The Comms Room - 2011-01-21 (page 3 of 3)

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10:04 PM

@WesleyDavid: I don't think the mods have quite that much of an impact on people's perception of the site. I have nothing but a good impression of Kara (I assume that's her name, not Karen, since that's how it shows on her profile), but I don't actually have very much of an impression of her or splattne. My view of SF is mostly based on the answers I see, and heavily based on answers by the high-rep posters.

Yes, Kara, not Karen. Blah. I fail.

That would be an interesting thing to study. Just from the folks I've talked to about forum leadership and culture as well as just plain end users of a site, it seems that most of them take their view of a site's culture from the mods and admins.

I think that in a community site like this - as opposed to a site that is created and closely directed by one person - unless the mods get together and agree on a policy (e.g. we're going to aggressively close beginner sysadmin questions), I don't think any one mod can have that much of an influence.

True, this is an unusually open community unlike others such as DaniWeb, Sadikhov or Petri

Part of the benefit of the trilogy is that 10K+ users can also overrule mods - if you have one mod who runs amok closing questions good ones will likely get re-opened

As a 10K user I actually see splattne more often. He's pretty active in retagging and closeing.

10:09 PM

but a mod can do things and other high rep users can think thats the right thing to do and vote in support of them

I also understand that mods aren't going to be making policy. Jeff, Joel and the team make the policy and the mods abide by it. However, mods will have their own way of interpreting and implementing the laws. Kinda like how judges are to interpret the laws - you'd think that all laws would be judged the same way, but we know there's a huge amount of leeway.

And yes, the community mods have a nice amount of a say in things. I like that.

Yeah, actually, I do see splattne more often on closing than on answering or on meta or here.

I'm still uncertain as to what exactly a "proper mod" has over a community mod.

@WesleyDavid Not much :)

what do you mean community mod? You mean someone with 10k+

10:11 PM

I think that the site team want it that way @wesley - its part of the "by the site users for the site users" thing

@voretaq7 You can't forget the blue diamond! @Zoredache Yes, someone over 10K

@WesleyDavid it IS a very pretty shade of blue!

i don't mean they want it to be obscure, i mean I think they want "ordinary end users" to have as much influence as possible, with the right amount of rep

Very IBM.

there was a meta question about that....

10:12 PM

Read "Theory of Moderation" too if you haven't

@sysadmin1138 there will later be a committee established to determine if we should change the moderator diamond. We'll wind up putting stripes through it.

The question I was thinking of just links to 'Theory of Moderation"

If I were a moderator, I'd lobby for a spiffier mod symbol. Maybe a check-mark with racing stripes...

Stack Overflow Blog: A Theory of Moderation

Posted by Jeff Atwood on May 17th, 2009

We believe deeply in community moderation. That’s why we appoint Pro Tempore Moderators and, ideally, democratically elected community moderators for every site in our network. But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, as little as possible!

From the very first version of Stack Overflow faq way back in mid-2008, our goal has always been to give power back to the community:

Stack Overflow is run by you! If you want to help us run Stack Overflow, you’ll need reputation first. Reputation is a (very) rough measurement of how much the Stack Overflow community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing other Stack Overflow users that you know what you’re talking about. …

Nice link. Thanks

I'm searching Meta for a post on the diffs between a 10K user and a diamond mod.

10:13 PM

Heh, I did that earlier today.

@Ward I think the stack exchange people want it to be subtle

There are some MSO posts on it, but they're tricky to find.

8

Q: What are diamond moderators?

Some people have a diamond after their username (ex: Jeff Atwood♦) What special privileges do diamond moderators have? How can I become a diamond moderator? Who are the diamond moderators? How many are there? Return to FAQ index

support moderators faq-proposed

@sysadmin1138 Here's the post on moderator term limits that we talked about earlier:

17

Q: Should Community Moderators be "elected for life", or have terms?

While I applaud the excellent work of all our community moderators, the question has come up: How long will be the elected moderator’s “mandate”? Is it for life, or are we going to have “moderator elections” regularly? Of course, any community moderator who wishes to recuse him or herself c...

discussion moderation moderators moderator-nomination

Seems that they're lifers, which I disagree with.

@sysadmin1138 and thanks for the link

My biggest concern is that, unless things changed, moderators can't issue a non-binding close vote.

3

@Zoredache Well... the fix there is for me to work up a sock-puppet user until I get to 3K on it.

10:16 PM

I'm pretty sure that's still the case @Zoredache

@Zoredache Wow, that seems rough. So you become a mod and have to refrain from issuing close votes for all but the most egregious cases.

All my sock puppets are under 1k...

>:p

Can one diamond mod overturn another diamond's decision?

Yeah, my sock-puppets are nudists. Not terribly useful, there.

@WesleyDavid I have issues with lifetime mods, but then the question is how do you grow the mod pool for the community? Do we add another slot every year and everyone has to run for re-election?

10:19 PM

Quote from Jeff's article: "As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. " <-- exactly.

@voretaq7 That's the way I'd like to see it. Once a year, elect new mods. If the community is large enough at that point, add a slot. Each mod has to sit out one year for each year he is elected. He can be re-elected after one year of not being a mod.

Lifetime mod-ship seems dangerous. However, as someone in meta said, benevolent dictatorship is better than a democracy, which I almost agree with.

@WesleyDavid I don't like the term limits idea -- I think if you keep running and the community keeps electing you you must be doing something right

@voretaq7 Fair enough.

@WesleyDavid why do you think lifetime terms are dangerous?

The grey area that really bugs me tends to be small business type questions, but they frequently get lumped in to home-office and moved over to superuser. I support several small schools. Some people seem to want to migrate everything to superuser unless your question applies to a medium/huge businessmen. It bugs me when a single mod votes to migrate. I have much less of an issue when the community votes.

@Ben Because handing anyone something that is irrevocable except for gross behavior seems to breed a complacency. I don't have studies or charts or pretty RRD graphs to prove it.

10:22 PM

@WesleyDavid the thing that mitigates the danger in my mind is 3K+ users being able to reopen questions. But that mean they have to look for them :-/

@voretaq7 It's not so much a matter of abusing closes and migrations as it is if the person is a continual benefit to the community with his attitude and communication with people.

@Zoredache I think mod migration should require at least one community vote personally, but then we get to splitting hairs on "if 1 why not 2, or why not equal to any other user?"

@voretaq7 I think I've seen exactly one reopened question that didn't involve a mod.

@WesleyDavid agreed - and having 1 year terms and re-election would help with that

@sysadmin1138 that's one more than I've seen

That's what I'm concerned with. Closes and migrations can be overturned fairly easily. Telling someone that they're being slightly toxic to the general tenor of the community isn't so easy to prove or oust someone over.

I see some mods on some sites that are just buggers and everyone has to just step around them. I don't like that. It pushes people away. I've left a site for the most part because of the general attitude of some of the leaders. A re-election cycle is a gut-check for the community as a whole, the culture as a whole... I see no downsides. I'm looking for some tohugh.

10:25 PM

@WesleyDavid, lifetime moderators don't bug me. Jeff says everything they do is logged. If there was ever a problem mod it would be easy enough to see that the where a problem and correct it if it was needed.

@WesleyDavid It can always be bought up on meta I guess

@Zoredache It's only easy to see a problem for lifetime mods if the problem is quantifiable with a SQL query. I'm talking the soft-skills arena.

@WesleyDavid I'd be just as fine with a way to hold a vote of no confidence on mods

@Ben It has been, and the consensus was that lifetime mods are the way to go. I'll just have to dissent by myself then. ;)

@voretaq7 nice. Now that might be meta worthy.

I don't think SE is going to grow to thousands of sites, so I think the paid employees will be able to keep an eye on sites and respond to any problems that come up with moderators.

10:27 PM

@WesleyDavid I meant if a particular mod was being toxic, that could be bought up on meta

But if there was a soft skills problem you could easily bring it up on meta, here, or @team@stackoverflow.com and discuss it.

@Ben Ehhh... you know the saying "you can't beat city hall"? I think once a person has a position of authority that has some level of tenure to it, it's rather hard to clean house.

@Wesley - I know a few sites with toxic moderators/administrators. All you can do is report them and if the people running the site don't do anything despite repeated reports you can only assume that is how they want the site to be run and you are in the wrong. I've walked away from a few sites on that basis myself.

@RobertMoir See, that's exactly what I'd hate to see with SF. Having to walk away if things get bad. Having re-elections mitigates that problem before it rears up.

I suppose a really evil moderator could go harvest the email addresses from accounts and spam/harass people directly.

10:29 PM

@WesleyDavid the StackExchange sites are still young though - this probably won't be taken seriously until there is a major problem (probably on StackOverflow first)

The only mods that are truly permanent are Jeff, Joel, and any of the staff they hire and make mods. Ultimately, you can appeal to them to get rid of an evil mod.

@Zoredache I never considered that.. and I think it would be exceedingly unlikely that that would happen here.

Well yes and no. It might remove one fool, but what I'm saying is that if the people running the site haven't already removed said fool then they actually want their site to be moderated by fools - which makes me dubious about any new moderators they appoint too

@RobertMoir Yeah, I getcha.

the downside of re-elections is that its a lot of cost, especially if the majority of the time the verdict on incumbents is "they're doing a good job, vote them back in".

10:30 PM

@RobertMoir SF is blessed in a way though - a lot of employees hang out in this chat and on the site

@WesleyDavid I don't think that would be the case about "not beating city hall". I am confident that Jeff and co. would have words with a mod if they thought they were being harmful to the community

which isn't to say I disagree with the idea completely, just that its not a clear cut thing one way or another

@RobertMoir Mhmm, it does cost time and effort and I do think many mods would be shoe-ins for re-election. I just think that it's healthier in the long run. Kinda like getting checked for lumps. Most of the time, there's nothing there. That one time that there's something, you'll be glad for all those times you checked and it was nothing.

@voretaq7 you're right, and that is why the sites ought to always do well. The site I'm thinking about that I walked away from due to foolish moderators was a "money saving" website set up by a journalist. The site has grown into a massive forum but because it isn't his day job he doesn't go there much and there are problems

@WesleyDavid you may be right. Like I say I'm not so much firmly against the idea, just saying "There's a cost to doing it as well as not doing it"

@Ben Yeah, I think Jeff and Kyle and etc. are good people. I just would hate to rely on them so much for arbitration. It would be so much better if methods were in place that prevented the need for that final arbitration in the first place.

10:33 PM

Another intangible benefit we have at least on SF is that mods tend to be involved in the community -- they're more inclined to discuss than delete (at least right now).

just as there's a cost to going mad on one's new kinnect fitness game. I'm staggering about like bambi after a heavy night's beer drinking now

It really does cost time and money, I was (still am) thinking of nominating myself for mod, but I don't know if I want to spend the time answering all the questions...

Really, how complicated do things have to be. Replicating an entire political system for the moderation of a Web site is excessive. With that in mind, I see no issue with "lifetime" moderators. However, if a moderator's behavior was unbecoming of the responsibility, their privileges should be revoked.

@Ward Sorry.. did I make a nuisance of myself with those touchy-feely questions in meta? ;)

Forget the Kinnect, I played "Octopus" with a bunch of 6-8 year olds the other day and I'm still sore!!

10:34 PM

I like Damien's accepted answer, I agree entirely.

@Warner Yeah, Things seem to be getting rather complex. However, SF is a big site with only big things in its future, so what seems complicated now will be better for the future, I think.

@wesley - it takes a while to answer them but thats ok

@Warner I'd personally feel a lot more comfortable with a "recall vote" on mods, even if it were restricted to 10K+ users

And yes, Damien made some good points that I hadn't thought of.

haha, @voretaq7. That's team@serverfault.com. =)

Technical people tend to do that too frequently.

10:36 PM

@Ward - answering questions... I don't want to talk out of turn as I put myself forward, but I think the questions are a bit of a litmus test. I don't feel people should be judged badly for not answering them, but if you look at them and think "I don't have time to answer this" then do you have time to be a mod.

@Warner team@ is more like a prayer to god :-)

Creating unnecessary complication and structure for otherwise simple tasks. I prevent that whenever possible in my IT dept.

Not everything requires a complex system, even though the thought of creating it is sometimes novel.

I like things to be as complex as they need to be, no more and no less :-)

@Warner Complexity is not always a vice -- Good engineers build systems that maintain themselves.

@Warner I agree totally. I'm trying to discern if what we're talking about is truly unnecessarily complex or not.

10:38 PM

Those systems may look more complex, but ultimately require less time from those responsible for them

@Warner: Like the GFS in the Bacula blog post :-)

@RobertMoir One of my favorite quotes.

Most routine tasks should be automated, you will not get argument from me there.

I sent that over to a colleague earlier today, @KyleBrandt. I enjoyed the post.

@Warner and I'd never argue that having to kick out a mod should be routine (Shiva forbid we ever get to that point) - To me it just seems like a natural extension of "run by the community" -- the community made you a mod, and the community can un-make you...

Easy to say that from the perspective of an end-user.

As a feature-request, the ROI is questionable from something that seems time-intensive to implement.

10:42 PM

My definition of "adequately complex" can certainly include decent self-maintaining systems and well engineered solutions, I'm not arguing for bodge jobs here. But you do sometimes see someone do the equivilent of constructing an 80-floor office tower to use as a bike shed...

Maybe it's simple to implement, I cannot say for certain. That is just the kind of discussion I have professionally about things like that.

Our system build scripts are very cool here, @RobertMoir. =) Quite proud of the work that was done there.

@Warner Implementation & ROI is definitely something that needs to be considered. IMHO the policy is probably harder than the code (what threshold for a mod recall, etc.), but it's something worth kicking around as an idea

I approve of good scripting.

I don't see what's overly time intensive about re-electing some or all mods once a year or even a "no confidence" vote for existing lifetime mods. A few weeks work to maintain self-sustaining excellence on the best SysAdmin based Q and A site seems like justifiable expense.

we're looking to change our build routine at work in the future. We're considering Kace tools

10:44 PM

I do believe that SF is bar none the best site for SysAdmins currently available... not that the competition was much to talk about. =)

@Warner I have a new level of appreciation for my system build scripts since they kinda saved my bacon yesterday when I b0rked a server.

chuckle. I have not worked with Kace tools before.

We write most of our own build and config management.

@WesleyDavid There was competition?

@Warner same here - couldn't find any tools that did everything we needed.

(actually couldn't find many that did even half of what we needed...)

@voretaq7 Meh, siloed competition in the form of individual forums that were/are great for specific technologies.

@voretaq7 and you SHOULD be praying

:-D

10:47 PM

@Zypher Shouldn't you be braiding the cable in your avatar? :-D

nah that's from my last job :)

@voretaq7 Yeah... a couple. The biggest, experts-exchange (a.k.a. our hyphenated competition) and one other forum I'm forgetting.

One day I will buy a rack, cable it up nice and braid all the ethernet cables. Just to say I've done it.

I'm really mostly interested in the Kace tools because they support mac os workstation deployment along with other platforms. Now that apple are getting rid of their real servers and only selling toy ones I need to think about what we're doing to deploy mac workstations when our current mac servers reach EOL

@RobertMoir i wouldn't call the Power Mac line toy's they are more server than workstation

10:49 PM

Hm, couldn't you setup tftpboot servers and roll your own?

The Hypehenated Site isn't much competition.

No, it isn't.

(i know everyone is fixated on teh mac minis a as "server")

Zypher, yeah but I can't rack mount them reasonably, they don't support redundant power and they're not a good fit for the datacentre

@Zypher please don't make me cry over the death of the xserve again

10:50 PM

Warner yes we could but by the time we got all the wrinkles out we might as well have just spent the money anyway

Makes sense.

@RobertMoir, your not supposed to have redundant power, you are supposed to have redundant mac minis.

@zoredache yes. And no matter how many I have, I still can't make any of them talk to the fibrechannel san currently plugged into our xserves

As I've said before, don't get me wrong, I have a mini at home as a media centre... install plex and its fantastic.. but server... sorry no.

@RobertMoir, do you have no satellite offices that you need to support ever? Not every server exists in the core.

Not for anything over "small business" anyway

10:53 PM

They would make a perfect secondary dns server, or a small file server at a satellite office.

Yes, they're good for that and small business, I should have said "but datacentre server... sorry no"

But I guess I get confused about where to draw the line of medium sized business with a few small sub-divisions.

we used one to control and store images from some cameras... I know you can do some neat things with a mini... its just not a "datacentre platform" imho. Maybe a few of them behind a load balancer to serve webpages but even then I can do that for less with commodity hardware with linux / apache on it behind the same load balancer

Of course the question that got migrated and I complained a bit about kinda sucked anyway. Particularly since it was more about the hardware.

But it seemed like some of the argument continues to be that will completely ignore you if you aren't using over-priced over-speced enterprise grade hardware for every system.

Oh I have no problem with someone who rocks up and says "I have a mac mini server for my small business / branch office, how do I install Open Directory on it". I'd be totally behind that one... once I remembered what buttons to push that is, I don't set up OD every day of the week and its a long time since I took the apple sysadmin cert course

I'm just pissed at apple for claiming that the mini and the pro are a replacement for an xserve in situations where the xserve was the most suitable platform.

10:59 PM

Did they really claim that? I though the mini was really aimed at a WHS replacement.

@Zoredache The official "replacements" for the XServe were the Mini Server and Mac Pro (which is "rackable" if you want to sacrifice something like 4U)

Speaking of which Microsoft, also recommended WHS to small business.

@Zoredache neither offers redundant power or hot-swap hard drives that I'm aware of though -- two big requirements for me :-/

Well we all know that Microsoft's marketing team need some time alone with an angry gorilla holding a baseball bat

@RobertMoir Leave Ballmer out of this!

11:01 PM

don't get me started on him. The guy really is a jerk and yes I'm speaking from personal experience

I think he's amusing. I'm only speaking from seeing videos though.

less amusing when he's giving you both barrels for asking a difficult question rather than admitting that maybe its his answer thats the problem. Trust me :-(

I support several small schools. (~20-40 students) A high end server would be nice, but they just don't have the money. They do need to share documents. A few hour outage to replace a drive is not an issue there. But since I support many schools, some larger, are you saying that I should tell a school they can't have a file server because they can't afford the ~5k+ it would take to get a redundant Dell/HP/Whatever?

I'm glad I'm not involved with MS any more.

He's very.... excited... apparently about developers.... and I'm worried he's going to clutch his chest and fall down, at which point I might laugh and look like a callous jackass

@RobertMoir AMEN.

I've got no problem with deploying non-redundant hardware, but around here email is zomg critical i will die if I can't check it every 45 seconds so the hardware I have to spec for it needs to meet that expectation. Apple removed themselves from that arena.

(Which SUCKS since we use Mac workstations and I really wanted to deploy their mail/calendaring solution)

11:06 PM

That's the issue. Apple have essentially declared they don't want to sell into certain market spaces any more, and hurt the plans of people in those spaces.

& full disclosure as an apple shareholder I see both sides: Nobody was buying the things, so why keep spending resources on it ; conversely if there's no device in that niche Apple will never break into enterprise use because their hardware isn't perceived as datacenter-grade

ooh, it's go-home time!

I'm keeping my G5 pizza box for nostalgia now that they're off the market.

@voretaq7 Drive safe in the slippery stuff.

room topic changed to The Comms Room: General serverfault chat. Don't mind the roar of the servers.

possible be back to hang out later tonight -- for now: ROAR (i flee)

cya

Our G5 server is still in use. It just eats up the file server role

11:10 PM

I think Symantec should be horsewhipped for the price of their EV certs. Goodness. I'm looking for decent EV certs for a client's shopping cart. $1400 for one SSL cert? Some now, Symantec.

Aren't all EV certs teh spenday?

GeoTrust is suspiciously low priced at $299, but seems to be well accepted by browsers and I've used them for an Exchange cert in the past. Comodo... perhaps. Anyone here have experience with an EV cert?

EV certs are needlessly expensive because they can be. Symantec is needlessly needlessly expensive because they're Symantec.

EC?

EV, rather

We use digicert at work for all our certs.

11:12 PM

Godaddy, sells them cheap. Godaddy support sucks, so if you can live with poor/no support you can save some money.

digicert.com/ssl-certificate-comparison.htm

Yeah, I looked at them too. Apparently Digicert only sells in packs of three at a minimum.

YEah, we're DigiCert too for our wildcard and Exchange certs.

I've been absolutely delighted with them

they sold us just one UC cert when we wanted

@RobertMoir Us too.

11:13 PM

Strange this page then: digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm

and yet when I browser to this link, they sell them single. digicert.com/welcome/ssl-plus.htm

Confuzzled.

very odd

All I can say is that we managed to buy one cert at a time from them when we needed to, and I've been delighted with their service at point of sale and afterwards too (we had to go back and get an exchange UC re-issued and they were no trouble at all)

SSL certs are such a scam...

9

Yeah, they look good. And at $144 for a single year EV cert... that's not bad.

GeoTrust can be had for $49.

@Warner, for an extended validation cert?

11:17 PM

@Warner EV certs from GeoTrust? I'm looking at their site right now, as luck would have it.

the problem is that people still think "SSL means teh site is secure!!!!111one!!one!"

I've used GeoTrust before because of their low price and good service / certs. I'd recommend them.

AFKBRBBBQ

Ah, not for EV..

EV is expensive.

Thank god for startssl.com . They offer free regular ssl certs.

EV also requires root chain updates. All devices that terminate SSL will require it.

Old browsers can still throw errors but using the "site seal" can help with that.

I ended up going with Thawte for EV, which wasn't the cheapest by any means. At the time, only about half a dozen CA at most offered EV.

I'd be fine with GeoTrust if cost were a consideration.

Later all.

11:20 PM

Pretty sure I've used Geotrust in the past though not for EV or UC or anything complicated

cya Warner

Later Warner

IIRC they were pretty good too

though i'd still with my other hot tip if it was me. They were the first people who didn't make me dread ordering a cert

I've always found CA's to be intruiging organisations. Imagine if you somehow managed to steal the Verisign private key... Never mind the Coca Cola secret recipe, CA private keys are the REALLY valuable secrets.

@kennyr That's why a lot of 'em are using Intermediate certificates. Presumably so they can print off the private-key of the CA itself and hide it on paper in a vault a half mile underground.

i think someone did still a root key from verisign once, at least the root of all the subsequent certificates they issued to MS for code signing

what is WRONG with my typing today? Still = Steal

11:24 PM

I have an autocorrect rule set up in Outlook which corrects serber to server. I type serber a LOT more than I should :(

@kennyr, speaking of that. How many CAs does your browser trust these days? Each new one means there is more of a chance that someone can get the key start issuing forged certs...

as long as you're not typing rm -rf too often

@Zoredache mozilla.org/projects/security/certs/included <- the firefox list of trusted CAs

Right, but that is a pretty big list. 47 different organizations each of which has at least a couple different CA certs in your browser.

Indeed, pretty scary if you think about it.

11:35 PM

well time to get my head down here. Night folks, have a nice appropriate time of the day!

nn

Night Robert

map of CAs eff.org/files/map-of-CAs.pdf and the article it came from lwn.net/Articles/399585

Lovely. 502 bad gateway errors on userscripts.org

it's ok from here

11:50 PM

Did you try to sign in?

no

Sorry, I'm being a luser. When I try to sign up it 502s.

I signed up ok

I think it's time for bed. I've been formulating a response to Wesley's most recent question for ages but my brain is a big spongy mess right now, so there's an awful lot of nonsensical crap coming out at the minute. I'll give it another go again tomorrow I think.

Night all

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