I was reading an article on Forbes that says Google Chrome might be draining my laptop's battery because it brings the system into a mode that uses a tick rate of 1ms instead of 16ms, and is using up to 25% more battery power in the process. (And apparently, it doesn't leave that mode like it's s...
@TerryChia I've noticed certain increase in desperation to answer crap questions lately yup, hope that new "Answer well-asked questions" addition to How to Answer sticks to at least some
tho I'm not sure this help system actually makes much of a difference, the only ones that read it are the ones that already know all of that
we should just enforce stricter rules on our own when reviewing, and nuke more often ... it's been a while since I last saw anyone object to review / mod actions
help system is kinda only good for pointing at when someone points at you first
@TerryChia I don't think they're results that would directly translate in any case. They're a much larger community, both in terms of candidate questions and active users.
That changes the dynamics and the ability of a site to self curate dramatically.
@TerryChia I understand that, but moving to a model were we tell non-professionals that they (and their questions) aren't welcome, isn't going to cause us to get more good questions, it's going to cause the level of site activity to drop. If you can't find interesting questions to answer now, you're still not going to be able to find interesting questions to answer after we drive 70% of our traffic off.
@Xander See, this won't be a popular view but I'd rather have less traffic than crap traffic. It's very depressing to see the new questions page filled with crap so I don't look at it anymore. This increases the likelihood that I miss the rare great question that I'll actually be motivated to answer.
Speaking of reviews, here's an interesting (to me, anyway) stat that I calculated the other day. @TildalWave, @Adnan and I, between the three of us, have done 42% of all of the reviews on sec.SE.
@Xander Wow that's a lot! OK, you have to consider that many first cast votes don't count there, and that mods might respond to flags which also doesn't count towards completed reviews there in the queue.
@TerryChia Fair enough. Certainly less crap would be welcome by everybody. It's just that in my experience, throwing away that much traffic from a site that's already fairly restricted in nature tends to lead to either stagnation, or worse, a death spiral. I think that if we want to have a reasonable chance of success at materially improving the site, that change needs to be made hand-in-hand with a plan for re-growing traffic that's more constructive.
@TildalWave Yes, but it also illustrates the problem that you brought up. We can't close bad questions with 3 voters. The site would be healthier if more folks would jump in more regularly. (We three have over 43% of the reviews in the Close queue, over 55% of Reopen reviews, and over 57% of the Low Quality Post reviews.)
@Xander I think most "curious about" non-professional questions are hit & run anyway and we don't get those because their authors are otherwise active on the site. They might be on some other SE sites and read some article in the news, remember there's this Sec.SE they might drop a question at. But most of those must be, by my understanding, new to SE. Those need more guidance, and it's often to no avail, because they don't respond to comments or even forgot their login password or whatever.
@Xander Agreed, we do need more active reviewers but I'm not sure how to get them now during the summer? I've noticed a few new ones before (Phillip, David, Mark,.. ) and they IMO do a good job, but we also lost some and I'm not exactly sure why.
@TerryChia I will say that it's pretty impressive that every single post this guy has ever made has a negative score. I don't think I've ever seen that before.
@TildalWave Yeah, summer is always slow for the professional folks with holidays, and we will always have more crap questions/answers in the summer because of kids being out of school. I haven't just seen this here, I've seen it happen like clockwork in every technical forum I've ever been a member of.
In fact, I think I mentioned that in this very room last summer when people were complaining about all the crap we were getting at that time.
@TerryChia But if we succumb to "anything goes" how's that gonna improve quality of questions? It only communicates to professionals a non-serious attitude of our site. We could definitely use some help in the review queue.
@TerryChia You want motivation? How about being active on a site that sucks less? Like IE? :D
@Xander I'm not a parent but I thought kids need guidance even more so than professional adults? So we have this conundrum then how to improve effectiveness of our reviews while there's fewer reviewers active on the site. Should we, say, propose that the quorum of 5 be reduced during the summer?
@TerryChia before the summer it was quite tricky to even find something to review, unless you found those slow hours ... now they kinda linger in the queue
@TildalWave Is that just because it's summer or is it because the people who used to do reviews just stopped contributing all together? i.e. was this a problem last year as well?
@TildalWave I don't see a time-based graph though, so I can't tell the level of activity especially since I don't visit the review queue that often.
@TildalWave I ask because I feel (my memory might be hazy though) that the quality of the site has dropped a lot compared to the same period last year.
It's not just the amount of crap questions. It's the lack of good questions.
@TildalWave I dunno. It would be nice to have a few more regularly active, but I don't think we need to do anything that drastic. Ultimately, there's no such thing as a perfect site, and I don't believe that any of the issues we have are particularly dire. In my opinion, other sites (like SO) are in much worse shape than we are.
Plus I have observed that lately we seem to be the exact opposite of a site like SF. In other words we cater to everyone but the actual infosec professionals.
@Xander SO is just a dump site for "why dis no work" questions anyway, I only go there if someone posts something in chats that comes with a promise of a good laughter
@TerryChia might be a good time to ask a question then? :P
Anyway, I agree that the situation isn't dire now, but I'd hate to see security.stackexchange turn into "Tech support for what my mom thinks is a security problem".
Well we also don't wanna become a niche site, so we just have to find a good balance and enforce our qualitative requirements better somehow. It would help if SE didn't model all the smaller sites according to what the trilogy needs, but I think they took notice of that and are working on this. Such as better educating new visitors on what we stand for and alike. It won't happen today but some of it already did, some is still to come. ;)
You have to admit we also got a bit lazy. Fewer active reviewers, dead meta, blog posts few and far between, and we also stopped engaging in other extracurriculars like our CTF team ...
If all of this is symptomatic to being the summer vacations time, I dunno. I hope it is, otherwise we have bigger problems on our hands.
On the Tour page for Security.SE it states:
Information Security Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Information security professionals.
However, when I see questions like this Does clicking lead to DoS attack? with 10 upvotes, it doesn't strike me as the sort of question an in...
@TildalWave The CTF team was what? 3 people on a good day? Half the regulars in the site's chatroom doesn't even participate on the site. The blog only had 2-3 people writing for it even back when there were regular posts.
Well it's as good of a place to make a name for yourself as any other, possibly better than a personal blog that rare few wold visit. So I don't really understand why it would have problems getting new contents? It's not like nothing is going on in the infosec world.
@TerryChia That wouldn't solve anything. What would you do, ask for a security certification? We get a lot of questions from developers and administrators who aren't security professionals. Do you want us out of here?
SF's culture is obnoxious, they strive on hammering on people. I don't want to import their culture here.
@TildalWave Let's face it. The majority of the site's participants are not in the infosec world.
@Gilles No, I just want good questions that infosec professionals will find interesting. If I'm not getting that here I won't participate as much. Which is exactly what is happening.
@TerryChia I don't see any distinctive line between an infosec and a non-infosec world. I'm myself primarily a developer, but I do focus on some practices that are entirely within the infosec domain. And frankly, I have a hard time seeing how anyone could still be a developer and not pay attention to secure coding practices, app hardening, ad nauseum... it's simply not 80's any more where you'd be glad to connect anything to your beeping box, and if it's a virus you'd even be proud about it.
You have to come to terms that majority of people here are "beginners" in the infosec world, that doesn't necessarily mean they're non-professional. Actually, if they weren't curious and trying to learn, that WOULD be non-professional.
@TildalWave you need to get out more. I'm on a team whose product is marketed as a security product, and some of the developers do need to be told repeatedly that “nobody in their right mind would do this” or “this wouldn't ever happen naturally” do not matter, the product still needs to behave securely.
@TerryChia Close as off topic, downvote, let that become your second nature and you won't think much about it. Move on from those crap ones to others that might be better. That's all.
@Gilles Not sure what you mean? That devs trying to adopt secure coding practices are rare?
I'm not sure I'd agree with that, but yes, the oil slick always swims at the top and that's what you notice as most striking.
@Gilles That's because we live in an instant world with instant solutions to instant fu*king problems, and because greedy companies learned to spin that bulls*it to its needy consumers. That doesn't mean there aren't any good apps any more. It just means that your average Joe the consumer will buy any crap that Jack the spinster can market to them. It's also one of the reasons why I'm here, because at the end of the day we also have an educational role.
@Xander Problem is that there's a limited number of interesting questions. The number grows as technology moves forward, but not as fast as questions get asked. So pretty quick every question you want to answer has already been asked.
@Xander It's not just me though. Take a look at the people on the top of the last months rep chart. Notice how few of the old names there are on there?
@TerryChia Have to admit I'm one of those too, and I'm getting a bit more lazy to answer questions elsewhere on SE also. But I think I'm a bit burnt out and need to take it easier. Plus I nearly lost ability to walk a fortnight ago with a herniated disc, so I have excuses. :))
@TerryChia Yeah, but I don't know that that's indicative of anything other than the natural ebb and flow of a community. People come and go, and priorities change. @Adnan's been busy with work and relationships. @Poly dissappeared when he got his new job. GrahamHill who had disappered, has returned as is back on the chart for the quarter. David has also been extra active recently and is up there.
This is why we have an endless stream of new SE sites. SO was really cool for about 2 years, and quickly it became a cesspool of send me teh codez plz, so they made SF and SU. Then the same things happened there, so they made programmers.se, askubuntu, unix&linux, sec.se, all covering the same material as the original 3, but starting fresh with more focus and fewer n00bs.
As a thank you for being awesome, if you have at least 1,000 reputation and are on page 1 or page 2 of …
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IT Security Stack Ex...
On the Tour page for Security.SE it states:
Information Security Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Information security professionals.
However, when I see questions like this Does clicking lead to DoS attack? with 10 upvotes, it doesn't strike me as the sort of question an in...
As a thank you for being awesome, if you have at least 1,000 reputation and are on page 1 or page 2 of …
http://security.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all
… we'll be sending you a little care package shortly:
IT Security Stack Exchange t-shirt in your size
IT Security Stack Ex...
There used to be a place where you could buy Stack Exchange branded gear, what happened to it?
