched cookies

Seems that's a good graph then :)

There's more pending :D

But only after the experiment ended so... bad experiment?

ah, that's close. I have reopen and edit aas well

@Tinkeringbell there's always more pending as you approach the current date

I guess the rest is either handled or aged away?

5:32 PM

most questions that will be closed get closed soon after the first vote. Those that don't... mostly sit around while the votes age away.

(the graph shows the "effectiveness" of the first vote or flag - whether or not it gets closed or reviewed as "Leave Open")

In the two weeks prior to the experiment, 37% of first close votes/flags were handled. In the 2nd and 3rd weeks of the experiment, 53% of first close votes/flags were handled.

Seems like an improvement.

Unless a large percentage of those were supposed to have remained open.

FWIW, there outrages weren't louder than usual.

3, 5, 15. It'd probably be the same for the majority of the people that complain.

Makes sense too, they're concerned, almost always, about a single isolated incident.

The number of those incidents wouldn't rise much more than what it already is.

5:48 PM

Close wars on SO. Experiment resulted in slight increase, but... Even so, still so rare as to be irrelevant.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

The experiment is a resounding success confirmed, then

When do we get 3cvs back?

@Shog9 How would the data look like if close reviews only required two "Leave Open" reviews to dismiss from the queue, instead of three? (Assume a question wouldn't have been closed if the review task received the Close review corresponding to the final close vote after it had already received two Leave Open-s.)

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

I don't really care about that right now

Lowering the threshold for Leave Open is a good idea if we lower it for Close. But it's not gonna significantly change the overall efficacy

And if a site goes HR and implements binding close votes for all, I think it should be dropped down to just one review.

6:23 PM

My suggestion. 2 close votes from gold tag badge holders to close a question

+1

In the past, weighted close votes (based on tag score/badges) were shot down because it'd be confusing to see questions closed by n users with variable n. But during the experiment, there were 3-, 4-, 5- user closures all the time, and nothing exploded.

The CVRQ did explode - after the experiment ended

It returned to the pre-experiment level, didn't it.

6:39 PM

Is "crème brûlée" a reasonably common spelling, or just an diacritics-stuffing trick?

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

I prefer the diacritic free "burnt custard"

as long as you don't stack em

čřěmě břůľěě

all on my keyboard

rene

@410 I would say it is common where I live. But we have had the French "influences" due to them occupying the country in the 18th century

user271002

@Shog9 in that case "burnt cuſtard"

6:52 PM

@rene Ah yes, those were good times :)

@Loong just ad some umaluts and make it more metal

user271002

@JourneymanGeek This week I saw an animated hotel ad on travel.se "time to visit Germany" or so. And on the next picture: "Frankfürt".

ow

user271002

And then another picture "Wien".

user271002

Vienna? Germany?

6:58 PM

so Wien?

"add" mistyped as "ad" by an MSE moderator. In time where ads are becoming more aggressive than we were promised they would ever be. Mere coincidence? I think not!

@JohnDvorak its 3 am and I've not had enough sleep

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

7:11 PM

kinda stuck at services section of my website. Anyone have any suggestion / recommendation on the design?

8:12 PM

@JNat (Rather old) cross-site spammer: stackexchange.com/users/13380535/quickbooks-chat-support

8:42 PM

@JohnDvorak Hungry doggies eat many things; including, but not limited to apostrophes and d's.