That's just the thing?. This has blown way out of proportions. I'm sad to hear that Iain was offended (and I had no idea), but still.. This the most active room on the SX and we're having a place to vent. Get over it, we're sysadmins..!
In general, my guidance would be: take things down a level or two. You don't need to cut things back entirely, but just be a bit more mindful of things.
actual-factual-case-in-point, the site electrician at my last job got an HR reprimand because he asked his assistant if he'd "seen the new dikes" within earshot of the HR lady. He was talking about diagonal wire cutters -> http://www.google.com/products/catalog?client=safari&rls=en&q=diagonal+cutters&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=16398333904075057810&sa=X&ei=71HqTur_McbZ0QHg7-3mCQ&ved=0CHkQ8wIwAg#ps-sellers
@RebeccaChernoff The fact of the matter is that this room is under a microscope. We've had more diamonds in here this afternoon than most rooms have visitors in a week. There are diamonds from other sites weighing in on our meta with their thoughts about a community that they plain don't participate in and we're a little upset by it. I hope you can understand our frustration.
@RebeccaChernoff Don't take this the wrong way, but you're just the most recent in what has become a long line of people telling us to take it down a notch or two today. That makes your point no less correct. But a lot of people have felt the sudden need to do so today; and it just seems like they've all picked today to tell us what they really think.
Yeah, @RebeccaChernoff We certainly appreciate your input. I hope you don't think that we're attacking your ideas, it's just not the first time we've heard them today. We've had plenty of time to refine our response rate :D
That's basically what I'm saying though. Things got blown out of proportion. We all just need to take a step back, breathe, and things will work out. </happy, warm, fuzzy thoughts>
@RebeccaChernoff I think that we're all fine with that. We're just afraid that all of the diamonds from other sites are going to try and police us and that's the absolute last thing that we want.
Most us us are on the front page of all-time rep. We love this community. We know how it works. We don't want someone from Cooking, or Drupal telling us how to conduct ourselves.
I'm not here to shut things down. I'm not laying down banhammers or anything like that. I want everyone happy, and if there's problems, I want to jump in and see what I can do to help resolve things so everyone's happy.
Chopper3 for giving up his diamond, Iain for quitting, and all of us for unknowningly contributing to people quitting when we did not want to drive them off
@RebeccaChernoff <milton voice>I was told there would be insects. And now there are no insects. and I am very hungry. And if you don't bring me insects I will sleep on your stapler.</milton voice>
(ProTip: When you let your reptiles out to play on the desk look around before you grab for a stapler. They get very bitey when you grab their heads and pick them up)
Here's the thing: 1) Funny pictures: Some people get annoyed with "flag all the" meme we have here, but seriously - even SX employees have a private room where they link lolcats/memes all day long (re: last video podcast at the SO blog) 2) Scaring off new users: Couldn't we just get a popup for new users when they enter this room? "We're not live support, so please ask your question at the main site. Don't be scared if someone is having a steam vent inside the chat room, we're just sysadmins and we'd love to get more users to the room"
Non-admins cant just read the transcript and point us out as bad guys.. you wouldn't go inside a biker pub and then write a news article about how foul their mouths were
@pauska Off site mod here (please don't eat me!) - one thing you could do is pin that message in the star queue - you see those hollow stars? They take precedence over your normal normal stars. So if you write a nice message you could get a friendly blue person to pin it.
@pauska I think (though I don't want to speak for him) that @iain is generally happy but wants to see us police ourselves a bit more, like we do with on-site snark
@MarkM, I think Iain's point is that we should be more cognizant of what other people think and be more aware of what it might look like to other people
@voretaq7 I feel that there's a difference between snark (price of admission, I think) and being an actual hostile environment to people we want to include. I'm essentially new to Chat as of today though, so I don't know enough of the backstory or the normal tenor. I'm running with the "women in tech" mention, and my personal attempts to become more aware of "privilege".
I'm just very uncomfortable with all of the blue in here. Don't get me wrong, everyone with a diamond on here at the moment is great, but studiohack and someone else were in here this morning dropping judgement left and right for no apparent reason.
@GraceNote definitely not a solution at all - just a temporary reminder / "welcome, really, we won't bite (hard enough to draw blood)" banner while we figure out how to get everything cleaned up...
@MarkM Well, I heard it voiced earlier so I'll at least address some concern - we're not going to do something like station some off-site moderator or two to keep a vigil on this room. It's not our intent.
@pauska We're not good at that? I've been impressed with how the comic routine usually stops right quick and people get serious and start talking legit shop.
So hey - to be sysadmin related : anyone ever use Terremark cloud provider or similar? I've never done such a thing myself, and am starting to play with it for work.
The preferable course of action is pretty much what Iain was calling for - if things have to be done, it shouldn't require even a Server Fault moderator.
The problem is that he posted on meta, disappeared, chopper quit, and everything spiraled out of control and now there's as much blue in here as there is black.
@pauska I think it works pretty well. Just about the whole room jumped on the discussion re: crontab prime-number interval modulus timing the other day.
A large part of it is that a couple of off-site mods came in here guns blazing and turned it into a huge mess while we were working it out within the community.
It seems like this whole situation is nearly like a person walking into a nudist colony, and then staggering out whistling for the police and screaming THERE ARE NAKED PEOPLE IN THERE!! - Well duh - that's the culture. Like it or leave it.
@MarkM I think a lot of the memes we post are toe-to-the-line. The boobs memes are IMHO over it -- They don't have to go away, but they have to reduce...
And yet at the same time, I realize that we do tend to get into areas that most of society has decided to call profane. So... perhaps we should figure out specific lines of moderation.
@WesleyDavid Across the street from one of our offices yesterday there was a guy who took all his clothes off (34F outside) and stood in front of the local baptist church in the crucifix position. Thankfully it wasn't one of OUR clients and cops sent him on his way instead of locking him up.
@WesleyDavid Self-moderation was working well I thought. I never saw anyone get excessive. Besides, if you want to go farther, there's always The Other Place.
@RebeccaChernoff I really disagree with mods from other sites SEs being mods in all chats. I can see it on beta sites where traffic and number of mods are low. But on SF there's really not a whole lot of need for external mods in here. If mod flags in chat go into a similar queue as main flags, this would have been a non issue
I don't think the Bridge would be where it is if the concept of profanity were entirely disdained (though I'll admit you guys make us look like angels at times)
I hate to be butting in, considering I'm blue (and technically apparently I've been in here since yesterday...) but whilst we're all at it this feature request on MSO is about graded chat flags (chat flags stay on current SE site initially and only appear to all mods when nobody acts on it). Might ba an interesting solution to the all-mods "problem".
Honestly, Studiohack and the other guy (anyone remember his name) came in here and made things 10 times worse. You guys keep telling us that you'll back off and let us handle it ourselves, but that's exactly what we were doing. The added attention caused some off-site mods to throw their two cents where it didn't belong and it resulted in us not even getting a chance to police ourselves and respond to iain's out-of-the-blue meta post.
I have every reason to believe that we would have had a constructive (albeit heated) discussion about how to handle Iain's points on his MSF posts. Two blues from outside came in not understanding how we communicate daily with each other and started banning people.
Oh hey, apparently some of my chat got flagged as spam/offensive. It's a good job I knew what was flagged so I know what to do whatever it was again. Oh wait... I don't know what was flagged. Why would I?
@GraceNote So its going to look better if 100% of the regular SF chat people replies with "I agree"? Isnt it someone at SX's job to respond to feature requests?
Oh stop your whining
forgot that kyle banned me from chat for 24 hours?...
I've said before I get a lot of flags that I ignore because I don't feel that coming from this room's culture I'm qualified to judge another room's comments
@voretaq7 My point was more that they jumped in the middle of a discussion that they didn't understand. Most of us talk daily. If there's an issue we should be given a chance to sort it out ourselves, not have two people we've never seen before start banning regulars (and letting the one real problem starter go free)
Ok, ok fine y'all. Tell ya what. y'all fork over $5 for every half hour you want to be banned. Y'all can duke out who gets suspended from chat for the longest, and I'll go buy myself something fancy.
@MarkM Then go ask yourself why nobody solved the problem until someone had to put up a meta post, people started monitoring and flagging and moderators from other sites came and finally did something about it?
@MarkM Er. I didn't ban anyone, and I don't think I even spoke in here until right now, so I'm pretty sure I didn't "make it worse". I don't know why you have such a big problem with people commenting
@MichaelMrozek What that translates to is "Someone from within the community should have said something. People from outside should largely not have interfered since they don't know us."
@TomWijsman someone inside the community that chose not to take it up with us directly. That's his prerogative, and I still love the guy, but I think many of us wish it had been brought up as a direct conversation.
I find it hard to take criticism from people like @TomWijsman (n/o), who are never here, but tell us what to do... I find that strange... Why the need for al the morals all of the sudden?
I am sure that the people who have popped in here earlier today to "help us out" with their nice big banhammers - were acting in good faith as they saw best, but that doesn't alter the fact that they've made things worse :-(
If people think there's a problem with this room that's one thing, but having random people jump in who have, as far as I can tell, never visited before jump in and start laying down the banhammer is crazy.
@bartdevos I've got less of a problem with people coming over to to discuss things, to be honest. I might not agree with all they say but I'm not offended by anyone having an opinion.
@MichaelMrozek That is correct. SysAdmin culture at large is rather salty, and when someone precious walks in not expecting that, they can get offended. It's like someone spitting out cold soup and complaining to the chef -- but it was gazpacho.
@pauska I've never seen a site so concerned with "us" vs "them" before. The number of times somebody in here has said something along the lines of "you're not a sysadmin, so shut up" today is astonishing
@MichaelMrozek It's a matter of cultural understanding. There really is a culture to this profession. Much like there is a different culture at many universities, or companies or whatever you can think of. So someone coming into HP and saying ...
@MichaelMrozek That's another cultural thing TBH - but it's more extreme in here today because of the kersplosion of people who (at least in our perception) want to dictate rules of behavior
..."You're too straight laced, you need to lose the suit and tie!" isn't coming at it from the right perspective. That's just who HP is. A guy from HP coming into Googled and saying "You shouldn't let employees walk around in bare feet. It's disrespectful!" is just as off based.
@MichaelMrozek We were in the middle of a heated debate about how to handle Iain's meta post (which was totally out of the blue). Outside mods came in without understanding it and turned it into us vs them. We were sorting it out ourselves. Then @RebeccaChernoff and @GraceNote came in and we all cooled down and discussed it
@MichaelMrozek I don't mean to jump in, but the second you said something about being concerned with "us vs. them" I figured you were from SO and not one of the satellite sites. You might not be indoctrinated into their thinking, but SO in general has a cultural absolutism about them.
@MarkM and others: I apologize for coming in here and telling you guys how to do it, I was sticking my nose where I didn't belong, as I wasn't familiar with the situation.
The problem is that everyone is telling us to sort out these issues that we didnt even know existed until this morning, but no one is giving us a chance to sort them out. Assorted OFF SITE diamonds keep popping in throughout the day and reigniting the shit storm
