Sort of borderline between technical and non-technical: what if there was a way to say, "please just manually flag on this site, let us handle it" -- maybe the detection reports contain a marker or something.
@JohnP I very much agree, it is a problem. Something I've been talking to people about for a long time. But that's neither here nor there for this issue.
I get wanting everyone to be on board, but if the disagreements are philosophical like that we might have to agree to disagree and defer to policy in points of conflict
@Magisch well, yes and no - the policy by no means makes it clear what to do in every specific circumstance, so deferring to policy in a lot of ways means deferring to the site's view of policy, and its manual implementation of policy in specific cases.
@DavidPostill leading off with please can come off as abrasive. Not saying that it's your fault at all but if we want to avoid this we have to be as gentle as conceivably possible
@Seth Then stop making "it really does come back to that" type responses. You have one point of view. Others have a different one. They are in conflict here and the end goal is to resolve them. How is being working on, but you are completely dismissing the other point of view because it disagrees with your own.
@DavidPostill Then you ended it with "Don't be a spammer". That's the first time I've seen that autopost, and I could easily see how it comes across as rude. Esp in the situation that it was in.
@DavidPostill same. I am not condemning you, merely the way the wording comes across. Sorry if I implied otherwise by using the sweeping "you" in reference.
now that that's settled, I think everyone involved could use a small breather for this discussion. Everybody got their say, now we can all step back a bit, reread the transcript in a few hours and then come back ...
@Magisch right, and sites do have leeway to interpret and enforce the rules as they see fit, once it gets down into the gray area that's not clearly defined by the policy. So if you want to agree to disagree at that point, I think it actually means trying to not step on the site's toes.
@Magisch blatant spam is pretty universal, rude and abusive is "Be Nice" which I mentioned, everything else can be adjusted per site (though it doesn't make sense very often to deviate from the common standards)
@Cascabel I still think even the finery of what counts as spam and what doesn't is firmly in the realm of ground rules that sites themselves need not alter
@Catija yeah, basically. Or... I don't know, maybe you have high and low-confidence reasons, and on the low-confidence ones you mark it, so people don't use their "you're a spammer go away!!" comment.
@Magisch I think we might want to look at examples at some point. But even if what is and isn't spam is clearly-defined, then what to do about it isn't.
You can look at something and say, yeah, this is against the policy, we need to act... but also I think if we just edit and say "hey fyi, rules, here you go" sometimes that's better than nuking.
@thesecretmaster I have an answer, but it definitely has a "we know what we're doing" feel about it. While I work on the wording to be less antagoistic, let me ask you one: Why does a site want to opt out of spam protection and why aren't they asking SE to opt them out of the already offered protections provided?
@Andy It's not just a matter of different views. It's Charcoal affecting my community from afar and then telling me to bugger off when I take issue, or heck, even have concerns about it. By the 10th time I don't have much respect left for such a disrespectful viewpoint. But fair enough. I'll throw some more effort at not coming off snarky.
I have a lot of experience handling flags, and I know very well that there are good and bad actions that can be taken when handling the flag, or by users noticing the same issue.
@Magisch I appreciate and really can follow the idea to try and make everything simple, but... It's almost never simple. While it really helps to make things simple when dealing with the flood, it's not useful when dealing with people.
@Magisch And I know for a fact that on the sites that I frequent, spam policy violations are not always nuked, and the community endorses and benefits from this.
@Seth Forgive this question, please. How is Charcoal affecting you? My assumption is that it's affecting you negatively. I want to focus on that specific thing.
@Magisch No, they don't. There is really almost no hard network-wide policy. Most sites don't deviate much from the network standards, but they could if they wanted to. CMs hardly ever make policy
@Cascabel Maybe that discussion needs to be had and enshrined on MSE then. Because I am unaware of any consensus reaching MSE discussion that states spam isn't a purely binary issue
@Andy A site should be allowed to because SE spam protection lets the targeted user know, and is much more conservative, and works by different mechanisms. A site can want to opt out of anything that is believed to harm the site. If a site sees charcoal as too aggressive, they should be allowed to opt-out.
@Magisch Maybe so - and I would not be surprised if some parts of it already have been. But my point is, the status quo is that it's not purely binary. I think that anything other than that would be a policy change, even if it's hard to point to a specific codified policy that explicitly states there is wiggle room.
@Seth I've been mostly focusing on reworking the comments during this conversation, which TBH isn't so easy on my phone. I usually agree that caution is good.
@thesecretmaster Is it appropriate if Charcoal can show they have provided a positive impact though? In this case, I'm talking "believed to harm the site" vs. "Here is exactly what we've done".
@DavidPostill I'm sorry that you got yelled at... I don't think that what you did was wrong... and I don't think terdon thought that, either... it all seemed to come down to the wording and I can understand how people could take the wording of the auto comment as being a bit blunt... even if it does say thanks or please... those social niceties don't always make something sound nice.
@Andy The site should have the final word about how spam is flagged on the site -- I don't think that's something were debating. Now, charcoal can certainly argue their case, but folks native to the site should get the final say.
@Seth I don't like this. I don't like the fact that we appear as a brick wall. We're not a brick wall, just trying to balance needs of mods and sites against needs of network and ourselves, but that's a difficult balance and I appreciate it doesn't come across like that. If you've got particular suggestions for how we could change that, want to take some time to think through them and email them to me? Obviously I can't promise we'll do them, but if we can change it, I want to.
@Magisch Can you point to a policy that says that everything that violates any part of "how not to be a spammer" is simply spam, and all spam is nuked?
@Andy I was mostly happy with it up until this whole discussion. Other than that time you (dang English is not very specific with 'you' now is it) posted on MSO instead of MSE. My problem is when I some much as even peep "I'm not sure this is a good idea" I get berated like a child, meanwhile your changes affect me and my community that you're not even a part of. It's akin to me making the laws for your country while living on the other side of the world.
@Cascabel Not off the top of my head. Meta is curvy and full of noise in that sense. Let me look if I can find anything. I think there is something though
@Magisch I feel strongly enough about this that if e.g. a post like the one on bioinformatics got nuked by spam flags, I'd mod message every single flagger and issue a severe warning
@angussidney and that's kind of the point, most policies in fact do have fuzzy bits and exceptions and room for best judgment in specific cases for the good of the site, and it's odd to be hearing that this specific policy doesn't allow that.
@ArtOfCode It often appears that you're not willing to change -- e.g. when you were asked to turn off smokey on a site, your first reaction was to say "No, unless you can say why you want it off."
@Seth Disagree. If all sites need something, sure, that's what the network needs. But if an individual site needs something different to the others, that's different.
If a site wants to have our systems tuned off, they should be able to - but it should happen after the WHOLE community has come to a consensus on the fact, not after a single mod has a disagreement.
@Magisch this discussion isn't going anywhere. You hold one opinion, other people hold another. There may be a reconciliation, but it's going to come from policy not discussion.
Recommend an MSE post about how to classify self-promotion
@angussidney I think that the default should be to turn smokey off. That's the initial state of the site. Having Smokey on is an extra feature that most (or arguably all) sites find useful, but the default is still to not have it. It's not built into SE.
The bioinformatics post is good enough that I wouldn't even ask the user to disclose the affiliation, it doesn't matter in the slightest there. It's a very good answer to the question, the end.
@angussidney This. We're in a hard spot - follow everything any moderator says, or push for meta consensus and appear combative? I'm sure there's middle ground, we need to find it.
@thesecretmaster Default state kinda doesn't matter. If sites find it useful, then it seems reasonable to ask for the agreement of a majority of the community to take away the thing they find useful.
@thesecretmaster FWIW it's intended to supplement stuff that SE built, you could think of it as something that SE just hasn't gotten around to implementing yet
@ArtOfCode That's exactly the attitude that people take issue with. The needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of the one, especially for such a simple, technical fix.
@Undo indeed - something in the spirit of "let's present what effects we're having and let you and your community decide/suggest/inform" rather than "you shouldn't/can't change anything, we are definitely the best ever here's why"
@Undo Sorry, I should've qualified that - I know y'all don't think that either, and I was replying to you to agree with working on middle ground, not to say you had that view!
@ArtOfCode I just think that it should be turned off temporarily while it's being discussed on a site. Because at that point it's clear that there is some (likely minor) issue with what Smokey is doing.
@Seth The balance there isn't quite that simple. But I'm serious - if you've got suggestions about how we can change that appearance, ping 'em through to me
@thesecretmaster Clarification (maybe to @Seth too): Is the problem with Smokey and it saying "hey, possible problem here!" or with the automatic flags when smokey determines there is a problem?
@DJMcMayhem I don't know whether or not I've seen that specific thing. But what I have seen is a lot of very adversarial discussions where the pro-smokey folks are arguing strongly in favor of keeping it on, and expressing a lot of skepticism about others' views.
and I totally get how it turns into that. You have some people and a project they're very invested in, which they see primarily from the point of view of that project, and you have some other people and a site they're invested in, and they see it from that point of view.
@Cascabel OK, fair enough. It comes across as a surprise to me since I've never seen those adversarial conversations. (Not saying they haven't happened)
If smokey gets turned off for a site nothing stops someone else from hosting it with that site turned back on - it's all public record there is no possibility to restrict that
IMO, it was totally wrong for the first response for this problem to be 'we leave the system as it is or we turn it off completely.' There may be some context in the TL that I'm missing, but it was still wrong
@Magisch can vs should. Anyone can run it, yeah, but now that we're a biggish group who take responsibility for running the primary copy, we have responsibility to handle it... uh... reponsibly.
@thesecretmaster sooo... the meta chat effect that comes with increased visibility on possibly problematic posts? Could you elaborate on how that affects your site?
@thesecretmaster I'm pretty sure you have these opinions for a reason. I'm trying to get to those reasons. Opinions we had enough, we need to compare premises to get progress out of this
@Magisch I'm assuming that there is a reason it went that far in this hypothetical case, if the mods decide that the bot is harmful to the site, and this decision is supported by the community, suspending the account that the bot uses would be warranted
@Andy tbh I'm not familiar enough with this "smokey commenting" thing to really comment on that. I don't really have an issue with autoflagging. I'm not a fan of 5 autoflags at all, but I also am willing to let you guys play with it. What I really take issue with is the attitude that you can run this all over my community with no respect for what we want.
Default-off is kind of weird anyway, because at the point where a site begins, it probably doesn't really even matter - they're not getting much spam. It becomes a more interesting question once the site has grown a bit.
@Andy That might be slightly confusing... Chat is "messages" and last I checked, Smokey doesn't actually write any "comments"... meaning comments on a site.
@angussidney considering a large percentage of the people talking now are blue in name and probably blue in the face by now, won't have much of an effect
@ArtOfCode I don't think you guys are doing bad on the technical front (although better reporting for mods would be amazing, and easier access to data). The only "suggestions" I have are give some respect to the sites you're messing with. If they ask you to turn it off, do so. Frankly I'm continually shocked this isn't obvious.
@Seth Agree with that, actually. I think we're differing on what the "site" is - we think it's the community representing the site, so we push back when it's a single moderator suggesting it.
@Seth I think our differences come from that we see this as a network wide, not site wide issue. That also means that input of individual sites is weighted, meaning that small sites appear less important in the general picture
I guess I see why small sites can feel shafted in this
I do generally agree about asking the community rather than just one mod (outside of emergencies anyways), though I think it could also be good to have a process that involves both charcoal folks and the mods presenting some information.
@Undo Single moderators are (almost always) the speakers for the community. You should listen to them. And you should know that (again, why isn't this obvious?). I have no problem with you requesting a meta post, but you should be honoring it in the meantime. If it turns out that it was the whim of some lone moderator that's a problem for the community to address, not you.
@thesecretmaster But it seems like a pretty simple meta post - "do we want this, yea nay". Doesn't need that layer of representation, and it feels like a disservice to shut something off without talking to meta.
Of course it's a lot easier to get clear information about smokey stuff than the rest... like I was interested in auto spam flags vs manual linked from smokey vs all other spam flags, and that's tough.
@Seth AIUI people prefer to not be trigger happy around here... That includes turning off things that may turn out to have been pretty useful all along ...
@Seth and that's what we need to work on. What actually happened seems to have been the right thing, it's just how it was communicated. That sound right?
Moderators are specifically elected to be the caretakers of things like this, that is their job. Most of you should know this, which makes your "we don't want to listen to a lone mod" seem like a front tbh
ofc they need to represent what the community wants, but that's their problem, not yours.
@Seth With all due respect I disagree. Last I checked moderators aren't the voice of the community they're moderating, but only one of X voices (where X is the active members)
@Seth Disagree. I think it's an issue for both of us to consider. For a large system like this, asking for a meta post to demonstrate community buy-in before taking away a generally-useful thing seems reasonable. Yeah, it's down to the requesting mod to execute that how they want to, but us making sure ain't a bad thing
Strawman procedure: if a moderator says "I promise we want this off right now" then just immediately turn it off for X days, and when there's time, start a more detailed discussion (meta etc).
@Seth we have never ever turned off a site entirely. Not gathering any data from a site even if it gets obvious spam does strike me as the ultimate move
@Vogel612 That could mean that it'd be nice to have a list of options that are technically easy enough. "You say you want smokey off. What do you mean? A) no autoflagging, B) no reports that people might manually flag off of, ..."
@Magisch Seems important to me, because I learned about Smokey's existence from mods first I believe... Also, I think moderators can make or break a communities support for things like Smokedetector
@Magisch right, which is why I suggested the general procedure above: if a mod says "yes really off right now I promise" you trust that they're acting in the interests of their community, then you verify on meta.
Ultimately this isn't my project and I'm not even in any official capacity of it, but from what I've seen, I disagree with this. Not strongly enough to make a big fuss over it, but still
@Tinkeringbell I'm not worried about that, because ad 1) there's so many good candidates for mod on the only site that I'd seriously consider running, ad 2) there's no elections in sight for said site
Should we take a step back for a moment and make a list of concerns that we want to discuss? Figure out exactly what we want to have a discussion on and what we want to come to an agreement on
I have a (small) BAM file with CIGAR and MD fields. My goal was to create a *tsv file with two columns, one with the reconstructed alignment and the other column with the corresponding sequence. This would be useful in my analysis. (I would either use R data.table, or pandas in python.) Further c...
on action items - I'm certainly willing to try to help run a town hall chat if that's still a thing, I know I'm not entirely unbiased, but in terms of anyone but CMs maybe I'm not so bad, I feel like most of this doesn't have terribly substantial effects on the sites I mod.
On that note, if I had displayed the attitude some diamonds have tonight I probably would have earned a timeout, but their concerns get taken more seriously instead. Food for thought
FWIW if you think that it is a valid point, that is something that could / should be brought up. I understand that diamonds are just people, but their special powers directly translate into higher expectations :/
Maybe I really need to take a couple days because this is exactly what this feels like
It feels like the elite club of diamonds doing their own thing and holding themselves in such high esteem while showing no such consideration to the rest. It might be best for me to recuse myself from this entire discussion in the future lest I become not nice
I think the problem in this particular case is that Charcoal acts a bit like HNQ, and draws attention from outside users unfamiliar with the site. But with the assumption that there is something wrong with the target post in the first place
