@ManishEarth Can you post something in a private room and give us the message ID?

@Undo chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13566060

I think.

@hichris123 Why?

Didn't give me a page not found for other ids.

ok, thanks ;)

Now we shall try to star it.

Message #10000000 was in a private room

k

But the room is too private; I can't see it either

dev room, probably.

No, I know which room it is

Not a dev room, just site specific

oh

Can't star with the usual method...

@ManishEarth What's the room ID?

3608

wow, old room

No good.

Still locked down tight.

Yeah...

^Mm... us?

rofl

We don't have any obsolete comments in Charcoal now, on SO.

:P

@hichris123 Really? I just fed it 50,000.

It must be really hungry.

Huh, weird that it was so hungry... ;)

> Having been a moderator for half a year now and handled quite a bit of comment flags

Uh.. yep. 49,000 SO obsolete comments waiting to be flagged.

Probably us too. :P

@hichris123 That's us again, yep.

I'm suprised that they don't just give us diamonds for all of the comments we flag. :P

heh

We're going to get you a diamond.

That's final :P

Some site... some time.. some place... :)

yeah...

How about Arduino... when it launches... on the SE network?

:P

@Undo Hm... good idea... sometime in the near future... it's a Quora site. :P

:P

Or Yahoo Answers. Take your pick.

None of the above, please.

> Election closes in 21 hours.

grabs popcorn

@hichris123 Oooh new diamonds.

You can hear them spinning up the polishing machines now.

Yep.

The SE team needs to make a video How a person becomes a diamond.

Oooh yeah. With the end being Shog dispensing the diamond.

@hichris123 would be counterproductive, IMO

was joking

ah :p

@ManishEarth I care more about the part of how Shog or someone gives the person a diamond. :P

I do wanna see the diamond-dispensing button, though.

oh that

there's a button

Of course. :)

@Manish You've probably seen the button, haven't you?

no

oh

@hichris123 actually, it's not always Shog

Maybe it's a lever, then. You can't prove it's a button.

@ManishEarth Then it's the computer!

oooohh

How... wonderful of a screenshot.

@Undo quite a few

@ManishEarth Is there a "promoted to cm" message for CMs?

@kalina Huh. Maybe you should complain about it in the Bridge.

me? complain about moderators? It's not worth my time

nobody gives a shit when I complain about moderators these days

hehe, ok

@Undo seems to be done at a deeper level

hmm. ok

@Undo it does sound more like a lever

@Undo it's literally about half of them

like some moderator looked at the flag count and went "meh, I cba with this"

I really hope there's a table at SE headquarters where you punch in a site and user ID and then pull a huge lever that makes a mechanical sound, then a plastic blue diamond falls out.

grrr, the worst of it is, in some cases they've still removed the flagged comment anyway!

That's really hard to do.

nope, quite clearly says "declined" in my flag list and the flagged comment is quite clearly not there

huh.

as an example (and as you know, 100 flags is two full pages of flags) the above screenshot shows lots of declines

none of those comments exist anymore

How rude.

oh we have a @GraceNote in here

Maybe they're trying to send a message that they don't like having tons of flags :P

@Undo You know how much blue we could have in this room if Pops, Grace, Manish, and ThiefMaster all talked at the same time? :P

@Grace isn't it your role as a community manager to investigate this kind of thing?

@hichris123 It would be hideous.

Just think if you or I were a mod. shudders

ugh

I did make your name blue once. :P

hehe

^ There you go

Hideous.

I would never chat again if I got a diamond if I had to have that beside all my messages :P

(good mockup, though)

I just changed the HTML. :P

yeah, I figured.

It's a class... like mod class or something.

^ Looks much better :P

Hm... I don't know if it's better.

It is.

I wonder what other cool mod chat powers Manish has. :P

Leaving people's dogs out.

(the last build expanded on the milk feature)

What does that have to do with chat, though?

^ Cool mod graphs there!

^ Anna's first bug

Yep.

That's where I found it. :P

I've got to go get something done, cya.

(I've already used my 100 comment flags for the day, too)

Cya.

I do need to flag... :)

@Undo What happened to the plz-accepts in Charcoal?

@kalina ?

@GraceNote large numbers of declined flags that got actioned anyway

out of ~100 flags raised today, about half were rejected, even though the thing I flagged was removed (in most instances)

Arqade or somewhere else? Transcript here says you raised flags on all the sites you work on.

oh right, on Arqade

@hichris123 They got thrown to the bottom of the list, methinks.

saying that, I did get a "Thank you!" flag declined on Ask Ubuntu as well

I'll look into it.

@Undo Not in the filter.

maybe our moderators need to be introduced to signal vs noise?

I'll have clearer numbers tomorrow, once another % of my flags have been declined but actioned

@hichris123 oh. weird.

I think... something bad happened. :P

oh, I know.

I messed with the DB.

And apparently I nuked all the please accepts too.

Hmm, how to fix?

Put them all back in.

But I need to go accomplish another thing.

cya

Cya.

@Undo o/

A suggestion for your endeavors, though. Rather than spending 100 flags in one day, it's probably more useful to collect the lot of these into a list and then provide said list.

@GraceNote We've had that idea brought up by Shog, I believe. We've been thinking about it, however, we're trying to find a way to get a list together (I've set up something in Charcoal). We have done mass deletions with SEDE queries, however, those were comments you could blindly delete without context. Some of the ones we flag need context, so that might be a problem... (unless you trust us. :P).

That requisite context speaks all the more to having a batch list than to have these sorted into the flag queue.

Especially when you specifically target particular contexts to flag.

In that kind of situation you can even just raise a meta post about it.

I'm talking like comment thread stuff (like How do I foo the bar, I edited, now it foos the bar. @GraceNote

I'm pretty sure raising a meta on Arqade saying "please delete these 4000 comments" will be less productive than flagging them!

@kalina Actually, no, it really shouldn't be.

@hichris123 Right. I know. That happens to be what a lot of the flags I'm looking at right now are about.

Probably my flags. :P

@GraceNote well considering the mods on Arqade are rejecting me flagging things like "thanks!", I wouldn't see why asking them to bulk delete would work any better

@GraceNote So you suggest either bringing it up to the mods on the site or a SE team member or a meta post, rather than flagging? Sounds like a good idea, just hard to implement.

@kalina One reason is because waking up in the morning to a 3 digit flag counter is bothersome. A second reason is because having a compact list of hundreds of things to sift through is a lot easier on them than to have to sift through how our flag queue works.

Meta is a place to collect and organize things. This includes things that only a moderator can do.

Heck pre SE 2.0 it was a lot of what I used Meta for was to bring stuff up for moderators.

@GraceNote I have very little success with Arqade mods actioning things I bring to meta and you know that - take my community consensus post for example

Do you think that throwing hundreds of flags is going to make it take any more result?

all posting on Arqade meta seems to do for me is get me downvoted into oblivion and banned

I'm pinging @Undo so that he can read it when he gets back... I think it's a good idea. The next part is just how to implement it...

@hichris123 well the system is basically in place, you could just give said mods access to charcoal

@kalina Your last five questions on Arqade Meta are all positive, 3/5 were actioned on and 1/5 was a self-answer that was also upvoted.

@GraceNote my meta activity from before I deleted my account was never re-associated with my account

@GraceNote and really useful stuff like this that would improve the user experience and can only be actioned by mods has been completely ignored by the mods

@kalina I don't think we should let the past weigh us down. Especially when actual current activity proves the opposite of what past indications would predict.

@GraceNote that's easy for you to say, you didn't get roasted alive when you nominated yourself from things that happened two years ago

@kalina We've got that in place... it's just another thing for mods to do though. We do have a auto-thingy that makes lists for mods to easily delete.

@hichris123 yeah that's what I'm worried about, mods really shouldn't taken an action if they're only half bothered

No, I didn't. But there's a difference between histories here so it's not my place to try and empathize. It is, however, my place to try and sift things into a system that works for both parties. I can't say why or why not the moderators did or did not do anything about the 2013 clean-up efforts, but I do see action taken on your requests.

Posting on meta allows it to be more organized. It makes it easier than having to check a flag list of all things to see what you've already marked. And it makes it easier to actually act through it.

@GraceNote please understand I have no issue with SE, I do appreciate the time spent to undelete me, but if a flag counter is scary and results in mods rejecting stuff while still actioning it then maybe that individual shouldn't have been elected in the first place. The system gives me 100 flags, just because I choose to use them to clean up the site shouldn't mean I am penalised.

I'm not penalizing you.

so, I'm sorry if I'm giving you a hard time, but it would probably be better for everybody if you found the mod that is willing to reject stuff while still actioning it, because they're doing their role wrong.

Declined flags are usually to say "don't do that"

You went and cast 100 flags. We enable you to cast 100 flags because that's a thing that can be done. I'm suggesting something that I feel, regardless of how this went through, is actually a more useful course of action, not just for you, but for everyone on every site.

I've used it for flags that ultimately helped me as a mod, but were borne from a misconception (eg the classic "wrong answer --> NAA" flag)

@ManishEarth in this instance, that would translate directly to "please don't flag comments that just say 'Thanks!'"

It's like casting flags on 30 questions that need to be retagged the same way - yeah, it's possible and the system enables it and it's not inherently wrong or anything. But a meta post is a lot more organized.

No, "Please don't flood us with comment flags"

@ManishEarth the pattern disagrees with this

if it was huge blocks of declines, I'd be inclined to believe

Also so far only two flags that were declined were actually actioned on.

And yes, many mods are annoyed when flooded with flags. Undo flag-spreed on some sites and was told to stop. Nothing wrong with that, either

but it's interspersed amongst accepts

@ManishEarth Yeah, I guess really you should kinda ask your mods first before doing something like that...

Comments are considered trivial when it comes to mod duties

Think about this: If your comment flags are taking up mod time that could be best spent elsewhere, it's actually disruptive since more pressing things may not get taken care of

if mods consider comments to be trivial and a waste of time, then high rep users should be given the tools to deal with them without a moderator

There is a feature request for that.

It's a spectrum, not a dichotomy.

also, ^

since mods are the only people who can remove them, then mods need to action them

@kalina Some comments flags are ok. A hundred comment flags, as mentioned above, an be a problem.

Is removing comments really even necessary? Cleanup is good, but to me, this is optional cleanup as far as short comment discussions go

Optional in the sense that nobody needs to do it. Not mods, not 10ks.

isn't the key point of Stack Exchange high quality content with high signal to noise ratio?

@kalina obsolete comments doesn't improve it that much. It improves it, but not that much

everything is an improvement

Comment threads are one thing, but a couple of "thanks" comments -- the system is already designed to handle that

@kalina ...but not an equal improvement

considering that Arqade already has clean, clearly labelled tags, very low numbers of bad questions, everything gets closed and deleted quickly, etc

comments are the next logical step

The mods have better things to do.

Mods have better things to do than handle comment flags? Nonsense. :P

based on the numbers badp posted this morning, I'm responsible for about 30% of the flags on Arqade before today

@kalina mods don't just handle flags

no, you're right, they also occasionally get in the way of my editing sprees and intermittently resolve a new user that comes along and starts disrupting chat

Basically, if you raise 100 flags, the mod can handle all of them (which cuts into normal mod time), or handle some and ignore the rest. If all the mods are going to ignore; then there isn't much point in flagging. So declining makes sense.

maybe in some convoluted paradox world - if it's a valid flag then it's a valid flag

define "valid"

So, uh, judging by the tables here, you do actually have block rejection on your flags.

The point of the helpful flag thing is to encourage the same behavior

Flagged as obsolete... Is the flag obsolete? Yes - flag must be valid!

As in, the bulk of the declines are one giant block done at once, not interspersed

It only looks otherwise because the flag list you see is organized by the time you cast the flag, not the order that it was thrown to the moderators.

Which is why we regularly mark wrong flags as helpful when we want the users to flag similar content even if it didn't turn out to be as correct

@GraceNote interesting, why don't I see this?

right

so what you're saying is the Arqade mod team got bored half way through and just vented the rest of them out of the airlock?

So doing the reverse isn't so paradoxy

@kalina No, there's also six different mods also taking action on your flags at once.

Well, not all at once. Kinda in shifts.

well, that's how it's supposed to work, surely?

You've got some blocks in the middle that are declined and not actioned on, and it was mostly a block of about 10 at the end that were declined but also actioned on.

but why decline and then action? That's basically spite

Of note, in that latter group, only one wasn't a result of purging the entire comment stream as a whole.

Manish just explained it as not being spite.

Oh, I see you capitalized the E so that people stop calling you Manis.

he did that ages ago

aaaaaaaggggggggeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssss

I haven't actually spoken much with Manish for a while.

@GraceNote yep :P

@GraceNote o/

Heyo heyo~

I've only done that on chat, though

Chat is where people refer to you directly like that. On the sites, I imagine people just lazily ping your full name or even just @Man

exactly

Speaking of which, do you know what a manometer measures?

men

pressure?

wait no

It measures how much THE MAN is PUSHING YOU DOWN.

haha

that still sounds like pressure

that's the point

It is.

Of note, this goes a lot better in person when you can gesture with your hand in a pushing-down motion.

Yay, real internet again! (it was down...)

Alright. I'll poke the moderators and see what all this is about.

all ins?

Where poke == confusing email that confuses people. :P

ninja

@ManishEarth I love ninja mod edits.

I certainly meant "all ins"

uh oh

hides

(fortunately, ninjas are good at that)

@people I am right in thinking that changing setTimeout(POSTFlag,5100); to setTimeout(POSTFlag,60000); will change flag posting from once every 5.1 seconds to once per minute, right?

Yep.