Data Dumps have been turned off

Somehow, I don't feel good about contributing (for free) to a site that will charge me to get my contributions back out

yes yes I know API, but that'll get hobbled too

@RyanM-Regenerateresponse (to add to your list) stackoverflow.com/users/2884831/tony-wu - 7 answers in the space of about an answer i.e. about half the daily quota

We may as well keep SD and MS down. If they're going to axe the datadumps, they'll axe the API too.

All the tools will break.

While I am concerned about them charging for API use, SE has thus far and quite recently been very generous about upping SD's API quota as the service is nothing but a boon to the network. I suspect that they would allow SD a key that bypasses any paywalls, similar to how they previously supported us by allowing us to have a free SO Team (they continue to allow us to have more than 50 members I think, which is more than the free tier atm)

@Mast-onstrike But what about all the spam?

@Ethan The error "Domain someplace.com not found" notice/error you saw on this MS post indicates there's no record in MS of a "someplace.com" domain, not that it's not found in the post. In such situations, you can create the domain record for the "someplace.com" domain first. This can be done from page you get to form clicking "Tools" -> "Domain" and then clicking "add a new domain" to get to the Create Spam Domain page.

waffles™

@Ethan Unfortunately, MS' records of the deletion of posts is incomplete. MS relies on SD to be watching for post deletion and report it, but SD only watches for the post being deleted for two hours. Thus, deletions beyond that will generally not be recorded. The list of posts to watch for deletion are also per-instance, so switching instances will result in not continuing to watch for deletion of posts reported by the other instance.

In addition, it looks like there's a bug that will result in not watching for deletions of multiple posts on the same question. There may be another issue, but I'd need to check further.

We've considered, from time to time, ways to have more complete information in MS about post deletion, but haven't resolved on a solution or that it should be implemented. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to accomplish doing so without either access to a data dump, scraping SEDE (I believe), or the involvement of a user on each site that can view deleted posts using a (currently nonexistent) userscript.

@Spevacus Probably.

Possibly the other tooling will still break, we'll have to see.

@user16217248 SE seems more interested in keeping participation up than spam off the network, so we'll see.

Spam is participation,right?

Exactly.

More spam is more posts.

Next we'll allow voting rings and sockpuppets. More votes is more participation.

Unless it's different on other sides, if a user posts two spam-flagged-deleted posts they're blocked from posting the all important third to claim their membership in "weekly active users" counts.

That combined with people posting 17 ChatGPT answers a day means activity is going to be off the charts! And all thanks to their brand new, completely flawless AI policy.