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2:00 PM
Also
 
Maybe metasmoke could just drop old feedback on a post when new feedback from the same user comes in
 
We need a very detailed guide about what feedback to give when. Seems like quite a few privileged users seem to have differing opinions there
 
Is there a problem with conflicts?
 
@Undo That would be also sufficient
 
I believe there are 2 meta smoke admins at the moment, I can ask undo to admin myself to become the third, if we need this frequent feedback nukes
 
2:00 PM
you can handfix blacklisting or such
 
Doesn't that show that that specific rule or that specific post was unclear in how it should be handled?
 
@SmokeDetector f
Currently the policy on self vandalism, merely self promotion, random gibberish, cat over the keyboard or so
 
The post was unclear, but not spam, and smokey is only for spam
 
is generally known
but not entirely clear
 
[ SmokeDetector ] Few unique characters in body, repeating characters in body, repeating characters in title, repeating words in body, title has only one unique char: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa by olbrun on diy.stackexchange.com
 
2:02 PM
Self vadalism is really unclear everywhere, so do f, others tp- and others do ignore-
 
Some people like to mark self vandalism as sd k, some people use sd tp- and some use sd f
 
@SmokeDetector ignore (looks like self vandalism + delete)
 
@Ferrybig Post ignored; alerts about it will no longer be posted.
 
What I mean is we need a very specific guideline for corner cases
 
And that is why keeping the conflicting information is important. We can see who is flagging things against what is expected and reeducate them
 
2:03 PM
well
if they change their feedback on a post
that is because either they changed their opinion or it was an error
at which point the need for re-education is gone
 
Still indicates a place where we can give guidance
 
I really think we should keep all posts in this chatroom, even if the post was false positives, helps us finding them back if something wentwrong with flagging
 
In either case: Slow down when reviewing
 
Human error will always happen
 
Despite what some think, flagging isn't a race to see who can get the most. The goal is accuracy not quantity.
 
2:04 PM
I always reread the post after casting my spam flag to double check it was really spam
 
I'm almost tempted to do a few 'audits' on legit posts and see just how bad the reflex-flagging is
 
@Undo good idea, :D
 
regardless wether or not we have alot of reflex flagging
people will think we do
some posts we destroyed were from otherwise normal users
 
Links?
 
I often thought to myself "That must feel like beeing bullied"
 
2:06 PM
Heard that a lot, but I've never once seen it actually happen
 
@Magisch Part of the problem with that perception is how you are describing it. "Destroyed".
 
@Undo you should post a chat message from the smokedetecotr account manually that says as reason "Are you paying attention" and the link to the post goes to a "rick roll"
 
No. Smokey isn't for that.
 
@Ferrybig heh
 
Thats NAA <-> garbage
 
2:08 PM
@Magisch that's abusive
 
I've seen posts by normal users like that (which could be anything from spam seeds to misclicks) get abusive-destroyed
Imagine you're such a user
you post some random gibberish, maybe your keyboard failed
 
Okay
 
and 30s later you get -100 rep and a answer ban
or even your account gets destroyed
Now the site views you as a threat
 
And yet somehow I clicked the button, put my email and username in, then my keyboard failed, then I clicked 'post'?
 
I think gibberish should be handled with a abusive flag, like stackexchange recommends
 
2:10 PM
Well sometimes these are normal users who were writing a reply but messed it up
 
And, for a destroyed account, you were probably a new user anyway. Mods don't just destroy a user that has history for one crap post
 
@Andy this
16
A: Is a post such like 'assdddsssafffwq' spam?

UndoThese are abusive, and should be flagged as such (rude/offensive). Those flags should be marked helpful (as should 'spam', 'very low quality', and 'not an answer'. They all apply). Here's my reasoning: We are a professional site. Imagine you're at a conference. You walk into a group of professi...

 
I wouldn't most likely but you can fall victim to that surely
 
@Magisch Have an example of an obviously legit user that got their post blasted?
 
Maybe its conjecture, but it feels like breaking someone's face with a sledgehammer rather then throwing them out
not on hand no
the fact that I can't see deleted posts doesn't help in looking
 
2:11 PM
You have metasmoke reports
As soon as this problem leaves the theoretical world and becomes practical, we can look at doing something
 
What also happens
sometimes on sd n posts or self vandalism we get a slew of instant downvotes
People are already describing us as a creepy voting ring or cabal, though
 
How many people?
 
@Undo I can only think of one recently, and it was solved on Meta and doesn't appear to involve Smokey at all
 
Reads like project spam. SO users have a pretty good record detecting crap like this without the help of a bot. Well, other than the OP :) This kind of organized witch hunting is very creepy. — Hans Passant 19 hours ago
I don't think we are doing bad stuff
just how it can easily seem that way when you're not involved
 
I honestly don't care if people think "we" are a cabal, I care as soon as we are actually doing harm
 
2:15 PM
The value of stuff like SmokeDetector isn't so much that this stuff wouldn't get caught otherwise, @Hans... It's that it might not get caught as quickly. Two minutes after that answer was deleted, the same user tried to post on another question... But was blocked by the system since his previous answer had been identified as spam. This is a minor convenience on Stack Overflow, but a huge boon to other sites where a delay might mean dozens of such answers waiting for a moderator to wake up. — Shog9 ♦ 19 hours ago
 
Which no one has a solid example of yet
 
@Magisch Let's work through this aspect a bit. What causes the down votes?
Is it because the question is bad? Or because someone posts a link in the chat room and says "cv-pls"?
 
Its mainly the smoke detector posts that get the downvotes, not the cv-pls
 
What is the difference between what Smokey reports and what the cv-pls posts report?
 
smokey reports indicate something that a bot thinks is spam
so its generally unconfirmed by a human until a human does so
 
2:17 PM
What happens when you flag something as spam?
 
a cv-pls is something made by a human
A downvote
but Im not talking about actual spam
stuff thats unworthy of spam flags gets drive by downvotes anyways
 
Its mostly the posts that are "requires editing"
 
or drive by spamflags, which would be considerably worse even
 
What's wrong with NAAs getting downvotes?
 
stuff like self vandalism
 
2:18 PM
@Undo Nothing and I'll continue to use my downvotes
 
Once NAAs are deleted, the only thing that contributes to is the user's answer ban. Which... isn't a bad thing.
 
or questions with repeating chars in debug output
 
Self-vandalism.... usually isn't on awesome questions to begin with.
If we're going to 'fix' this, we'll need to 'fix' the meta effect too.
 
The problem is small
but its the same problem as with cv pls
 
Feedback suggestion: Required editing - used for posts that should be edited/ are edited (example: vandalism / bypassing of the post body limit)
 
2:19 PM
it makes us seem like a voting ring to outsiders
 
@Undo Solution: Get rid of meta! Go back to 2008!
 
Again, I'm fine with being a voting ring as long as we aren't causing harm.
 
can't speak for SOCVR, of course, which is probably where this really originates.
 
I can't see it now, but I think it was smoke-reported
 
2:20 PM
@Magisch there were never any spam flags on that
 
and it may even have been me :o
 
@Magisch Someone being a dick vandalizing their posts wastes others time reverting
 
@Undo they were presumably cleared
I raised a custom flag about that
 
@Magisch no, I looked.
 
This user's question and self answer were nuked out of low orbit with spam flags, the answer deleted due to 6 spam flags. In hindsight it might not have been spam after all. Maybe the user just understands poorly how the self Q/A here works. What Im saying is the Q/A was most likely merely bad, not worth the low orbit spam nuke. Would appreciate if a mod could clear them and not make the user lose all of his rep over this. – Magisch Feb 26 at 14:07 helpful
 
2:21 PM
@Magisch Which is literally the only flag ever raised on that post.
 
!!/test In my Swift project I need to use PDF assets rather than tons of PNGs. I know it's possible with Objective-C with the Image+PDF open source project, but I need it without Objective-C bridging. Are there any options I can use?
 
> Would not be caught for title, body, and username.
 
I remember flagging the answer to that as spam
 
Didn't think so
 
oh, the answer got spam nuked
!!/test UIImage+PDF provides a UIImage class category method to render a UIImage from any PDF stored in the application bundle. The motivation for this was to enable the easy use of scaleable vector assets in Swift iOS apps. <a href="https://github.com/RomanBambura/Swift-UIImage-PDF">Swift UIImage+PDF</a>
 
2:22 PM
> Url in title
----------
Title - Position 227-245: https://github.com
 
But it wouldn't have been caught by Smokey either
 
Someone reported it
might even have been me
 
Not sure what happened after my modflag, but I remember it beeing my attempt to clean the situation up
 
The "spammy" answer seems like NAA to me
 
2:24 PM
@Ferrybig well, it links to his own project
 
Well
 
so it's technically undisclosed self-promotion
 
I reported it and it got nuked
hard
and that was a "legit" user
 
What was your expected outcome if you reported it?
 
I later saw that that was a fail by me, hence my modflag
I've been significantly more careful with reports since
 
2:25 PM
So... I'm starting to see a pattern here: SOCVR is having a hard time doing it right.
 
[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in answer: How to share COM ports from hyper-V by Mandy Floost on askubuntu.com
 
sd why
 
@Magisch Which brings me back to:
 
@Magisch [:28829037] Body - Position 489-495: eltima
 
21 mins ago, by Andy
In either case: Slow down when reviewing
 
2:26 PM
Thats what I mean with getting more specific guidelines
sometimes we are a bit ... harsh with nuking posts over there
not sure if unsavory self promotion is worthy of a nuke from orbit always
 
I honestly have no problem with that being 6-flag nuked
 
@SmokeDetector Seems false to me, didn't check for disclosure
 
@Ferrybig That user has another, proper post
f imo
 
sd f
 
@Undo [:28829052] That message is not a report.
 
2:28 PM
@SmokeDetector f
 
Mod-nuked, though.
 
great, now I get to learn another new name
 
Well, im going home now (currently at work)
See y'all this evening
 
@Ferrybig Yeah I'm mixed on those Eltima posts - I used their products years ago and a few are fairly good / unique so I could imagine others recommending them.
 
in SOCVR Room Meetings on Stack Overflow Chat, 2 days ago, by gunr2171
> Are we okay with having a lot of members being privileged Smokey users? Should only RO be privileged in SOCVR and let members be privileged in Charcoal HQ if they really want to?
maybe this isn't a bad idea
Or at least seriously prune the users list
 
2:29 PM
We had a long talk about that in the meeting
the outcome was we are okay with that
 
in SOCVR Room Meetings on Stack Overflow Chat, 2 days ago, by Undo
No, and this isn't really something for SOCVR to worry about.
Not really SOCVR's decision
 
Hmm... one thing that I did notice is there were a lot of fps on SO today. Maybe we should try to reduce those.
 
ultimately, we're the ones that Shog is going to ping when people abuse this, so... it's our responsibility. I have no problems wielding authority to meet that responsibility.
@hichris123 More than usual, yeah
 
In the current climate of socvr
a !!/report equals almost instant destruction
 
@Magisch Unless the post author is Undo
 
2:32 PM
So that is quite a bit of power you wield there
Anyways, bb in 1 hour or so
 
We could disable some reasons for SO, such as link-at-end-of-answer.
 
Is mostly the reflex votes that are annoying, how many people would notice it if we use a fake stackoverflow site that looks real to see how many people are going to flag it
 
@hichris123 User is not blacklisted (6072079 on stackoverflow.com).
 
@Ferrybig nah, just use the real one and I can decline flags as they come in
If anyone has a sufficiently spammy-looking false positive handy on SO, we can run a little test
 
2:34 PM
@Marshmallow Yeah... the annoying thing is half of those are tps and half are fps.
 
If we do it enough times, they will get a scary warning if they try to flag again, :D
 
well okay then. Drat.
So... yeah. Maybe we do have a problem here.
 
@Marshmallow Looks like link at end of answer isn't too bad actually... metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/….
(and the two posts marked as fps today were someone mass-spamming questions)
 
2:39 PM
Full picture, including NAAs: metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/…
 
@Undo Can you share how many flags came in?
 
Not really
other than that it was > -1
 
@Undo MS PR. Would have been in yesterday, had I had a decent net connection.
 
I had it in on my screen at -4 when deleted, although I'd downvoted because it generally sucked so somewhere between -1 < -3
 
@ArtOfCode Oh nice, thanks
 
2:42 PM
@hichris123 This one has two TPs, but it's someone posting a link to an open source library that does things like the OP wants. metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/24017
So I question the accuracy of feedback on those.
 
yeah... :/
But then there's posts like metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/24080
 
@Marshmallow That's more NAA than spam, without even reading the question.
 
The repeating characters in body is the category that has the worst feedback
 
also, Marshmallow == 404?
 
@ArtOfCode Yeah
I recognize the uid :P
 
2:44 PM
Good ol' Slim, yes.
 
But if they get nuked indiscriminately, NAAs and spam alike, then it's better not to report.
 
I'm concerned about this:
in SO Close Vote Reviewers on Stack Overflow Chat, 6 mins ago, by Petter Friberg
@Undo No spam flag, but you made us close vote the question....
 
@ArtOfCode Click on the profile, click to parent site, and check the github name
 
okay, here's a thought: What if we took away only manual reporting from SOCVR?
 
If things that shouldn't be getting spam-nuked are getting spam-nuked because of manual reports and SOCVR's reaction to that, then we and SOCVR have a problem.
 
2:45 PM
@Andy It wasn't a good question though...
 
@Ferrybig click overload
 
NormalHuman, Sally, 404, Marshmallow never changes the github username
 
or considering the site, clickoverflow.
 
@ArtOfCode How are you running MS without getting errors about UTF8 stuff?
 
@Undo It doesn't seem like there are too many false reports.
 
2:47 PM
@Undo EC2
Don't ask me how it works, but it works
 
well okay then
 
How about SOCVR => unwanted reasons => link at end, and maybe some others where NAA and spam get mixed up. They'd be still reviewed over here.
 
Next time run git add -p on db/schema.rb and don't add the charset changes.
 
@hichris123 But "made us close vote"? That implies they are flagging things that pop up and not looking at the posts at all
 
I think that was just a poor choice of words...
 
2:48 PM
@Undo Sure. I didn't actually notice that happened, I just ran rails db:schema:dump to update it and threw it at git.
 
No you are not interpreting it correctly.
 
@Marshmallow I think that would be a good idea.
 
@Marshmallow Here's one: How about we exclude manually reported posts from SOCVR?
Or at least exclude manually reported posts reported in SOCVR from being posted there.
 
They are posted anyway, everyone sees the link in the report.
So I don't see what this achieves.
 
@Andy If a answer comes in from smokey, with link only, that will make us look at the question, if question is request of off-site resource we will CV it (this is what I meant)
 
2:50 PM
@Marshmallow But not in the Smokey format which apparently elicits blind flagging.
 
I don't know. If people want to tell others in the same room: "here's spam, go flag", they can always do that.
Except we won't even have record of it happening.
 
How about we try some education as well? Someone should drop over to SOCVR and simply say "don't blindly flag Smokey reports or you can't have nice things".
 
Here's what I think the problem is: Smokey has become too good, and people are relying on its judgement too much.
4
 
That.
 
Damn bots
Kill them all
 
2:52 PM
in SO Close Vote Reviewers on Stack Overflow Chat, 8 secs ago, by Undo
Don't blindly flag Smokey reports or you can't have nice things.
there
 
It's good, but it's not good enough to go blind flagging. Yet.
 
@PetterFriberg Thanks for the clarification
 
There are some reason/site/rep combinations that I'd be comfortable with people blind-flagging, but not all of them, and definitely not manual reports.
 
When I reviewed manual reports in the Great Review Sprint, I was reviewing false positive on ~20% of reports. 1 in 5 reports being incorrect is well over the acceptable threshold. In fact, people blindly flagging those are actually over the threshold where I'd seriously consider taking mod action to stop them.
 
@ArtOfCode What was the time distribution on those, though?
 
2:56 PM
in SO Close Vote Reviewers on Stack Overflow Chat, 21 secs ago, by DavidG
I wonder if there's any way to make Smokey do audits...
 
@Undo shrug
@Ferrybig Yeah, I've been wondering that for a while. Metasmoke is a great tool, I'm sure we could bend it to that somehow.
 
Sometime I need to pull data on the overall t/f ratios by week or something
 
sd f
 
@hichris123 User is not blacklisted.
 
3:08 PM
@Marshmallow I was one of the people that sd k ed that
the site if you go through with it looks quite shady
 
You mean promisekit.org looks shady?
 
Yes
 
I... can't say I agree
 
link only is bad
link only to a shady website is worse
when you then also dont have any decent posts or very few others ... that sets off my red flags
 
3:12 PM
Are you seeing the same website as I am?
 
@Undo did you deploy that PR and something's broken, or was it just a merge?
 
@ArtOfCode Haven't deployed yet, testing stuff
You broke a few tests :p
 
@Undo I'm good at that
 
That looks less shady then with css errors
@ my workplace it was a scrolldown corporate thing with broken formatting
I remember that one because our kaspersky thing screamed in protest
btw @Undo That "Audit you did
how many flags did that get?
 
more than -1
 
3:15 PM
@Magisch abs(flags) > -1
mod agreement.
 
What does that mean?
more then -1 could be 0
 
It's data that can't be shared.
Comes under the moderator agreement.
 
Ahh
The moderator NDA
curious that how many flags a post has falls under that
 
I often see mods mention how many flags something had when they clear it though
 
3:17 PM
@Magisch They... technically shouldn't.
 
It's not a lose-your-diamond thing, but when you've been on the team for less than a month you're a little more careful than you otherwise would be.
@ArtOfCode actually, reading the agreement, it says "PII"
 
I understand
Anyways
Maybe we need some more strict guidelines on how to use smokey
 
@Undo Heh, been a while since I saw it.
@Magisch Maybe we do...
 
Maybe we need to take it out of SOCVR for a week or two, and 'reset' things a little
 
Or, do the same as with the Tavern - > 5 min delay
 
3:19 PM
Does SOCVR only get SO posts, or everything?
 
So stuff can be dismissed as f or n before being posted.
 
@ArtOfCode deployed
@ArtOfCode Only SO
 
nice
 
I'd wager that the SOCVR room owners definately do care if they look like a voting ring though
we get enough crap as is for the cv-pls
 
@Marshmallow that actually sounds like a good idea
 
3:21 PM
@SmokeDetector f
 
It was @hichris123 that implemented that delay for the Tavern, it's somewhat nontrivial.
 
the "repeating characters in body" is a quite heavy source of sd f in so
often people use long single char chains as debug output
 
We do try to avoid it by comparing the number of characters to length of posts. Maybe not trying hard enough.
Why not just limit that reason to posts under 200 characters, for example? Still catches self-vandalism, but not other stuff.
 
@Marshmallow Sounds sane
Maybe disable it completely if the post has code blocks anywhere.
 
You should check who spammed flag, my feeling is that it was not privileged user. you don't have a problem of people reporting post's incorrectly, if you have something, you have people flagging incorrectly the result of smokey.... and that I guess can happen in any room, even if a user is in this room.
 
3:23 PM
@Undo when you've got a few, that new admin tool could do with pagination. I couldn't figure it out. No rush, though.
 
@ArtOfCode you mean the one with eight records? :P
 
@Undo So far.
 
Yeah, true
Pagination wouldn't be too hard there
 
that's why no rush
Copying the format from the posts index didn't work.
 
@ArtOfCode that was one of three by this user
promoting the library
his company makes
without proper disclosure. madara nuked him and all 3 of his posts were destroyed
@ferry 's and my sd k happened after the third post
tuna sd f d them as they came in
 
3:28 PM
Oh right. The user is still there, the posts are gone. Spam, then.
@Magisch while you're here, what was your thinking here?
 
If that was the 2 before that that I sd k ed
that was user error
ferry pointed it out to me afterwards
 
sd f
 
@ArtOfCode Markus Hyett is Product Manager at Arachnys, the company that makes the library he linked to 3 times in a row :p
 
Fair enough. Do try to ping one of us if you get it wrong (probably me), so that I don't look at the logs and wonder whether you're sane :)
sd n
 
3:31 PM
@Marshmallow It wouldn't be hard, but I'm not sure SO posts get quick feedback in here (the CVR is fairly quick on that, of course). And if there's no quick feedback, it doesn't really matter.
 
!!/pull
 
Restart: API quota is 3626.
 
@hichris123 Then I think adding metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/reason/73 to SOCVR / unwanted reasons is the way to go.
 
Yeah, probably.
 
@Marshmallow concur
 
3:40 PM
@Undo that email I sent you a couple days ago? Just identified another, by the looks - metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/admin/invalidated
 
@ArtOfCode eh, thanks
We need an admin page that shows all of a single user's feedback
 
on it
 
@ArtOfCode Is that me? (please dont be me)
 
This is exactly why I built that tool :)
@Magisch nope
 
@Magisch we can't exactly run around saying who it isn't
 
3:42 PM
but again I can't keep saying who it's not
 
well
if it ever is me, you can say in public
 
We probably need to establish what we should do for people we identify, actually. It'd be good to be consistent.
 
As long as people aren't flagging incorrectly I'm not sure it's a big deal. If someone mistakenly marks a tp as fp or fp as tp, that doesn't matter. But if they're flagging something as spam that isn't spam...
 
@hichris123 The only real harm is that it messes with our stats
 
I'm not overly worried about people reviewing reports wrong, but if they flag the same as they review then it's worth a mod looking into their flags.
 
3:46 PM
At which point... maybe the policy should be "ping them and tell them how to mark feedback" followed by "just flag one of their posts and leave it"
 
@ArtOfCode will do next time, :)
 
Maybe most people dont realise how powerful smokey is
 
@Undo Probably worth talking to a mod in TL, so we can explain if they don't get it
 
@Magisch I don't think it's really that powerful, tbh
 
!!/pull
 
3:49 PM
@Marshmallow CI build is still pending, wait until the build has finished and then pull again.
 
@Undo I think it is
you saw what happened when you did an audit
 
I usually skip Smokey messages that I think are borderline
 
imagine that when you and tuna aren't around to clear up
 
@Magisch Yeah, but it wasn't anywhere close to nuking something valid.
 
@Marshmallow :P
 
3:51 PM
[ SmokeDetector ] Link at end of answer: Need a TV/Movie API with associated trailers by user3498471 on stackoverflow.com
 
!!/pull
 
Because nobody has maliciously tried nuking something valid
 
Ping me if you ever see something obviously valid get six-flag nuked
 
[ SmokeDetector ] SmokeDetector started at rev 5e99200 (hichris1234: Tighten bad keyword with email on SO) (running on Raspberry Pi)
Restart: API quota is 3485.
 
@Magisch so let's cross that bridge when we come to it
 
3:52 PM
fair enough
 
Can we burn that bridge then?
 
@SmokeDetector So that's the last report of that kind for SOCVR. :)
 
Because I haven't lit anything on fire in a few days
 
coupled with the latest SD report
that sounds like excessive self promotion
guy has 2 posts. one is a token question mentioning his website. The other is outright promotion (with disclosure though)
 
3:53 PM
@SmokeDetector fp-
 
@Andy I'm still tempted to remove manual reporting from SOCVR
let them come here or the Tavern if they really want to manually report something
At least put a bit of a barrier there
 
sd ignore-
 

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