The Reading Room

3:12 AM

@verbose You can always explain the new close reason in a comment. That said, I will roll it back because the new question seems unrelated to the old one so it's not an appropriate edit.

The newer question seems worse than the old one.

6:05 AM

@b_jonas Thanks! Good to know I wasn't the only one with the rollback impulse. Agree the new question was worse.

6:19 AM

Yes, when an edit entirely changes the question like that a rollback is appropriate

7:01 AM

Congratulations to Pete on 2000 reputation.

11:49 AM

All of the questions-to-candidates so far are more asking for opinions on general site/community issues than specifically about the diamond mod role/tools.

I guess that reflects the fact that, on a relatively small site like ours, being a mod is a lot more about leading by example as a user than about wielding hammers and banning people and other things that only diamond mods can do.

12:15 PM

@Randal'Thor Also most of us don't have experience about diamond moderation so we can't ask those types of questions easily.

12:28 PM

Would you mind if I copied multiple election questions from Sci Fi to literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1745/139 ? This is easier than inventing new questions.

Also I should ask something about how we determine the scope of the Lit site, but I'm not sure what exactly to ask.

I probably shouldn't just directly ask if history.stackexchange.com/q/61722/24029 is on topic in their opinion.

12:51 PM

Ok never mind, I haven't found that many good election questions on Sci Fi.

Eg. there are questions about the chat tomato blight on Sci Fi, but no such thing has happened on Lit; there's a question about whether the mod will be active on chat, but all candidates that I know about are active in this Reading Room, so that's not a useful question either.

And there are just questions that are equally applicable here but I just don't like them so I won't ask.

Although I did find another good one.

Ok, so what should I ask about how we should define the scope of this site?

I wonder if I should ask specifically about how the scope overlaps other SE sites.

1:20 PM

"Some people have ... unusual sleep/work cycles" -- I know. I do.

And I've seen other people on the internet who do as well.

A lot of SE people do :-)

I wonder if unusual sleep cycle might be even more frequent in Europe than in America, at least among the people I see on the internet.

Also I just don't want to push potential moderators into revealing personal details about themselves, apart from as much that SE requires a higher age limit for moderators.

Even this way the question can be incriminating because it can effectively require the mod to admit that they're intending to browse SE during work, but I don't think we can help that.

The 107 years at literature.stackexchange.com/a/54/139 is still quite impressive

1:38 PM

@b_jonas Yeah, it was a good way to phrase the question and one I don't remember seeing before.

@Randal'Thor scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7982/4918 is somewhat similar but not exactly the same

bobble

In currently in finals week so I'm not on the site as much :) will still be peeking in a few times a day, but not really posting

@b_jonas Mm, yeah, how often and for how long =/= at which times of day.

@bobble Good luck with finals :-)

also scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7968/…

@bobble is this a college thing or a sports thing?

bobble

@b_jonas college, I don't do sports

2:39 PM

unrelated to the election, TIL that the Cats musical of T. S. Eliot and Andrew Lloyd Weber etc is in fact older than I thought, from 1981, and that it's thus been translated to Hungarian by Romhányi József.

3:17 PM

Oh, I have a question. Do "community promotion ads" (as in meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/community-promotion-ads ) exist on Lit? If not, is that because Lit was still a beta site at the last approximately-yearly cycle when they got refreshed?

No, and probably

(although they were refreshed in 2021 and we were actually out of beta by then)

Yeah, I don't even know whether they exist anywhere on the network. Maybe the 2021 ones were removed and no new cycle started.

My mistake, we were not out of beta yet

It definitely looks like there are no such community ads on Lit yet, but I'd still like to know about whether there will be in the future. I might cross-post onto meta chat if you can't answer here.

6:00 PM

@bobble Belated congratulations on getting through the semi-finals ;-)

@Randal'Thor SE people have better Sleep Efficiency. (I wish.)

DLosc

in The Nineteenth Byte, Feb 6 at 13:40, by caird coinheringaahing

@Adám Don't expect any ads refreshes in the first half of the year, is the response I got back from a CM

@b_jonas People who have been around for a bit have often seen moderator actions or their results. So the question 'In your opinion, what do moderators do?' gauges people's awareness of the variety of tasks that moderators do. It's not just closing questions, deleting spam and other Olympic disciplines involving hammers.

6:22 PM

@b_jonas I think I remember an announcement somewhere about SE stopping the community promotion ads in favour of another planned promotion effort which hasn't started yet.

6:38 PM

@Randal'Thor That's plausible, but I haven't seen that announcement. It's probably hidden well somewhere under meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/community-promotion-ads , or maybe on the staff blog.

@Tsundoku Sure, besides hammers they also handle all the interesting types of flags, plus they have like a hundred different rarely used powers that are unique to diamonds.

But it still seems that a large part of their work comes out as closing and reopening and deleting and undeleting etc. It's just that unlike normal high-rep users, they don't have the luxury of ignoring or escalating the hardest cases. The diamonds are the ones that have to decide about deleting and undeleting and editing etc when other users find it hart to come to a decision. Flags sometimes call attention to these, but it's not always the flags.

Some of the hundred minor powers are writing ones, eg. I think they can delete any comment (which is different from users deleting the comment in that diamonds can still see mod-deleted comments), ban users temporarily, convert an answer to a comment, do magic on tags, post a notice on a question, move chat messages from any room, etc;

but other ones of the hundred minor powers are reading (idempotent) ones that lets them see sensitive data that isn't viewable by normal users, such as seeing most deleted information, logs of other moderators, ip address logs, etc, and I think this is mostly why they have to sign a special contract with SE.

For some of the minor powers I'm not completely sure about which ones diamonds can do and which ones only community managers.

And I really don't understand how the tag synonym and other tag magic stuff work.

@b_jonas They can also edit comments. If a comment is flagged because of something offending in it, simply deleting it is not the only option. Editing out the offending bit may be an underutilised alternative.

Mods can also edit anybody's chat messages, regardless how old they are. (Well except in one room.)

6:53 PM

I think diamonds can convert any question or answer to cw or non-cw, they can refund bounties, edit a few parts of the site-specific help pages.

@Tsundoku Ah yes, that too, I should remember that because the diamonds on MathoOverflow edited rotten links to the OEIS or to Erich Friedman's site in comments.

I don't know if a community-wiki can be converted back into a regular question or answer. If I turn something into a CW, there is always a warning that this cannot be reversed.

And we can pin chat messages instead of just starring them.

@Tsundoku I think that warning is for normal users, diamonds can turn them back, but I'm not completely sure.

@Tsundoku Oh yes, you can also pin meta questions to the main site sidebar

Just found this on Meta: Diamond moderators can remove the Community Wiki designation from posts.

And create events.

and I think there are cases when diamonds can undelete a post that got deleted in some ways where normal users can't undelete the same question or answer

@Tsundoku Do you mean the chat events?

A mod deleted question or answer can only be undeleted by a mod.

@b_jonas I was thinking of the events that appear on the main site; the feature we use for the reading challenges.

7:00 PM

@Tsundoku Oh, apparently that's kind of separate from the normal pinned meta posts, they're under a separate heading and have the colored site icon instead of the black one. I didn't realize.

Right. Pinned meta posts rely on moderator-only tags (the red ones).

Also I think diamonds used to be able to merge questions, but that power either no longer exists or just no longer gets used.

it's used very rarely, but it still exists

Merging questions is a power from the Moderator Legendarium that I have never witnessed.

literature.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/protect-questions says that diamonds can protect questions that normal users can't; and literature.stackexchange.com/help/locked-posts talks about locking and unlocking posts which is a diamond action and how when a post gets automatically deleted from multiple flags of certain types then it's locked so only mods can undelete it

Q: What is a "merged" question?

7:05 PM

54

Questions can be merged into other questions. What is a merged question? When should questions be merged? Who can merge questions? How do I request it? What happens to merged posts? Anything else I should know about merged questions? Return to FAQ index

support faq merged-questions

@Tsundoku right, this is why I say a hundred rarely used powers, some of them are common but some are used so rarely that many mods won't know about them

oh, and mods can move anyone's comments to chat I think

...provided that comments haven't been moved on that post previously

A hundred powers, and a hundred reasons to remain a moderator ;-)

@Tsundoku There was some kerfuffle about that on Lit one time in the very early days, with CMs weighing in on meta. (A user posted an answer as CW, a mod removed the CW status, and a CM said users have the right to make their posts CW for any reason.)

Can diamond mods delete a user's name, avatar, or info in their profile when they go against the rule?

7:09 PM

@b_jonas Probably on Stack Overflow they use every power every day.

@b_jonas Yes, so if you see someone with (e.g.) a pornographic avatar or a personally-insulting profile, you can flag it for mods.

@Randal'Thor Technically no because of meta.stackexchange.com/q/259914/222298

@Randal'Thor I haven't seen that happen on SE yet, but I know it can happen.

Also I suspect that mods can hide revisions of posts.

@b_jonas That's something mods also do on spam accounts. Just search for the number of users called "Spam" or "Spammer" on the main site :-D

@Tsundoku Ok, but seeing such results doesn't tell me whether it's a diamond power.

It might just happen automatically to users banned for spam or something.

hehe, there are indeed many named Spammer, and one literature.stackexchange.com/users/17663/spammer even has profile information left

a few still have photo avatars

hmm, this Spammer scifi.stackexchange.com/users/158578/spammer still has an ad in their profile

scifi.stackexchange.com/users/157864/spammer and scifi.stackexchange.com/users/157790/spammer too

I didn't realize this is what they're renamed to, I assumed they'd get their name reverted to user39999 based on their site user number

If their user name is changed to "spam" or "spammer" and this change is saved network wide, other mods can search for that name and destroy the account their site.

As for the election questions, if I can't figure out how to ask about site scope I could ask the candidate if they think I should promote Lit in forums outside of SE when such promotion mostly brings in identification questions.

7:23 PM

"Users destroyed" in 2021: a year in moderation has a rather high number in the "moderators" column. That's mods destroying spam profiles.

@b_jonas gone

You can see some other moderator powers in this Meta post about user annotations. This includes "clear sessions" (logging out a user), deleting an account, destroying an account, etc.

7:39 PM

@b_jonas It largely depends on the mod who's doing it. Some simply wipe the username which reverts it to user12345 based on their site user ID. Some change the username to "spammer", or more humorous variants such as "Spammy McSpamFace". Some don't bother renaming at all and simply destroy the user on their site, perhaps also pinging other sites' mods to alert them.

8:28 PM

Sometimes I see a rep change based on "user was removed". Does that mean a mod has deleted the user's account? And does that also remove all questions/answers/comments said user may have posted? If a user voluntarily deletes and quits, I don't think their content and votes go away, do they? I mean, answers from (say) Hamlet are still on the site, so I presume upvotes/downvotes are as well.

Also, could one of the mods please pin the ongoing topic challenges to the chat sidebar, or is that something most folks in this chatroom don't want/need?

@verbose Whether or not votes are kept when a user is deleted is calculated from the user's reputation, how many votes they've cast, and why the account is being deleted. It varies, but I believe in most cases the votes are kept, unless they've cast very few votes. I'm not super familiar with the details, though.

@Mithical ah

@verbose I personally think it's redundant given that they're in the main site sidebar, but if people would find it useful it can be arranged :)

I spend more time in the chat than on the main site :D but yeah, if others don't think it's needed that's fine

I mean, same, but often from mobile where the sidebar doesn't show up at all.

8:53 PM

@verbose They were pinned but they start moving down after a two weeks (I think), until they drop out of the list of starred chat messages.

Thanks, 'doku, but the sign language one is over, yes? And for some reason I thought moderator-pinned items didn't move down, good to know that's not the case.

Q: Keep pinned messages pinned (without 14 days limit) in chat rooms

Ongoing topic challenges: Arthur Koestler and Hayy ibn Yaqdhan / Philosophus Autodidactus.

It's been a busy day ...

Jun 16, 2021 at 13:23, by Tsundoku

Strangely, the chat comment about the current topic challenges doesn't stay pinned at the top. It's the second time I haven noticed this with one of my pinned messages.

21

I've read this answer to find out that pinned messages are being unpinned automatically after 14 days because "we found this feature to be abused too much". I fail to understand how a pinned message in someones chat room could abuse the site in any way. However, I find pinning a message an extre...

discussion feature-request chat moderator-tools chat-pins

9:11 PM

@verbose :63227544 literature.stackexchange.com/help/user-was-removed

@b_jonas thanks!

@verbose So have you been able to find a good data set?

The Lit SE one didn't work, alas. First, it was XML rather than CSV, which was irritating but not a stopper. The stopper was that the dataset I downloaded from the page Mithical pointed me to had only about 200 questions in it, from 2017 to now. I thought it would have had all the questions. I didn't want to spend any more time figuring out what was going on with that data, as I had to not just identify a data set but write up a proposal and give it to the prof for her approval

So I gave up (for now) on using Lit SE's data set and just went with Ohio voters instead; voter registration data is freely available from the OH SoS's office and has millions of data points

I'ven't yet received feedback from the prof, so I dunno what she'll think. In conversation I'd run both the Lit SE and the voter data ideas by her and she was fine with either

I wonder if there's a limit on the number of records you can get from SEDE at a time and whether you would need to combine results from multiple queries (e.g. one per year). Just speculating.

I'd've preferred to do the Lit SE one, but I didn't have the time to fuck around with the dataset just to see why it wasn't downloading all the questions.

@Tsundoku possible. As I said, though, the questions weren't the 200 most recent—they spanned the entire history of the site, from 2017 on

And I didn't have the time to figure out which questions it chose and why

9:20 PM

Hmm, OK. I haven't used SEDE enough to come up with an answer.

Specifically there were 241 questions

not 200

But that's still far less than 400, let alone the 6000 we have on the site.

The prof wouldn't've let me use that small a data set. Something with all 6,000+ questions would've worked. And anyway, even if she had been okay with the smaller size, a sample set of 241 would hardly have given us any insight into which sorts of questions get answered or go HNQ, which was what I was proposing to examine by using a clustering algorithm

I'd still like to do that, but I can't look into the SEDE stuff until after finals.

Did the data set you downloaded actually say whether a question had been HNQ?

I didn't bother to look. I did see that it had number of answers and answer accepted as fields

but when I saw that it had just 241 records, I spent just a few more minutes poking around the SEDE site and then giving up on the data for now.

9:28 PM

Even 6000 is not a very large data set, especially compared to voter data ...

True, but the prof had said at least 400 (not flexible) and an upper limit of around 10000 (flexible).

I don't know why she set an upper limit

Just looked, the posts.csv file (which I converted from xml) does not have HNQ data

Feb 10, 2017 at 22:23, by HDE 226868

Another HNQ question.

But in the question's history, I can't see whether it became HNQ. I wonder when that was added to a question's history.

Feb 9, 2017 at 16:29, by HDE 226868

We have another HNQ question.

Again, not visible in the question's history.

Apr 30, 2017 at 21:42, by Shokhet

HNQ, @Hamlet. Hopefully your question can draw attention from the CS/CS Theory and related sites.

Same issue.

So if you have a data set for old question, HNQ info may not be there at all. But for question from, say, the last three years, there may be a SEDE query that contains that sort of data.

9:56 PM

Well, "what characteristics differentiate answered questions from unanswered ones" or "accepted answers from unaccepted ones" might be more useful to explore than the HNQ thing anyway.

Though I imagine that asker being Mythical, Rand, or you probably is highly correlated with there being no accepted answer :D

Alex

10:43 PM

@verbose Across three sites, I have accepted 16 answers out of 147 questions. For some reason, though, my percentage is much higher on just Literature (7/24).

10:59 PM

Aug 15, 2017 at 14:59, by Mithrandir

I'm being Hamletty.

I probably have the highest percentage of self-answered questions. (Or at least among users who have posted more than 10 questions.) And I also have a lot of unanswered questions.

11:18 PM

@verbose There, ten answers accepted today.