Tavern on the Meta

6:37 AM

@SmokeDetector k

7:11 AM

@SmokeDetector why

@SmokeDetector wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be a spamseed

@SmokeDetector K

@Luuklag so far only legit answers though

Three OTQ waiting to be nuked...

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar they all have my del vote

@Luuklag same

7:39 AM

Glo ate them for breakfast

> Glorfindel'ed
> Taken care of by Glorfindel

2

7:55 AM

@Luuklag k

self deleted already

@Glorfindel your fix to a broken link is broken as well, that's what I get when clicking it:

(this one)

Looks like Microsoft put all the blogs behind a broken login wall, silly move which isn't surprising me a bit. lol

8:10 AM

The guy has an own website: ericlippert.com/2019/03/21/so-long-msdn-blog

Microsoft has changed the URL format of their blogs in incompatible ways a few times, but at least the one I follow doesn't have a login wall: devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing

@Luuklag yeah but the original link was to his blog on Microsoft.

@RyanM lucky, probably. Or maybe only some are broken?

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar some, yes, see e.g. meta.stackexchange.com/posts/266100/revisions

@Luuklag yeah, that's a better link. Thanks @Shadow for the ping

@Glorfindel yes this one works. Maybe Eric just has too many posts so when Microsoft tried to migrate them it all broke, their infrastructure can't support so much data.

So typical to them. :D

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericlippert

here is the correct link

@glo, I put in a link to the archived version of his MSDN blog

8:16 AM

@SmokeDetector k

Amazing how spam survive for so much time on small sites.

@Glorfindel Relatedly, if you've got a consistent way to update various Microsoft links, that's relevant to my interests. We get a decent few flags and edits about them on SO.

@RyanM yes, I believe I have. Do you have an hour or so?

It's rather complicated ...

NSFW user to nuke @mods :meta.stackexchange.com/users/1203283/teena-patel

Ah...I'm afraid I don't at this moment, I was hoping for some code or something to stare at ^^; but perhaps another time :-)

@RyanM yeah, I just realized I don't have the code on this laptop.

8:24 AM

@SmokeDetector k

@Luuklag looks like it's just non-English based on machine translation, am I missing something?

@RyanM gist.github.com/Glorfindel83/9ec08e9e7690ea7bd89dde409bd1085c

if those replacements fail, it will query the Wayback Machine

thanks! I'll look it over

@Luuklag doesn't seem NSFW ;)

@RyanM the script follows redirects until the final URL, and I've blacklisted a couple of them, since that's often something like https://devblogs.microsoft.com/.

The script runs once every three days, and on SO I've throttled it to 8 edits (on other sites like Meta.SE, 3 edits)

I have no idea when it will finish, though. This search includes pages which are actually served from the Wayback Machine, and links that are still working (e.g. to OldNewThing)

8:51 AM

@Glorfindel 35k / 8 * 3 / 365 = just under 36 years from now.

some links are beyond fixing

there are 35,8K links, so I though to substract some that have already passed.

but I guess I could up the pace on SO - it's not like 50 edits a day (when spread over 24 hours) are likely to have a noticeable effect on the homepage

@Glorfindel You could run the script daily on SO perhaps

or once every 12 hours

Does your script just run 8 posts, or does it make 8 edits, that could also be a big timesaver

8 edits

(perhaps even more, if a post is edited, all other posts in the same Q&A are also edited)

I just don't like having two cronjob entries and two configuration files :P

8:55 AM

Yeah it would be better if SE ran this themselves, without bumping. Like the URL rewriter

anyways, I'm off into a meeting

indeed, but these cases are too complicated

good luck!

tripleee

9:25 AM

@Luuklag I cleared your TPU on the Japanese one in metasmoke

Meta Andrew T.

@SmokeDetector erf, the question was translated not by OP...

9:57 AM

@SmokeDetector k

11:05 AM

@tripleee isn't it policy to flag non-english as R/A, and thus TP?

tripleee

in Charcoal HQ on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, 44 mins ago, by tripleee

@DavidPostill I suppose technically you could argue that, but from the Smoke Detector point of view, people mistakenly posting in the wrong language because they are unfamiliar with the site's rules is not something we would want to systematically red-flag

@Luuklag for Charcoal: charcoal-se.org/smokey/…

But also, I'm not sure you'd consistently get red flags upheld on wrong-language content.

In a certain sense, it's merely off-topic.

Yeah that's also true, but on most site's I can't close as such ;)

"Needs details or clarity" flags are also an option

11:28 AM

Wonder what happened with OP of this Q, so that he gets network suspended until 2028 meta.stackexchange.com/questions/377879/…

But only on MSE and the trilogy

oh never mind, Sha already posted that as a Q meta.stackexchange.com/questions/379119/…

11:48 AM

Generally CMs seem to pick 10 years as the more-permanent ban duration.

So generally that's what you'll get if you incur the wrath of the CMs for whatever reason :-)

...although I guess for one-off stuff it's shorter sometimes.

e.g., a couple users who decided it'd be a great idea to respond to mod messages with threats got year-long network suspensions.

@Luuklag yeah, TL;DR is we can't know what they did, but they deserve it.

Plus, it's really far from network wide, only 5 sites out of 140 they have account in.

@RyanM well 2028, is not 10 years, as their most recent question was about a month ago, at least on MSE

but I suspect they enter a number of days, so it probably is some round number, perhaps 2k or something (5,5 years)

12:03 PM

I suspect, without checking, that the ban was applied in 2018.

Especially given the mention of account merging.

@Luuklag and on two other sites it's until 2026 "only". Appears to be random clicks of the CM.

(to choose suspension period.)

Just weird, but doesn't really matter.

oh, interesting...well, who knows.

@RyanM that must be on U&L then, as for the other sites they had activity after that

Maybe after merging 100+ accounts they were just too tired to set the same suspension on all sites. ;)

oh I checked only questions, they answered in march on U&L

so probably they got suspended somewhere after their MSE post

12:06 PM

@RyanM oh wait.... so if the merge was into account that was already suspended... yeah this can explain it.

Didn't think about it for some reason.

I'm not sure how network-wide suspensions work with account merges.

@RyanM I'm not sure that the CM's are sure how they work

@Luuklag if the new theory is correct they weren't suspended, just merged into account that was already suspended. But same outcome, yeah.

And to better news, I bought Loacker! :D

Quadratini double chocolate.

yum yum

$4 for 250g package.

loacker?

@Luuklag you... don't.. know... it... ?! It's like you won't know what is Toyota

One of the more famous brands ;)

12:15 PM

I know the type of pastry, just not the brand name

A beginner’s guide to JSON, the data format for the internet

12:32 PM

oh

tripleee

12:43 PM

bunch of pending spam and rude/abusive from today still up: 1 2 3 4 5

#4 was originally reported a couple of weeks ago

curious

→ 27 messages moved to Chimney

Feeds

2:00 PM

Guest Post on June 02, 2022

When APIs send data, chances are they send it as JSON objects. Here’s a primer on why JSON is how networked applications send data.

@Feeds a beginner's guide to Onebox, the one disfunctional box for previews

@Feeds beginner's meaning "So complicated than even experts will find it hard to understand"?

2:45 PM

wait

that blog article is... completely wrong

how..

none of what it calls valid json is valid json

LMAO

Well, I didn't think they could possibly replace the author that got banned from contributing with someone who contributed even worse content, but here we are.

@RyanM banned author? I missed that I guess

like

it's probably a copy paste problem

it has to be

surely

@KevinB where? Couldn't see something wrong.

@KevinB No wait, there's one! The first one under "Comparison to YAML and XML" is valid.

2:50 PM

Yea i just saw that

{
   "hello": "world"
}

is valid json

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar literally all of them except one. string keys need to quoted in JSON.

{
   hello: "world"
}

is invalid json

it won't parse in most systems

I guess "beginner's guide" here refers to the level of familiarity the author has with the subject.

@RyanM w3schools level

eh

pretty sure w3schools has this part correct

2:53 PM

well they fooled me.

They schooled me. :P

A: Many syntactic, semantic, typing and style errors in the "Underscoring (or dunder-scoring) the importance of native type methods in Python" blog post

26

Editor of the blog here. I appreciate the corrections and feedback, and I've tried to fix the article where I can in order to remove the inaccuracies. If you have other specific feedback on it, including edits to make to the code, I'd appreciate those as well. I rely on my writers to produce good...

@KevinB kind of. They just making it clear that without quotes around the keys it's not pure JSON but rather the JavaScript way to represent JSON.

Or something like that.

So the blog post is only for JSON used with JS, they just forgot to mention it.

If the keys aren't quoted, it's not JSON.

Even w3schools gets it right: "In JSON, keys must be strings, written with double quotes... In JavaScript, keys can be strings, numbers, or identifier names"

javascript objects aren't json

json objects don't exist

2:59 PM

> XML is part of a major API standard, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

I see what they're trying to say, but that's misleading...

@RyanM soap is used for cleaning dishes ;)

@Luuklag no no no, it's for opera.

and they're just skipping right over the fact that YAML is a superset of JSON

and...what on earth is "Serialized JSON" supposed to mean?!

JSON is serialized!

the "JSON Object" bit i can look past, honestly, so many people make that mistake and i can understand why they do

but it would be nice for the blog to be correct

Well start a new MSO thread, and comment the link to ryan's old answer.

3:02 PM

@KevinB Honestly, it's nitpicking at best to say there's no such thing as a "JSON object"...every JSON parsing library I've used has such a concept (in contrast to a JSON array)

@Luuklag And don't forget to bring torches!

:P

the bit that's problematic iwth calling it an array or an object, is that it's a string

the json does though represent an array structure or an object structure, if not one nested within the other

Right, which is why it's entirely legitimate to refer to an object serialized into JSON as a "JSON object"

That difference matters more with javascript

less so with other languages that parse json

I am, admittedly, not a JavaScript programmer.

3:06 PM

with javascript, it's literally javascript object notation, so it's easy to mistakenly refer to a json string as an object, which would cause errors if used directly in that way

because, well, it's a string, ;)

but yeah, someone oughta write up another "why has another incredibly wrong blog post been published that literally 10 seconds with a JSON validator could've caught" post

also the worst offense: Using JSON in API calls has two spaces between "Using" and "JSON"

well have fun with the torches and pitchforks, I need to go pick up the kids. Cya later

"[JSON] is much more compact than other standards" - yes, if by "other standards" you mean "XML"

otherwise it's on the heftier side.

the most common way json is used, is inefficient but descriptive and easy to work with

inefficient in terms of payload size

but if you took all your keys/values and used a nested array structure instead... you eliminate all those keys

Yep. The author appears unaware of this.

Or like...protobufs, flatbuffers...

any binary wire format really.

3:12 PM

also, -> benalman.com/news/2010/03/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-json

man that blog is old

cocomac

3:36 PM

Can someone with a bunch of rep on SO tell me what the score is on this post? I noticed it keeps going from maybe -5 to 3, so I was wondering what the actual upvote/downvote ratio is

34/36

controversial, but not necessarily hot

there are also userscripts that give you the ability to get the breakdown without 1000 rep.

cocomac

@RyanM This one? - stackapps.com/questions/3082/view-vote-totals-without-1000-rep

@KevinB Thanks!

@cocomac yeah, that's the one I use

cocomac

Oh wow that script is amazing!

Q: Site traffic fell off the table the week of May 10, 2022. What happened?

4:03 PM

0

I looked into the site analytics (25k+ rep only) just now and what I found was alarming. Daily page views averaged between 50k and 60k consistently all year until about May 10th, when it just tanked. Surely 75% of readers did not all decide to never visit the site again on the same day. What in ...

discussion

Did any other sites see similar drop offs in traffic?

Did that occur in previous years?

there's certainly a normal thing that occurs every may of every year

@KevinB No this kind of drop off is unprecedented.

SO for example saw a pretty decent drop off starting in the beginning of may

25mil to around 20mil

and "new visits" dropped to almost nothing

end of the school year

@KevinB Do you see the same crash last year?

no

nor any prior year to that

4:20 PM

Our other metrics like posts didn’t fall off really at all.

Maybe a change in how the views/visits is calculated?

that's what i was thinking

also no matching drop in posts/answers/votes

wait hang on. wasn't there a recent privacy-related change relating to analytics tracking cookies?

Q: Why has there been such a huge drop in "new visits" since May 9th, 2022, across multiple sites?

16

The Data: The following graphs are from today, starting from when the public beta started, and with data points plotted "weekly" rather than "daily". Quantum Computing: Matter Modeling: Physics: See here, a diamond moderator confirmed that the same thing is happening at Physics.SE, without show...

discussion statistics site-analytics

5:01 PM

This looks very familiar. Style of writing, nonsense name. Last time it turned out to be a troll.

5:16 PM

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar maybe raise a flag and the Dutch will handle it ...

5:50 PM

@rene I did but it got several upvotes since then, so...

Maybe I'm just trollonoid

:P

Ann Says Times Will Get Better

true

:D

M.A.R.

6:29 PM

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar what happened to shoot first ask later?

7:22 PM

Is it that when a closed question get pushed into the reopen review queue, the users who closed it can review it?

Sonic the Save Ukraine-hog

@AnnSaysTimesWillGetBetter If I recall correctly, yes

Ann Says Times Will Get Better

Oh.

So in smaller communities, pushing a post into the review queue won't be that effective?

Spevacus

The close/reopen process in general suffers when operating on a site with a minimal number of active reviewers.

Most of the time on sites that small, moderators end up doing the bulk of the work.

@rene You summoned?

M.A.R.

7:50 PM

@AnnSaysTimesWillGetBetter you have to demonstrate that a review by the same person is considerably less likely than by others to result in a reopen. Is the site policy so vague that people get into close reopen loops often?

If reviews by the same people have a 4% chance of successful reopening, and 6% by others, that's not enough reason to change how reopening questions works.

OTOH, if a site is small and quiet enough that the same four or five people do all the cleaning, there's a much bigger chance that reviews simply fail because either the OP loses interest in the question, or closing or deletion thresholds aren't met quickly enough or at all. That is potentially grounds for some interesting discussion on what to change.

I guess what I'm saying is that an appeal process is fair and all that, but not terribly crucial for healthy site function.

Ann Says Times Will Get Better

@M.A.R. it was shot first

@AnnSaysTimesWillGetBetter it can be, just need to convince those who closed why it should be reopened. Sonic is good at convincing me, for example, there were quite a few questions I closed as duplicates, which I later reopened after hearing good reasons.

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar :D

@M.A.R. I see.

8:06 PM

@Tinkeringbell on behalf of Sha, yes ... but if your flag queue is empty then it is all under control ... ;)

@rene yeah flag was handled

8:22 PM

@rene not exactly empty but also not having anything new :)

So that seems fine then. I'll crawl back into the hole I was summoned from ;)

@Tinkeringbell you mean your bed?

@rene no, this:

Ha!

You won't believe what she has inside.

A 32-inch Oled TV?

8:29 PM

Double than that, but I was referring to her kitchen.

@rene Not yet, got one more block of documentary to go ;)

@rene Isn't 32 inch rather small? Mine isn't OLED, but I see to remember it was 55 inches :P

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar my kitchen is nice (though a bit messy at the moment)

@Tinkeringbell I was close! ;)

@Tinkeringbell I know it's nice! :D

@Tinkeringbell I'm old skool. I remember CGA was awesome.

@rene Hahaha I think 32 inch is a PC sized screen? We had one of those really big TVs back when I was young, it was in the attic for ages after....

Like, big as in fat, i don't think the screen size was much over 32 inches XD

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar I often think I could've used a tad more counter space... But if I'm doing something more complicated that vegetables, potatoes and meat I now just prepare and weigh everything and use the dinner table as extra counter space for the prepared stuff, it works ;)

I think I'll be in trouble if I do get one of those coffee bean machines though. Those are big!

@Tinkeringbell huh, nice! And all that while you're living alone, that's admirable. ;)

@Tinkeringbell depends which, got a friend with a small machine.

8:43 PM

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar the small ones usually don't have a function to make lattes ;)

Welcome back @Massimo long time no talk here! :-)

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar Eh, don't go imagining grand things, mostly it's just stuff like pasta with creamy garlic sauce or a chicken/grape stew with couscous ;)

@rene not for Golden Axe

Nothing too fancy

@Tinkeringbell ohh, true.

Massimo Ortolano

8:44 PM

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar Thanks, and Hi!

@Tinkeringbell more than what I ever made. Most complicated I'm doing is pasta with meat. :D

@ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar Well add some garlic, milk and herbs to it and you got the pasta I made recently :P

@MassimoOrtolano So, tea or coffee? ;)

@Tinkeringbell this would make kids not want it, anything out of the ordinary and they won't touch it. :/