Ask Ubuntu General Room

8:31 AM

Why don’t we delete comments automatically after say 48 h? There are questions where I raise dozens of no-longer-needed-flags, especially canonical and HNQ questions are quickly cluttered with useless comments. The cleanup presumably takes considerable amounts of time by flaggers as well as mods – why do we do that?

Videonauth

9:01 AM

@dessert imagine we delete a comment after 48 hours on a question but the OP has not logged in since so maybe a useful question or reminder to the OP will go missing before it is even read.

It is sadly not always the case that an OP always sticks to his machine in hope of a quick answer.

11:08 AM

@Videonauth I think 48 h is a fair amount of time, but a week would also be OK – and that’s plenty of time to read it IMO.

Byte Commander

11:34 AM

I think the harm done by an unnecessary or no longer needed comment laying around longer than required is far less than the harm of a useful comment being removed. Some even comments hold value indefinitely, not just until the OP has read it.

then they are not really comments, but should rather be edits to the post

12:05 PM

@dessert Not always though. Sometimes, for example, I will convert a link-only answer to a comment because it is actually a useful link (for example a relevant youtube video) and having that remain there under the question for ever can be helpful.

By the way, while I really appreciate your raising multiple separate flags for each obsolete comment under a post (it makes my life easier because I can delete all of them from the flag handling interface), it isn't necessary. You can just flag one with a custom flag and ask us to delete the lot. It's really annoying for you to have to wait 5 seconds between flags to flag them all.

So sure, if you have time, flag each of them, but it's absolutely fine if you just flag one and tell us to get rid of the rest.

@terdon oh, that’s good to know, thanks :)

12:35 PM

@dessert Just don't tell the other mods I told you this! :P

3

Ah shit, here's one now!

Hiiii

Actually it's also nice cause sometimes we look at all the comments anyway

whistles innocently as though he hadn't just told a user to make more work for mods

Naw.. I encourage the same

@JourneymanGeek True. Although I admit there are a few users whose comment flags I tend to trust implicitly. I know them well enough to trust that if they say it's obsolete, it's obsolete.

I have few enough flags to trust but verify ;p

12:39 PM

@JourneymanGeek Sure, usually. But if it's one of the users I know and trust, I tend to just glance at the comments and not investigate further. Plus, they're only comments anyway.

Oh hey, there's a nice feature request: allow users to include multiple comments in an obsolete comment flag, and then the mods can delete the lot with a single click.

That would be yes

Oh also folks can sometime miss comments that need further context to make sense

solsTiCe

1:14 PM

hi. so I installed ubuntu a long time ago because I couldn't bare gnome shell or wanted to switch back to kde. I wanted unity. now that unity is gone and that gnome shell is a little better, there is nothing left to hold me back in ubuntu ? isn't it ? so do I go back to archlinux or not ?

Jacob Vlijm

Well, make a pick, not really we can decide for you.

solsTiCe

@JacobVlijm yes. I was expecting someone pointing me to a good reason to stay

1:29 PM

@solsTiCe that's a very different philosophy. Other than canonical's NIH tendencies, Ubuntu is reasonably predictable

Source based distros are very different

So whatever works for you

solsTiCe

archlinux is not that a source based distro. you downloaded binary package like apt does. it's not gentoo or sourcemage or wahtever

you compile from source what is not officialy supported

gnome 18.04 window-manager i3-wm

2:29 PM

@solsTiCe If you’re asking about desktop environments / window managers, which of them can you use with Arch but not with Ubuntu? I mean if that’s the only thing you look at they should be the same, no (just that Arch uses the newest version of it)?

Don’t get me wrong, I recently set up Arch with the i3 window manager on my work laptop and just love it, but if e.g. i3 is what you want, even that is easily set up on Ubuntu:

9

Q: Switching to i3 in 18.04

I installed i3 with sudo apt-get install i3. But if I try to launch it via terminal, it says another window manager is running. In older versions of Ubuntu, there was a round button at the login screen in which we click to select WMs. But in 18.04, there is no such option. How do I launch i3 with...

sudo apt-get install i3

:>

Q: Ubuntu 18.04 - Python3 - dpkg and Hplib

7:01 PM

What do we do with this answer to an existing q which was posted as a new q?

0

I too had problem as referred to in this old article but i couldn't add my solution to it A lot of upgrades didn't terminate of terminated in error. Often the first issue in the log was that a python script could not create a directory "usr/share/hplib/ui5" I looked throug a lot of answers ...

apt package-management python dpkg printing

7:18 PM

@dessert the OP says "but i couldn't add my solution to it" You already asked him in a comment why's that. Maybe just wait until he answers?

@PerlDuck well getting an explanation on the why does not solve the problem, an answer in a question post to a different question breaks with some fairly basic rules of the site…

@dessert True. I just thought the OP might answer something like "I didn't find the your answer button" or similar and we can guide him to that very button on the original question.

true, it would certainly be the best solution if OP could add the answer there himself

Don't take me too serious today. I'm a bit ~~pissed~~ annoyed by some poster here that refuses to explain his actual problem (input and desired output). He keeps using words like like, similar to and such. I hate that!

We should have a filter to immediately flag posts containing the phrases like, similar to, approximately as UNCLEAR.

7:46 PM

@CharlesGreen I was a bit kidding, sorry. "Mr. Green" reminded me of Reservoir Dogs but that was false memory. There's no Mr. Green in that movie.

@PerlDuck hahaha, I like that ;)

Charles Green

8:50 PM

@PerlDuck I'm not sure I saw that movie - I'll have to go back and check.