The Water Cooler

rolfl

1:28 AM

And there I was... minding my own business.... ;-p

Monica Cellio

2:00 AM

@rolfl and then? (Sorry, missed a reference apparently.)

rolfl

Nope, no reference missed, Shog9 invited me here ;-)

We were discussing the auto-review-queue system being tested here in relation to post notices.

Monica Cellio

Ah. Oh, you're new here? Welcome!

@rolfl wait, what?

rolfl

There's a meta post, let me dig it up....

3

Q: Testing proposal: automating review of answers that fail to meet site-specific guidelines

Posted on behalf of jmac. The idea to test automating review of answers that fail to meet site-specific guidelines has been proposed by SE Community manager here: let's test this first, see where it works and where it falls apart, and then implement the system that emerges. Pick a site you'r...

This is a complicated back story, I was looking at moderator-tool features, and hoped for a time-delay flag system for posts (specifically answers) that needed some delayed mod attention, typically when they have post notices put on them.

Also related:

9

A: Improving the System to Deal with Bad Answers

I've been giving this some thought. While I do think this could be a useful tool, I have a few concerns: Post notices should be rare - if we're seeing these on every other answer, there's a bigger problem. You're specifically aiming this at answers you hope to see improved - but we actually hav...

So, the workplace is the designated test site for getting stats ;-)

Monica Cellio

@rolfl yeah, I asked for that once too (flag delay, I mean):

8

Q: Can we have a snooze alarm for flags?

When handling flags, sometimes I see one for, say, comments that will be obsolete, but aren't yet, or a post that's currently low-quality but I want to give the (new, otherwise-promising) user a little time to fix it before nuking it.1 What happens now is that I just skip past that flag and it c...

feature-request moderator-tools flags

And I would love to have some sort of automatic reminder, or review queue, or something N days after a post gets a notice, so I can go back and see if something else needs to happen. (Edited appropriately? Remove notice. Ignored? Maybe delete. Etc.)

rolfl

Yup, I was about to ask for it again ....

I would like the same thing.

It has also come up on skeptics....

15

Q: Add a review queue for posts with a "citation needed" notice

We're using the "Citation Needed" notices a lot since they were introduced, but there is no really efficient workflow for removing them later. We rely pretty much on the community to flag posts that either addressed the issue and should have the notice removed, or that didn't address the issue an...

feature-request post-notice

All of these are attempts to correct the same issue.... a post has problems, the poster needs to fix them, or the post should be deleted....

and a mechanism to come back and check

(one mechanism is flag based, the other is queue based, queue is probably a better idea, actually).

Monica Cellio

2:11 AM

@rolfl with the "controversial review" flag if applicable.

rolfl

Actually, your question was closed on MSE as a duplicate of the question I just recently commented on:

I was about to ask an almost-duplicate of this question, but more closely related to add post notice insufficient explanation - We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed. It would be great if this post notice came with an ability to auto-flag if the post was not modified in 'x' hours — rolfl 1 hour ago

and shog replied to me there... which leads to links going through the process.

Monica Cellio

Yeah, I linked to mine (even though it was a dupe) because I was talking about my wishes and dreams. :-)

rolfl

Shog, there you go: Testing proposal at TWP meta, posted on behalf of @jmac — gnat Mar 20 at 21:12

Anyway, apparently you guys here are testing the process to see how much value it has ;-) Any results?

Monica Cellio

We had a proposal, but we don't really have a process that we're using. I'd be happy for us to be a guinea pig if we had a process to test. I guess this involves canned searches now?

We do get flags from people saying things like "this annotation was added 2 weeks ago and nothing's happened; delete?", so somebody is doing something here at least some of the time. But we don't have a nice organized "click here to start" process for everyone; it's roll-your-own.

rolfl

Ok, I figured as much. I expect it is also a chicken-egg problem, that the usefulness will only be apparent after it is implemented....

We would use post notices more if we had a way to manage them later.

Multiple sites are interest in feedback from this proposal. Any updates? — rolfl 7 secs ago

^^^ that should ping jmac ;-)

Monica Cellio

2:21 AM

Yeah, I think you're right about chicken-egg. I think we've got people here who see the utility but aren't up to implementing it, and the folks who can implement don't understand what the big deal is 'cause they're not getting lots of problem answers on the sites they hang out on.

And I know post notices are supposed to be rare; if we do this right they'll be temporary, one way or the other. Right now, because this stuff is hard to track, they tend to linger and pile up on some sites. (I haven't actually checked ours lately.)

Shog9

trivia: we worked up a design for a "delay" feature a while back, but it ended up being pretty complicated... And there are a lot of rather more pressing flag fixes needed.

If I can find it, I'll post it for posterity

rolfl

There are a few ideas kicking around.... a simple idea for a "post a link with a delay" would suffice...

Like "remind me of this post in x hours".... I woudl like that immensely. Make it personal to the user, the mods, or a flag.

Much better than favouriting a bunch of posts I don't like to track activity.

Shog9

ok, so there are lots of ways you could implement this as, say, a user script or other superficial thing

if you didn't want to build it into the system, I mean

rolfl

As a stop gap, yes.

I just happen to do SE from.... 6 different machines.

Shog9

once you have to communicate this state with other mods, with the flagger, with various systems that use flags as signal (review, quality-checks, etc.)... It gets much more complex

rolfl

2:31 AM

making it a flag.... I could do that with userscript as well... I could probably userscript a flag on the post too.

My thinking/expectation is that it would be a useful moderator tool, with many applications.... and useful for many.

Shog9

the simplest option becomes something like, "flag is immediately marked helpful; system raises a new flag in x hours, with no connection to the original apart from the post"

rolfl

yes, the immediate problem happens to be posts that should be improved, because deleted is too harsh... with some later follow up.

that would solve it, yes.

Shog9

found it!

rolfl

the later follow up would be to either remove the notice, or delete the post.

Monica Cellio

@Shog9 that would work. Userscript wouldn't help me because multiple browsers. Also, I really want any mod to be able to pick it up, not necessarily me personally.

Shog9

2:41 AM

@MonicaCellio actually, it would work just fine if you didn't ever close the window ;-P

Monica Cellio

@rolfl yes. And ideally we can specify how long to wait, because "tomorrow" is fine on a Tuesday but on a long holiday weekend I might want to give the author a couple more days.

rolfl

^^ yes. Agreed. On the 'smaller' sites this would be more than great... ;-)

Monica Cellio

@Shog9 I rarely close my browser (only when memory gets out of hand or I need to reboot). But I access SE from several devices.

Shog9

Right. If the "reminder" is a new flag, doesn't matter which device you're using as long as it gets raised.

Monica Cellio

And I don't really want them to end up in "buckets" -- oh, these are the ones I noticed at work, and these are the ones on my phone, and these are the ones on my desktop at home, and oh right, I was using my tablet that one day...

@Shog9 yes, new flag works fine. I was saying that a userscript doesn't work for my use case.

rolfl

2:44 AM

What shog is saying is the userscript can run on any open browser, and raiuse the flag at the designated time, and you can collect the flag from any other device/machine.

I really should use Shog9 not shog... hmmm.

Monica Cellio

@rolfl oh! Ok, didn't get that. I know very little about userscripts (I consume them but don't write them).

But that is kind of fragile if most people don't leave browsers running forever...

rolfl

I must admit that I can write the userscript, if I wanted to, but leaving a device with mod-level privileges running userscript would scare me a little ;-)

Monica Cellio

@rolfl mmm, good point.

rolfl

I have a 24/7 server running in my basement, don't tell Shog9 but I can open it up to any mods and let them feed time-delay flag requests in to it ;-)

give me your user/pass and I can get it working on TWP as well ... hehe not!

Monica Cellio

@rolfl ha ha. No. :-)

@rolfl oh wait; I think I'm starting to grok it now. So this userscript would queue something (somewhere) to wait mumble hours and then raise a flag via the API? Something like that?

rolfl

2:49 AM

in essence, you can program userscript to do anything you can do from the UI yourself. I would much rather the dev team did something... in fact, in this case I would not implement it myself.

Shog9

0

A: Can we have a feature to delay a flag for a short period of time?

So about a year ago, we started discussing this internally. This isn't something that's a high priority for us to implement, but it's worth keeping in mind in case other development work makes such a thing easier. In the interest of furthering public discussion, I'm posting the notes we took. Aga...

Monica Cellio

Yeah, I was thinking userscript = UI = the moral equivalent of moving the mouse cursor around on the screen and clicking, or replacing CSS/layout, and stuff like that -- not what I think of for something like this. If flagging can be done via the API (don't know if it can), that's the tool I would find myself reaching for (but "would", 'cause I'm not going to write it).

Shog9

API is perhaps a bit generous, but it's certainly possible to raise (or dismiss) flags from a userscript without much fuss.

rolfl

Shog9, that post would be an elaborate system. I don't like the term 'defer' the flag. The flag would be 'handled' now, either by adding a post notice, delete, comment, close, all of the above, in addition, a followup flag would be scheduled for X time.

Monica Cellio

@Shog9 thanks!

rolfl

2:54 AM

that followup would be a separate action to take.

delete a notice, confirm good behaviour, whatever. It is a 'reminder of a future commitment'.

Monica Cellio

@Shog9 so, a simplification: instead of reacting to a flag, how about a mod-only "flag this in N hours" option? That might be used in response to a flag (which we'd then handle), or it might be a timer we set when adding a post notice or noticing a borderline comment thread or whatever.

rolfl

That reminder should not necerssarily only be triggered by an existing flag though....

you should be able to schedule a follow-up on non-flagged posts too... not defer an existing flag.

Monica thinks like I do, nice.

Monica Cellio

Thank you for sharing these notes. A simplification that would enable the use cases you listed (which, by the way, a "react to flag" trigger doesn't, for all of them) would be to allow mods to outright raise a flag for later -- "raise this flag in __ hours (or days" and then the flag text, nothing else. Works for "check back on these comments", "deal with this post I just annotated", etc. It wouldn't have to be tied into existing flags with deferred resolution and all that. That seems simpler; is it feasible? Does it satisfy the requirements? (Should this be an answer?) — Monica Cellio 56 secs ago

rolfl thinks like I do, nice. :-)

rolfl

I was about to add essentially that as an answer .... you think like I do... nice.

but, I think Shog9 has the point.

Monica Cellio

@rolfl separate feature request works for me. I don't have time to write it up as a proper request right now; would you like to?

rolfl

3:03 AM

I need to get to bed... if you have not raised a separate feature request by morning, I'll jump in and do it....

crap... you think like I do.

Monica Cellio

@rolfl wow, this is freaky.

@rolfl ok, one way or the other we'll get it out there tomorrow, then. Thanks for the help.

Link in here if you do it, and I'll do likewise.

rolfl

You're welcome. Till then.

Will do.

Monica Cellio

Good time zone!

rolfl

I was in Pitts last month... hmmm.

Night.

Monica Cellio

So next time maybe you'll come say hello. :-)

rolfl

12:03 PM

Hello.... working on that meta question now ;-)

rolfl

12:24 PM

Argh..... it has already been asked before.... @Shog9: meta.stackexchange.com/q/119096/241497

@MonicaCellio - I edited this previous question significantly: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119096/…

rolfl

12:36 PM

In edit review queue now: meta.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/31524

jmac

1:57 PM

@rolfl It did ping me, but I am utterly swamped at the moment and will not be able to get to this until next week at the earliest. Can I snooze the ping?

rolfl

Why is it that you guys get to snooze the notifications... huh?

So not fair.

;-)

jmac

@rolfl Unfortunately I don't get to snooze them. I have about 5 dozen notifications that are ahead of you in the queue.

rolfl

@jmac - just to make sure it is clear, there is no need at this time to follow up on the statistics gathering here on TWP... the 'nice' follow up from you would be to raise the request meta.stackexchange.com/q/119096/241497 with the dev team ;-) That will take just a moment or two, instead of the hours required to gather historical data.

jmac

@rolfl I do need to run the stats at some point though too, because I care about answers still, it will just require me to be all smart-like with the SQL. Perhaps I can grab you to help out some time if you're willing, and save me some headaches when I have dumb SQL questions (I have gotten better, but I still have a long way to go)

(see how I oh-so-casually totally deflected bringing up a feature request with the dev team? )

rolfl

I noticed... and SEDE will be missing much of the data on deleted answer results....

jmac

2:14 PM

@rolfl Yeah, that isn't an issue on my side. The writing the actual query thing is going to be the issue. So if I can ask dumb questions involving combining tables and making sure my logic is fine, it'll make it go much quicker.

rolfl

No problem, just shout whenever ... you know where to find me ;-)

Matt Giltaji

4:25 PM

crickets.... anyone awake?

jmac

Half-awake, but not really around.

Matt Giltaji

so I have a weird scenario that doesn't seem to be a full blown question

my boss is asking for reports about how much time we spend per day on various activities

we provided them, and the totals add up to how long we were at the office (8 hours or so)

the boss has now accused us of lying on the reports, because no one gets 8 hours of productive work done, and demands the "real" time of the activities

i tried to explain that everything is rounded, we don't track that we spent X minutes in the bathroom, etc, but to no avail

i've never heard of anyone asking for time reports that intentionally do not add up to the total hours put in

jmac

4:43 PM

We had a question about that before.

Some time ago.

Matt Giltaji

hmm, more searching then

thanks

jmac

I am trying to find it, but having little luck

it was about how to pad time sheets, or something like that, and addressed this specific issue.

Take a look through this search the titles look promising.

Matt Giltaji

hmm, i was searching "time reports", but yours looks better

Monica Cellio

5:33 PM

@rolfl oh, and I not only saw and voted on it, but commented (and BTW, this didn't scale, as predicted):

Yeah. At least one small beta site is pinning time-annotated links in chat to remember to come back to posts requiring followup. It works, but it's "outside the system" and doesn't scale, so being able to just click on the post/comment to mark it for later review/action would be helpful. — Monica Cellio Jun 12 '13 at 14:58

rolfl

I saw that comment, and I had a look at the chat room. I figured it would not scale.... too manual.

Monica Cellio

@MattGiltaji and if you don't find it via search, try starting to ask it and looking at the suggestions. The ask-question search is often better than the regular search.

@rolfl and that site is still small, too -- but people just couldn't manage it even for those small numbers for an extended period. Way too manual.

rolfl

I believe the trick here will be to convince the PTB (or is that the PHB) that it is useful functionality, that will only become more and more useful when people can use it in other ways too... There are lots of small examples where it may help, but the overall accumulation of the small items, as well as the ones we have not yet identified, will be a strong argument.

Matt Giltaji

5:49 PM

@MonicaCellio wow, not sure how they did that, but the ask question search is phenomenal

thanks

enderland

6:22 PM

sometimes searching google rather than the site is good too, just use site:workplace.stackexchange.com as a search term

Monica Cellio

@MattGiltaji that search is one of SE's hidden treasures. I fire up "ask question" way more often than I actually intend to ask a question...

2

enderland

@MonicaCellio the worst is when you do that with the exact question title from the person who asked and the first result is the exact same question as a duplicate

Monica Cellio

@enderland yeah. :-(

jmort253

7:36 PM

Hey crjenkins, welcome to The Workplace SE, a Q&A site. So that it's more clear exactly what your question is, can you narrow this down to a single question that matches both the title and body? This will help others searching for similar problems and will also help us rank answers via our voting mechanisms. See How to Ask for details. Once edited, this gets bumped back to the top of the main page and also is added to our community review queues. — jmort253 ♦ 16 secs ago

jmort253

8:03 PM

Too many questions and not a lot of focus between the title and body. It makes it sound more like a plea for advice. With some edits, this could be reopened, so let's keep our eyes peeled. :)

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