@Undo and I were musing about this the other day - there are a few big user-run organisations on SE (think SOCVR, SOBotics, and us). Maybe I'm biased, but Charcoal is the best-organised and most accurate of the bunch, and I want to keep it that way. It's in part down to how well everyone involved knows the systems, so expanding on that angle can't hurt.
@Catija This. It'd be easy to bury it in a hundred page document, and point people to "hey, it says that on page 47, not my fault". But that wouldn't be good either.
@Magisch Eh... but even not joining... you've got people who come in here, see something posted, click a link, make a comment... I'm not saying it's common... but you don't have to be a member to respond to smokey reports.
I don't think it would be too hard to write a series of short self-guided documents about the important things. Link 'em together, call it a training course, and get people to go through it before privileges
@Cascabel Do we tell people not to make comments, though? The alternative in this case would have been to flag it as blatant spam - which it technically counted as - but a member chose to use their judgment and comment instead.
I have a proposal for things to do (you know, because we have nothing else important to work on :) ). Let's work on user friendly documentation - not technical documentation, but documentation that explains what we do and why. Cover all aspects of the system. Give a peak on the admin side of things too. Then, we need to have a discussion with the community. Like we have here. Like the ones that are locked n TL. Have it in public on a meta. We find a way to make it a valid meta post
@Undo No, of course you can't forbid comments, but maybe you can say only use copy pasted comments if totally sure they work there, maybe you can say to make sure you understand the site before you go too far, etc.
I know I'm not entitled to participate but being told post-factum about decisions sucks majorly. It makes the process a lot less interesting and inviting too
All of the issues that have been raised in the past two months behind the scenes. Issues that have been festering and are, frankly, giving us a bad impression to certain mods. We've come across as arrogant and 'do it our way because we're awesome' - as least that's what I appear to be picking up
@Undo I don't think rules would have helped so much as more friendly-worded comments. Those comments sort of read like you're talking to someone who is spamming. They should be written as if you're talking to someone who is new and made a minor error... the spammers won't respond, so you don't care about them.
"Yeah we talked about this in TL" well then I can't do anything with that besides accept it. I mean it's technically fine but at that point we're not discussing, just handing down.
The suggestions I made earlier were in that spirit, trying to avoid people without site context coming and giving the impression they think they're in charge.
@Andy The flipside of that is that it seems to me - sorry to be this blunt - like mods like to adress things in the TL and we non diamond peasants aren't worthy to hear about it until it's handed down to us. People evidently have problems with charcoal - why is the discussion about these happening where a chunk of us can't see it?
I'm not even sure that I understand this part of the discussion... I've only seen two occasions where the TL has been involved and the first one, was specifically outreach to mods... and this one today, terdon came here and most of the discussion was in here...
@Undo If you do that, you also need to have a rule in Charcoal that says "Don't pile on to people who disagree with something Charcoal/a charcoal member did."
@Magisch TL is not for discussion about charcoal anyway. Charcoal should be brought out in here - or designated chat room or meta. It's for the community. I agree with whoever said the mods serve the community not the other way around
@Andy you're pointing network-wide users to individual posts on sites they'd never have visited otherwise. This is not an issue for blatant spam, but it can be one for anything more subtle.
@Magisch That's a fair assessment. I suspect it's for a couple reasons 1.) TL is generally neutral ground for mods. CHQ definitely wouldn't be :) 2.) Mods are used to going there to discuss things with other mods
@Undo Yeah, but that doesn't make it nice to do it to them, or make it nice to turn it quickly into right vs wrong, possible vs impossible, before trying to discuss and understand each other.
@thesecretmaster And not bothering to discuss with the people you're disagreeing with but doing it by proxy instead comes off as backhanded and insulting
@Cascabel Right. I just don't want a "one reply to each message" rule or something like that. No reason to be artificial when we can tell people to use judgement.
(also, we're straying into solving problems that don't exist yet)
@thesecretmaster totally agree. It's a problem the site can have in general - we have the regulars and it can be overwhelming to new comers or someone who sees things differently. SO meta is the worst for that
@YvetteColomb @Magisch @thesecretmaster AFAICT most users here have a generally good idea of what's appropriate to do in a discussion, and what's not. This is a secondary theater right now, IMO
@Undo And, like above, trying to figure out who to listen to. Not listening to a network moderator because we don't believe doing that would be the best thing certainly can be read as "you don't boss us around"
Part of the problem is that if a mod comes here, they feel like they should get some understanding from the other mods who are part of this project... and I think that having so many of the primary champions for this project be mods, it makes it difficult.
My 2 cents on the issue (may be colored by my perspective, I'm the only non diamond in this room) isn't that we need to do more to make mods not feel disagreed with, but that mods need to drop the assumption that because of their blue name they know all the relevant policies. It seems to me like pointing out to a mod that they're mishandling spam is seen as an attack, and I don't understand why. I'd assume they'd all be open to learning, I know I would be. It's not like being a mod on a site
@Magisch I do appreciate the point about discussing here when possible, it's why I'm here now and trying to discuss things that could help more mods feel comfortable coming here.
@Magisch I think this is less black and white than that. There really are differences between sites, and charcoal folks tend to have very strong network-wide context while mods have the reverse balance, and both are relevant.
One thing that will help mods feel more welcome here (I would posit)... is having their fellow mods be open to what they're saying rather than feeling like they're immediately questioned.
Hello, welcome to $SITENAME$! Please just note if you want to promote or recommend your own product/blog, there are some [guidelines in place](https://$SITEURL$/help/promotion) for doing so. Following them will help you avoid giving the impression that you're spamming. Could you please [edit] to explicitly state your affiliation? Thanks. (If you're not actually affiliated it may be worth mentioning that as well.)
@Cascabel Yes. We feel like we're protecting the network, and are willing to sacrifice 99.95% on one site if that means we can get higher numbers across the network. Context.
@Mithrandir this assumes the goal is promotion. Which in the most benign case of the kind of response that triggered this discussion isn't the case. We're talking about the author of a specific tool posting an answer that uses this tool to solve a problem. The goal isn't necessarily promotion of that tool here.
Since y'all only look at the network wide picture, it's hard for people to trust that you're doing your due diligence to ensure no one site has a rough time.
What would ya'll think of doing something like SOCVR does with room meetings? Go to TL, collect five or ten good questions, set up an hour or so and hammer them out in a rigid, respectful, time-managed way?
@Undo I'm concerned about that - being excluding many people - without diamonds - we can ask people from TL to bring concerns here - or start a Charcoal Meta Chat room
@Magisch right, and since it starts to require more care, that's why a global strict policy, implemented by users not necessarily active on the site, may not always feel best.
In the bioinformatics case, if e.g. the community would say that they don't actually care to enforce the usual attribution rules for freely available tools, I'd probably agree with them. There is almost no harm caused there, and plenty of potential for unnecessary conflict
@Magisch that's the point where you need to step back, I'm afraid. We need to deal with every post like it's the first one - because for that site/user, it is
I actually agree with you - but would you rather have 100% network guidance and this happening all the time, or compromise at 90% and have everyone be friends?
I wouldn't call that principled, I'd call it being willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater when someone's already there offering to help do better.
@Seth And figured out that making posts filled with four miles of erotic ASCII symbols is a good way to irritate flaggers. Flag link is at the bottom of the post :(
I've only been paying passing attention to this conversation, but really turning Smokey off on BI entirely seems like they're misunderstanding the situation. Really the 'username similar to' reason is the only thing we have that is explicitly targeting non-disclosed blog posts
I would argue a user who can't read guidelines and blatantly self promotes isn't a loss to lose unless they can summon the effort to go read up on what they did wrong on their own and then come back later more carefully
Excessive self-promotion is always a judgement call. And that can require domain knowledge. E.g. it changes a lot if you know that the tool that the answerer used is one of the standards in that field, or if it is a random tool for a job where dozens of interchangable ones exist
@Magisch This is roughly the same as saying that Eric Lippert wouldn't be a loss for SO if he hadn't declared who he works for on his very first C# post.
@Magisch I wouldn't bother if it was clearly entirely about self promotion and trying to toe a line. But a lot of what I see is more like "I'm excited about this and also this is my blog!"
@Magisch But that's not really what this case was... It was a user who wrote a very long, detailed answer to a question that involved a tool they created and explained it... and then felt like deleting said answer because of a comment telling them that they needed to state that they were the creator of the tool.
I have always handled self promotion (undisclosed) as pure spam with the mild qualifier that sometimes a warning can serve, but evidently that isn't a widely shared opinion. I'm willing to adapt to that
What would ya'll think of doing something like SOCVR does with room meetings? Go to TL, collect five or ten good questions, set up an hour or so and hammer them out in a rigid, respectful, time-managed way?
@Undo after a certain scale, you do have to take into account the simple effect that the attention you draw has. It doesn't matter if most of your people correctly decide not to act on false positives, if there are still enough left that act rashly.
Because in the end this all boils down to disagreeing about how borderline spam should be handled. I think the worst that could have happened would be that a CM would need to lay out more clear guidelines if we couldn't do it on our own
@Magisch We... kinda made a mistake in assuming people understood what we were doing for the last two years or so. Didn't realize until now that it's more than one or two network mods with (large) philosophical differences.
@ArtOfCode I guess I don't entirely see what that would fix. I don't think the comment issue would have been avoided if we had been doing meetings because no one would have realized that comments like that are posted on borderline posts, so no one would have been asking about it
Then again, maybe I'm missing context since I just recently joined the diamond ranks and could read through TL, idk
Please remember that we have a **[Be Nice](https://$SITEURL$/help/be-nice)** policy on $SITENAME$; this includes stuff such as not including profanity or obscenities in your posts. In the future, please keep all posts profanity-free. In the meantime, I've edited this post to keep it in line with the policies. Thanks for understanding.
@DJMcMayhem a meeting is mostly not to fix that particular issue, but to reconcile different philosophical viewpoints. There are more of those than we realised.
This is waayyyyy late, but when I mentioned locking down access above, I meant, imagine that things got to where there were 1000 people writing comments and casting flags based on detection, and 1% of them were behaving badly, and you realized you needed to stop it somehow, and... the only way was to deny them access to the review queue, aka make detections not publicly visible.
@Mithrandir Please remember that we have a **[Be Nice](https://$SITEURL$/help/be-nice)** policy on $SITENAME$; this includes not using profanity or obscenities in your posts. In the future, please keep all posts profanity-free. In the meantime, I've edited this post to keep it in line with the policies. Thanks for understanding.
I'd also like to point out (and maybe someone's already done this, so much going on it's hard to follow) that if you're worried about overhead for turning reasons off and/or don't have the ability to turn a site off, maybe that's a technical problem that needs to be overcome?
@Seth FWIW the discussion is not fully about the technical problem in itself. It's understood that a technical problem can be solved. The problem is a philosophical one. It's the question whether we should solve the technical problem in the first place or whether doing so would detract from the benefit that this brings...
@Andy I'm not trying to be snide. It's exactly what you're doing. And nothing will get better if that is the perpetual answer. I don't really have anything else to say if that's all I ever get as a response. There's no point.
Just as an aside, there are quite a few English savvy peeps in the mod ranks that could view the current scripts and "niceify"/soften if needed. That's all I have for input.
If a site (collectively) wants to opt out of Smokey - they feel like the cost-benefit analysis isn't in their favor - I don't think that's unreasonable... But I don't think that it should be on a whim, either. Making it technically easy is fine but I don't think that making it easy should be so that we can immediately turn a site off without any discussion.
