hi

What do you think about this new Q&A? Is it really that police dogs are trained in foreign languages to prevent criminals from commanding the dog against the officer? I thought it would be just not to telegraph your intentions while commanding your dog, dog's don't understand speech the way humans do, I would expect dogs to primarily respond to the voice of the officer they are bonded with, not the words themselves.

Looks like urban legend to me, what do you think about this?

@lila Why not just apply the same approach as ipse? Require either personal experience (of commanding a police dog in Russian and confusing it) or a link to an authoritative source.

Oh I just noticed that the Q+A are both from the OP with no time between. I remember seeing a post about this Question and that it was closed because it was posted in bad faith - the OP never actually had a problem needing to be solved and was just trying to share knowledge, making the Q+A format irrelevant.

@Sarov Okay but I just wanted to ask people whether this Q&A gives urban legend vibes or not, I am not familiar with dogs and cannot even tell if a source is credible or not.

Ooh. I have no idea. I have a family member who's a vet who might know, though; I can ask later.

@Sarov Are you sure that's the reason it was closed, as far as I know it is allowed (although in my opinion: I don't like such Q&As) and a lot of such Q&As exist (at least on Pets).

@Sarov Thanks! ^.^

@lila I remember reading so on Jeff Atwood's blog, iirc.

@Sarov Oh okay then, I don't know I don't use Stack Overflow :D

@lila Oh they actually do that

Or maybe Joel Spolsky's blog... It's been a long time.

I always thought it reduced confusion

'The real problem there was that I was asking the question in bad faith. Jeff Atwood explained it: “Simple is fine. No effort and research is not.”' - joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-maddening-rules

@Sarov It would be a better answer if it was backed up

@JourneymanGeek Are they doing this only on SO, or other sites as well? And yes, I also think it defeats the site's format. pets.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2211

@lila Oh, self answering is ok everywhere

but if quality dosen't meet muster, its better to deal with that

Yeah, I wasn't talking about self-answering, per se. I've done it myself, often when I figured out the answer while writing the Question. It's more the bad faith o making a Question+Answer for the sake of making a Question+Answer.

IMO that's not the real issue, its the quality, or lackthereof of the answer IMO

Rather than the knowledge sharing process of have-problem->solve-problem->share-how.

@Sarov well, have hacked on stuff, managed to get it working through sheer dumb luck and ..... :D

@JourneymanGeek I know I know ^.^ but I understand self-answering as "you had a real problem you didn't know how to solve, then you learnt something and something else constructive happened and now you are equipped with useful knowledge to solve your own problem and thus answer the question" - that is totally okay, and I support it! But I don't like posting questions if you already have a full prepared answer for them.

At least in the turtle Question, the problem is in the Question. Different for the dog one, though.

@lila lets say the question and answer was by different people

would either/both still not be ok?

@lila Yeah, this is exactly my point.

(cause in this case I think that's the case

@Sarov Haha okay, I have learnt to know that if the first paragraph begins with some variant of this "duck rubbering" spiel, I can already give up trying to read the rest because I am not going to understand it :D

I saw the question before seeing the answer and that it was a fast self-answer; I regarded the question as low quality because it's so short and undetailed. With the answer, when I saw that later, it doesn't have any information backing it up and makes assumptions (like using "Russian;" iirc, police dogs are trained in GERMAN), that suggests the answer is just guessing at things and not putting in the effort to research.

I don't know if I'd flag it as "low quality," but it's not at all deserving of an upvote.

@lila Pfftaha. Rubber ducking is just when you explain your problem to an inanimate object (such as a rubber duck or bored coworker) and in doing so you figure out the solution, yourself. Just from breaking the problem down into explainable pieces, you figure it out.

I think a good "self answer" question would be having an issue, then taking the time to do some research and eventually coming back with the results of that research. "I know a random piece of trivia!" isn't a good candidate for a self-answered question, especially, like I said, with no outside information backing it up.

@JourneymanGeek I honestly don't know, it would require an unnatural cooperation to do such a thing, like putting extra effort to hide the fact that you are doing something "suspicious".

@AllisonC Agreed.

@lila or someone seeing a 'simple' question and throwing out an anaecdotal answer

this happens a lot :D

@AllisonC It is already in low quality queue (the question, that is) because of extremely short length that triggered the automatic filter.

@JourneymanGeek In that case, the Question is fine, the Answer is not. Whereas if it's from the same person, neither is acceptable, as I interpret.

@lila Yep, that's where I first saw it, and I do agree with the auto filter that it's low quality.

(also, my dog was bilingual :D )

@Sarov Haha I fortunately already know that (all our sites, not matter which ones, are just satellites of Stack Overflow so you ultimately learn such things sooner or later :D) but I meant it most often predicts things that are too technical for me :D

Ahh, fair.

@JourneymanGeek (My last one was commanded primarily via hand signals)

@JourneymanGeek Haha Ash, really? Which languages? :D

@Sarov One of the reasons why I have an actual rubber duck at my desk at work. :)

@lila tamil and english

oh ok nice

@AllisonC Like, sign language? Or just specialized dog-instruction-signals?

and I switched to tamil not to confuse humans :D

@Sarov I don't know ASL/any other sign language, so I don't know if any of the signals were from it or not, they're just the ones I used when training him, and he responded better to them than to verbal commands.

I had read somewhere that hand signals were helpful for training dogs, and he just liked them more than verbal ones

I wonder if anyone's ever, say, trained monkeys to train dogs.

@Sarov apparently fishing otters are trained by their parents

and no one actually knows how to train them, despite being domesticated for hundreds of years

Yeah, that doesn't surp - okay that part is interesting.

But yeah, it's pretty common for a species to teach its children, and for humans to train non-humans. Just wondering if it's ever non-human A training non-human B.

@Sarov Just my 2 cents: I have a love&hate relationship with IPS.SE. They have very strict rules for questions and answers and at one hand, the site is profiting from (mostly) good quality answers, but on the other hand the site is suffering from an incredible amount of closed questions and deleted answers. I stopped contributing to IPS because I felt unwelcome and uncomfortable there...

And requiring practical experience to answer questions isn't really enforceable. Anyone could write "I have a dog" in their answer and we don't have any means to verify this claim.

@Elmy IPS is kinda a strange fit topic and unfortunately walking the tightrope between seemingly excessive strictness, real answers and yahoo answers style posts is.... hard

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, I really don't want to be moderator there. I cannot imagine how hard that must be. I was involved in a few discussions about whether a question was on topic or not, and that was bad enough

@Elmy heh, I do MSE with one of their mods and hang out on their chat

Moderating SU is easy by comparison ;)

@Elmy just having a dog isn't good enough to actually have "experience," anyway. I had dogs when I was young, and live in a house with lots of dogs, but I don't have anything resembling the experience necessary to actually answer questions about dogs. :) I mostly just read and vote on those instead.

likewise

and it very much depends on the dog - I couldn't tell you much about big dogs for example

@Elmy I am hanging around on IPS chat since a few months (on daily basis; I come to say "hi" once a day at least) and I am happy with the chat because it is much more active that Litter Box (knock on the wood, today's Litter Box is awesome). And regarding the site, I am not using their Q&A site but I cannot say anything bad about it because they will stop liking/pretending to like me in the chat :D

All my useful experience is with cats, often mistaken for small dogs, but having little in common with them :)

@AllisonC other than shibas...

which are sometimes dogs with cat software :D

@JourneymanGeek I don't have experience with those, but that sounds entertaining to me :D

@lila Lol, at least then you would be able to write a question that's actually on topic ^^'.

@AllisonC Shibas are cat-like. derps or majestic beasties...

sometimes all 3

Not flat approved tho

That sounds delightful :D

My housemates have Great Danes, which are like small derpy horses. (A couple of pit bulls and a who knows, too.)

@AllisonC My granma has a fluffy GSD

And back when I had a dog in my younger days, we had a lot of labs and lab mixes (high energy!) and mine was a Dalmatian (smart, and a jerk)

Next doggo will likely be a Westie or mini schnauzer

@JourneymanGeek that sounds adorable :D

This is bravo. He once thought my brother was me, licked his face, then proceeded to try and fail to hide under the sofa

@JourneymanGeek awwwwww!

I was right, definitely adorable :D

@AllisonC alas, thanks to covid, it might be a while before I see that big slobbery furball

@JourneymanGeek I hope things work out to where you can see him again soon

New close reason has been added to the list, it is for problems that cannot be reasonably solved without a vet, to find it you need to go close->a community specific reason->This problem needs direct veterinary care and cannot be reasonably solved via self-help advice.

@lila that's going to be used a lot

@AllisonC covid's delayed a bunch of stuff for me

@JourneymanGeek same here, I've at least been able to see my parents a couple of times, but far less than I normally would. Haven't seen the rest of my family in a very long time.

And yes, I created that Q&A because i was trying to help out the site guys. Im sorry for trying to contribute.

@JosephCasey There's no need to apologize for contributing. The community/moderators don't want to discourage contribution. But they also have to uphold content standards. It's a delicate balancing act.

I know but what did I violate by answering my own question? The facts are all there. Dogs can be trained in different languages and I edited my answer to state that.

They dont have to be just trained in german. No offence @lila

so lila is a bot?

lol

haha no :D

hmmmmm i have to say i dont know.

:D

I do kind of believe sarov on this one.

Nah im kidding.

howver lila i do have a question

You did see that question I was talking about didnt you?

@lila Didnt you? (Sorry for ping)

In short, people started asking whether I am a bot because I am apparently sitting all the time on this chat & Q&A site, I said that it's flattering but not true and I am not a bot, then people responded that "I am not a bot" is exactly what a bot would say, so now they say this once in a while just to tease me :D

ah

@JosephCasey No problem for the ping, but what question exactly?

Ok so there was this one user that asked a question about why she/he was all of a sudden so furious with their cat, and a mod said "Lets migrate it to Psychology.SE" and i said "They denied it".

So

Pets.SE couldnt answer it, nor could Psychology.SE

So im going to try to create a site that can.

If your up for supporting me?

@JosephCasey can I be blunt?

?

blunt?

WDYM?

Blunt. As in not beating around the bush and saying something very directly.

uh sure?

go ahead

How long have you been around the network?

since last year

Have you ever been on Area 51?

The canon of SE sites is not covering each and every aspect of human life. And that’s accepted. We occasionally see new users that have their clearly off-topic questions closed ask “so on which site should I post it instead” and sometimes the answer is “there’s no SE site that would accept this question”.

Just a word of warning before you go all in and end up disappointed.

@JosephCasey he problem wasn't answering your own Question, per se, but an apparent lack of research/effort. Have you personally seen a police dog confused by non-police-issued commands, or did you read this in some law-enforcement documentation, or something? As-written, it looks like your Answer may just be you guessing.

@Stephie Experienced, proficient, acclimatized, familiar...

@JosephCasey The problem is that it was a low-effort trivia-style question with a low-effort unresearched trivia-style answer, which comes across strongly like trying to farm reputation.

@Sarov you got the idea ;-)

I made a suggestion in a comment to you that I will encourage you to consider again; I'll be a little more blunt with it this time. Stop answering questions. Start reading questions and answers. See what makes something highly voted, what results in few or no votes, and what results in downvoting. Your current answers are emphasizing quantity over quality; SE encourages quality answers, not "cheap and fast."

By taking the time to read and review those questions and answers that have been well received by the community (highly upvoted), you can start to improve yourself and your own answers. Currently, most of your answers are repeating the information in other answers, maybe with some anecdotal information added. Not necessarily worth downvoting, but not worthy of more than one or two upvotes.

And the SE system can and will actually “punish” consistently low-quality contributions, even automatically and without moderator action.

Yeah, I spent a few months reading pmse Q+As before seriously starting to contribute there. Worked for me.

Approach the questions less like a discussion forum or Facebook post, and more like an essay on a very important test. Slow down. Research your answer. Format your text correctly. Use proper spelling and grammar. Add proper citations, not messy ones. Make it readable. Make it informative. Include information that isn't already in another answer.

Aim for an A+ on your answer, not just "get it done and move to the next one."

@Sarov I came here via SO, and I have no idea how long I read stuff here (much less on SO) before I ever responded to a single question. It's worth it to take the time to learn how this site is different from other "discussion" sites. :)

@Sarov dito. On other sites, though.

@AllisonC interesting - do you see a pattern here?

@Stephie Rewarding quality over quantity :) Discussion forums typically reward quantity of posts via post counts attached to user profiles (or on some sites, "site currency" to spend, what a disastrous design!), and social media gamifies quantity via "likes" and other reactions.

While you could argue that there's some "gamification" of content here via up and down voting, since you aren't following a profile (like on social media) and the name of the person posting is less prominent, as well as the anonymity behind votes, good content is better rewarded here than "hot takes" like on social media

Nah - three users that came here from different sites and all followed the “listen and learn” method before starting to teach!

@Stephie Hahhah, that too! Listening is one of the most important skills you can have, and it feels like it's undervalued in the world today

Humility's another thing that seems undervalued that should be used more. Like I said earlier today, I don't know much of anything about dogs. I leave those questions to the dog folks. :) (Same with birds and fish--I might have a couple aquariums but I am very much a beginner!)

Yep. There’s no obligation to answer.

Dang. I need to triple my reputation here ;-)

There's a tendency in some groups for people to become "instant experts." I know on a hobby forum where I'm active, there's a lot of newbies who just learned about the hobby a month ago but are all in for posting tutorials (with bad information), advice (frequently sketchy), and "helpful tips" (that everyone already knows).

Ah. Those.

No knowledge is as dangerous as half-knowledge.

And since I finally fixed the build server I broke and it's well past lunch time, I think it's time for me to step out and find some food :)

@AllisonC Enjoy!

imagines putting a shattered server back together with duct tape and a glue gun

@Sarov Thankfully I don't think anyone's broken it that hard! (Though there's probably been a part dropped in the past... but that's IT's problem, not Engineering's :) )

@Stephie Ok and sorry for the late reply. Im at school right now.

I just want to help out as many people as I can, and by doing that, I want to make a Self Help Site just for that.

@JosephCasey Your intentions are good, but if you have bad tools, you cannot reach your goal. Realistically speaking, StackExchange is a very bad tool for your goal. There are rules that seem stupid in certain contexts. One such rule is that it's strictly a Q&A site, so every post must contain a question.

If I were in a dark mood and swimming around aimlessly on the internet and I found your site, what question could I ask? "hy am I feeling so down"? That would be a question you cannot answer.

And another "stupid" rule of SE is that answers must be objective and it must be possible to select one "best" answer that solved the problem. I honestly don't think it's possible to write answers that help people with depressions or psychological trauma in that way

And then there is that big, big problem, that people like the one who hurt their cat really need professional help from a psychiartist or similar. They need to talk about their problems with someone who can find he underlaying cause. They need to remember really uncomfortable things that caused their trauma. From personal experience in my family I know that trying to work through trauma without guidance can be very harmful.

So in general I would welcome your plan of creating a self help site, but you need to be aware that SE is probably the wrong platform for that and that you'll need a lot of help.

@lila @Elmy @Stephie I want to thank you for Helping me all of this way. However I am not leaving Pets. This is my home and you guys are my family. I would rather ditch the new site idea then to make it and leave you guys behind.

@JosephCasey Believe me, no one makes you leave. You're welcome to stay

IK

Im ditching the new site idea though

It does make it kind of hard due to me being on my school account, i cant see the photos that people put. It just says copyright.

but i made it this far, im not giving up now

@JosephCasey I do feel with you and I really wanted to help that person the other day. I felt very sad for them, not because they hurt their cat, but because they were hurt inside even more. But unfortunately leaving them a comment is all I could do.

Ik

now you understand why i want to start a site.

@JosephCasey Totally. But if you choose the wrong tools, they will hinder you more than helping you reach your goal.

I got the worried about domestic cat one

an yes i understand

and*

allison commented on it and I answered it.

And @Elmy Maybe you can help me make the site. You seem your experienced for it.

the guppy one is hard though

I might need someone else to do it for me.

;D

@JosephCasey Please, read the advice you've been given. You do not need to answer every question. Before you can hope to improve others, you need to improve yourself. Step back and read for a while.

IK

Yes.

Ok.

:|

@Elmy did you close that one question yet?

or is it still up?

@JosephCasey I get that you just want to help, but the way you're conducting yourself currently is only going to end in resentment between you and the site. Your answers are largely rather low-quality; not always enough to downvote or remove, but they aren't great. You'll continue to get downvoted and flagged, which isn't good for your own mindset. This advice is for your own good. :)

@JosephCasey The one about hitting the cat was deleted by the community moderators (one level above lila, harry and I)

Dang

Like I've said, go look at good answers, the ones that have a good number of upvotes (10 or more). Spend some time figuring out why they're good answers. You said you're in school; treat every question like an essay test, where you'll get a better grade for a good answer, a worse grade for a bad answer, and no change if you just skip it for not knowing the answer. :)

I wanted to try and add one more comment to that post apologizing

And yes allison

I will sit back and watch.

Good. It's what we've all done at the start. :) It'll make your answers better as you learn how to craft them. And welcome!

I am still thinking about starting that site on here. I wont just yet but I might in the near future. I feel so bad for not having an answer for that poor user.

But yes

Sometimes the only answer is "We can't answer that here, you need a professional."

@AllisonC may I at least suggest edits while im on parol? >:D

@JosephCasey Speaking from experience: Sometimes the best action in such a case is accepting your own limitations and encourage such a user to get professional help. Not all problems can be solved by a bunch of strangers on the Internet. No matter how enthusiastic or well-meaning they are.

@JosephCasey hahhah, of course :) It's a good way to spend time reading through questions and answers

ok lol

hello

@Nai54 hi!

a lot of chat messages here. What are we talking about?

@Nai54 hi

And how is everbody doing?

I am okay, but nothing too fancy, just fine and that's it, no fireworks; and you?

It's... a day here. :) I have a project on deck that involves dealing with a coworker who can be very difficult to get information out of sometimes, but hopefully the small piece of information I need won't be too terrible to get.

@Nai54 Haha you have now reminded me how, according to some statistics I had read some time ago, about 30% or so of "+1 for ..." comments are not even accompanied by an upvote :D

@Nai54 Lila pretending to not be a bot.

@lila intresting

@AllisonC Ooh house renovations. My family doing a humongous one, basically tore down our house and built a new one while living in it. Meaning going room to room we are all squished together. We've experienced our share of incompetent contractors :D

@lila oh I see why you said that ;)

@Nai54 hahhah, no house renovations, "on deck" here means "at the top of my queue" :) It's code related, not house related :)

oh misread your comment

no worries, it happens!

(I'd rather be on a deck than dealing with this information extraction...)

:D

@Nai54 ;D

@lila I have read the transcript of this chat from what I missed. Seems like another lengthy discussion involving Joseph Casey. And I hate to bring it up again, but seems important. I know that we talked about being authoritarian with him, which I am not going to do anymore, but I am currently scrolling through his 30+ answers and downvoting where appropriate (but not to many at once, not serial downvoting, simply quality controlling). I am also leaving comments in those places, do you...

... agree with the following few? pets.stackexchange.com/questions/31192/… pets.stackexchange.com/a/31125/19872

@Nai54 I agree, it is me who v*ted them up

thanks

@Nai54 Oh by the way, I got bitten in the rear end recently myself: we had 3 rude or abusive posts on Pets SE recently, flagged with red flags and all, it was on my watch so I was the one to delete them, but before deleting I downv*ted each one of them (I know it wasn't needed, but I did it just as a little "slap in the wirst" from me :D); next day I got notification...

@Nai54 ...about phantom +3 reputation points (phantom because I remember and see that all reputation is the same), I clicked on profile and see "voting reversal (serial voting correction)", so apparently as little as 3 downv*tes are enough, shocking!

Isn't that because downvoting an Answer penalizes the downvoter as well as the downvotee? So once the Answer was deleted, the penalty went away?

@Sarov It is, yes exactly: but that's the thing, I downv*ted and then immediately clicked red flag so it was deleted and -1 penalty was supposed to go away shortly after (usually, from my experience, it takes 1-2 minutes); but this time it happened the next day, and it was "phantom", I mean, it displayed "+3" but it already gave me back that +3 a day before.

Oh, I see.

@lila I think the algorithm is a bit more complicated, but we don’t really know.

Ok this is me on my home account guys

Joseph Casey

And also

Elmy i have a question

@Elmy is there any way i can contact a community moderator to request rep change to this account? could i at least try to?

@TheBigJoe1489 you can merge accounts. But you need to contact the Community moderators. Site moderators don’t have that kind of power.

There’s a section in the Help Center explaining how to proceed.

pets.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts

What you can’t do is transfer rep points like on a banking account.

Having two accounts is permitted with a few caveats. For example never ever vote or endorse as (account 1) for (account 2) or similar. Rule of thumb: if you couldn’t do an action with one account alone, it’s forbidden with two. If a moderator (or the bots in the background!) catches a user sock puppeting, there will be consequences.

imagines a SWAT squad with flamethrowers

@Sarov I have destroyed accounts for that. It’s a quite civilized process, it just requires me clicking a few buttons.

(But yes, it may feel like dragging a flamethrower out!)

In other words, “have hammer, will use it”.

But always in a gentle and loving manner.

Ha!

guys

It showed it as a suspisious request.....

im screwed

@Sarov 1. That’s what makes SE so unique - active moderation, not just by a few lone warriors with a diamond, but by the community per se.

@TheBigJoe1489 ? and you heard the warning not to vote on your other profile, right?

no

I didnt

and

I stopped even though i didnt hear it

@Sarov 2. And then there are those who see the gaming attempts again as a challenge to be countered.

gaming?

/oh

@Stephie Yeah, the community moderation is the 'secret sauce'. I'm not actually a mod, but I'm in the top 2 of all review queue stats on pmse.

@TheBigJoe1489 multiple conversion threads.

@TheBigJoe1489 it says this "Having two accounts is permitted with a few caveats. For example never ever vote or endorse as (account 1) for (account 2) or similar. Rule of thumb: if you couldn’t do an action with one account alone, it’s forbidden with two. If a moderator (or the bots in the background!) catches a user sock puppeting, there will be consequences."

@Sarov Which makes you a “mod light” ;-)

Heh.

is there any way i can appeal because i only voted once from one account and i stopped. I only did it so see if it worked. Im not rep hungry

Is there any way to appeal?

Not sure about the appeal, but sidenote - you can undo an upvote by clicking it again. I'd suggest doing so.

@TheBigJoe1489 what would you want to appeal?

Stephie apparently one of my accounts upvoted another one of my accounts and now im hogtied

@Sarov But it might be necessary to edit the post first, the vote will be probably locked.

i cant merge them

@TheBigJoe1489 Is that a response from CM?

?

no its a response from the bot

once i hit submit, it said it was a suspisious report

what did you say?

@TheBigJoe1489 please don’t go fiddling with your accounts, like trying to reverse that vote. Contact a CM. pets.stackexchange.com/contact

It might've been because you're using a different IP now? So the system thought you're a stranger trying to steal someone else's account. I second the advice to contact a CM.

how do i contact a CM?

Link Stephie just posted.

ik

What do i fill out?

do i say i want to appeal?

Appeal what, exactly?

Either try the “merge accounts” drop-down option again or choose “other”. There’s nothing to “appeal” in my opinion.

I think he means the one time he voted for himself

Agreed

If it was an honest mistake and a single event, nobody is going to punish an user for that. Mods are not lurking in the shadows, hammer poised, waiting for that one misstep.

Yeah but they may still want to know, like to remove the rep for it before merging the accounts. I'm just guessing.

I flagged, to let mods know just in case, I doubt there will be punishment though

thanks guys