@Mσᶎ Yes, other SE sites edit spam also. Just makes sense. If someone is super keen to investigate spam they can still look at the old version. My triumph yesterday was to use code in one branch that I added in the other branch. I think can feel a merge coming on ...

@andy256 I dunno that it's spam, I didn't click the link. I suspect it's just low-value student work.

I'm trying to shift our team away from Visual Source Safe (DO NOT MERGE!) to git "whaddayamean you didn't want a branch. Branches are what git does".

@Mσᶎ Uh, I didn't even look at it. I had to override my personal spam filter to look at it now. Yep, I got my previous workplace to switch from cringe SCCS to Hg. The French revolution had nothing on that!

What gets me is that I'm over 40, and I work with younger people who are more set in their ways. Admittedly I did de3cide to write a new server project in C++ rather than Go, but that's because if someone other than me has to work on it at least other people in the office are C/C++ programmers. I suspect only the recent graduate has heard of Go...

Holy wars are fun. The worst part is when were effectively forced into "lets do all of them", which sounds like a management stuff-up but it's actually the reality of releasing a phone app these days. You "have to" support android and iOS Jjava and Objective C), but for business apps Windows and Blackberry have a disturbing amount of support... so some of our code is in four languages and counting.

FWIW, TCP/IP to remote embedded hardware via either wifi or cellular data, so 'do it as a web page' really is not going to work.

@Mσᶎ @andy256 please don't edit out spam links. Flag as spam (or "other" if you're not really sure it's spam). You can see my reasoning for why in the answer below in more detail. Note that the reasons I state are endorsed by SE staff as well.

Editing out spam makes it more likely that a) other users won't flag it/vote to delete it, so it's actually likely to stay around longer, and b) does make aggregate spam reporting and trend tracking more difficult. Moderators can search deleted posts for specific urls, which is helpful to see a pattern of abuse. We can't directly search the version history, so although the link is "still there", it's impossible to find via a search.

In this particular case it's dubiously spam, but if it's not harmful, there's no reason to edit it out. Vote to close, flag it if you think it's appropriate.

@nhinkle the problem is that by leaving people to click the link while we wait for it to be deleted we're encouraging the user to keep posting links like that.

Bicycles is not a busy site, 6 spam flags can take several hours.

I'm also suspicious that it's true that "people will not flag a post that contains only the text 'SPAM - DELETE ME'" as spam.

I note that it's been three hours and that spam post is still there, for example.

That's not "quickly" in my book.

@nhinkle I see your point, but think like @Mσᶎ - maybe the middle course is to convert the link to text. Thoughts?

@Mσᶎ I like Android, but will have to start doing the multi-release thing. Sigh. All of my clients are Android or iWhatever, so I'm thinking of a PhoneGap-ish solution, maybe MoSync. But not anything using the HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript mish-mash or anything supported by Adobe.

@andy256 I run CyanogenMod on my phone, and I'm at the stage now where I won't buy a phone that can't run CM. My issue today is that I really, really want a particular BLE accessory... and Android has only just got proper support for BLE. I fear my next phone will be expensive.

@andy256 converting it to text breaks the url: search parameter, so I'd still argue against that.

It's just "write this in ObjectiveC. Now rewrite it in Java. Now rewrite it in C#. And we want a web version". The little differences between models/patterns on those platforms fade to nothing compared to the giant gulfs between the low-level APIs we're using.

@nhinkle It would be simpler to just ban that domain the way google and LMGTFY have been banned from comments.

@Mσᶎ the sites do have spam blacklists, and the way domains end up on them is somebody digs through some history using the url: search parameter and says, "ah, this one shows up a lot, we should add it to the black list".

so sure "someone" could just say "I saw this spam, and there is no valid use for that domain in a question, so blacklisted it is".

There are list size/load issues, I realise, but that's not my problem :)

I would love to have that functionality, but unfortunately the blacklist can only be edited by SE employees, and they're not keen on adding every little thing to it.

Also, these days there's a lot of magic algorithm stuff going on that looks at posts that've been spam flagged, users destroyed and marked as spammers, etc. and does some sort of crazy heuristics to block spam. It's actually helped a lot. They don't tell us much about how it works, but it may depend on actually seeing the links. IDK.

I've been calling for better spam handling systems for years, and would love it if people could just edit out the spam and let things resolve themselves semi-automatically, but unfortunately, due to the way things work, it's generally best to leave the links in place. It doesn't really do any harm, as long as the link isn't actively harmful (i.e. malware, browser hijacking, NSFW, etc.)

Anyways... you were talking about Visual Sourcesafe?

At work we have a bunch of perl scripts that do all sorts of poorly documented important tasks. "Source control" is a folder called "old" on the network.

So I came in and was horrified, and asked if we could set up some sort of source control.

So my mentor's like "oh yeah, sure! The electrical engineering guys, they've got something they use, you can get on their system!"

And so now I'm using Visual Sourcesafe for perl scripts and it's awful.

@nhinkle I'd say "VSS or perl", but I wouldn't want you to have think about which is worse.

@Mσᶎ I should just revolt, and install git and python on my machine

@nhinkle That's what I've done. For quite a while I was running git locally and VSS to the network instead of pushes. It worked a lot better than trying to use VSS, although the readonly files problem was still a PITA (our "lead developer" == biggest luddite solves that by keeping all the files checked out all the time. And deals with the ugliness of merging by making other people do it (or just checking in his changes without merging at all)

Right now the iOS dev is using a paid GitHub subscription, the Android code is in that too but also in a local Git repo (our new NAS comes with git!), my server-side code and website is in the NAS git repo, the legacy code is at best in VSS.

That sounds incredibly disorganized and frustrating

@Mσᶎ Chaos = situation normal. Luddite = everyone except me N you. Life ... ugh! Trillion: engage the improbability drive!

@andy256 I suggest that "will only use VSS, refuses to use anything newer" justifiably earns that tag. Mind you, I've also worked with someone who claimed simultaneously that "I've read and understand the SVN manual" and "SVN is too confusing and half the functions don't work", despite the other developers and some of the testers managing to use it without problems.

The scary thing is that when I worked in a bike shop we didn't have these issues. The personality conflicts and stupid arguments weren't there. We didn't even have what-sort-of-tea arguments.

Perhaps because the shop only hired decent people. Hmm. Even though, just like most software teams, half of us had truly awesomely lousy interpersonal skills.

@Mσᶎ I find the "SVN is too confusing" view interesting. For someone moving to whole-system version control from a file-at-a-time system, it's a big step. A whole new way of thinking. If a person limits their view of what could be by what currently is then life is very constrained.

:17140661

I can hear an interrupt coming. Bye!

For someone used to git and Hg it's quite hard to come back to

bye!

Power went out for 10 min yesterday, and there was another bump today. Lots of thunderstorms too. It's been crazy!

I should try my hand at lightning photography sometime. There's been lots of material.

coming back to "SVN can be hard" from explaining git branching strategies in the context of continuous integration and automated system testing is a bit harsh on the brain matter :)

@nhinkle :) I'd like to see surge protector photography taken much more seriously. When those things suck up hits they can be quite dramatic.

@Mσᶎ I've been fortunate enough not to witness that personally.

I've been woken up in the past by a brilliant flash as the local lines did an exciting thing.

As you might hope, the damage was limited to having to buy a new surge arrestor. It made me happy I'd bought a separate one rather than relying on my UPS.

Yesterday when the 10 min outage hit, all the UPSes started beeping. And they're each a slightly different pitch, and all start at slightly different times, until the entire building is singing a sad song of dying power. Then slowly they turn off until just a few lone UPSes keep beeping, proud of their low-power-consumption users.

@nhinkle the sad, slow songs of the UPS's.

I'd get a UPS for my home computers except I'm usually on my laptop anyways.

I have a cheap, shitty 500VA-is UPS at home that sits on a 100AH AGM battery. The 7AH one that goes in the box is a joke, but I can run for an hour or so with no power. Now that we're back in Sydney it's apparently decorative, but in Melbourne I used it a few times.

I run big monitors (and power the modem off the UPS) so laptops bug me.

When I'm busy coding I hop on my desktop with 3 screens, but for lazily browsing the internet, the laptop suffices.

@nhinkle yeah. For me the laptop is "in bed watching TV or playing Bloons TD" .

It's handy for school reports. People come over to work on projects and say "haha wtf why do you have so many screens". Then I pull up my paper on one screen, a few excel windows on another, a browser on the third, and they go :O

annoyingly, the laptop can boot to firefox faster than it can unhibernate to the same point. Even though it has an SSD.

That's rather odd

@nhinkle My gf was all "WTF 30" monitor so $$$$" then she used it for a week with CAD and changed her mind. When it died she was like "replace it. NOW. Buy one. Buy a new one. Why isn't the new one here. This little screen sucks. When is the new monitor arriving".

@nhinkle yeah, I suspect it's having 6GB of RAM that does it. Or something. I played with it for a bit then gave up.

It took me way too long to parse the sequence of quotation marks to realize that was a 30" monitor, not "WTF 30" being some idiom I didn't know.

:)

I have one of those 27" WQHD IPS korean screens. It was cheap and it's pretty decent. And a couple 21" dells in portrait on the sides.

I am totally hanging out for decent side hi res monitors to arrive. I'd like to go from 30" + 20" to 50", but not if it means dropping resolution.

I had 3 of those for a while, 2560x1440 or so, but 1440 is not wide enough to be useful. So I went back to 30"+20" . My other 20" died, but they're expensive to replace so after discussion we decided to wait for the other one to die then buy another 30". All Koren IPS, can't beat the price and I'm not too worried about the colour.

Somewhere I have comparison shots of (1440x2560)x3 in portrait vs (1200+2560+1200)x1600. After a year or so of use, I still think the 30" giant single screen is the way to go. Spanning single windows over multiple monitors gets ugly.

@nhinkle aaand we're at 6 hours and it's still there. But only 26 views. Which suggests that 20 people have looked at it and gone "nah, that's not spam", possibly including some of the close-voters. You appear to be right about that, Nathan.

FWIW, I didn't flag that one as spam. I flagged it as "other" and suggested deletion, but it's not really blatant spam. It's more somebody who's misguided about what's on topic for the site.

My point was more that in general, editing out spam links is not recommended.

Best workplace argument: "you were looking accusing" "how can you see my eyes through my spectacles" "now you're doing it again"

I just got told off for saying they're both "clearly not members of a reality-based community" :0

It's great being employed to drive my boss insane. That is my job, right?

@nhinkle in this case, "on hold" questions will stay around so by not editing the link out we give the asker what they want. It's only deletion that actually solves the problem, either the link or the question.

@Mσᶎ hence why I flagged it as other saying "should be deleted".

@nhinkle ok, so it's then up to the moderators to delete it manually. Hmm. I note that the "spam" flag doesn't require commercial, just advertisement. I'm assuming specifically to cover cases like this.

also, this is amusing: arstechnica.com/security/2014/08/… Routers with a limited amount of memory for BGP tables and it's full. Ooops.

@Mσᶎ - in fairness, reality-based communities tend not to live up to expectation

@PeteH Maybe my expectations are lower... I've been exposed to some less than ideal things over the years, and mostly from people who explicitly look at reality and say "not for me".

But my observation is more of a snide remark about their use of imagination over observation.

@Mσᶎ yeah.....unfortunately its the same the world over. I could join in but can't offer anything new.

I do enjoy coworkers who have completely random discussions though. it beats their usual "heated discussions" about design issues. Going off onto the look in someone's eye and whether it's appropriate for me to listen to Abba while they're doing so is a pleasant change.

The thing that annoyed me most was peoples' unwillingness (inability?) to even think about exploring better solutions, rather than doing the first thing that comes into their head.

I think you should not only listen to Abba, but sing it out loud

@PeteH NZ politics has just had a burst of excitement, a dump of dirty political dealings like your MP expenses scandal. Prime Minister using the secret police to dig up dirt on the opposition then telling a pet scumblogger exactly how to freedom-of-information it. "justice" minister getting a prisoner transferred across the country as a favour to a friend. The list goes on, and ranges from "dirtier than usual politics" to outright illegality.

So that's a bit exciting. I'm even more tempted to visit so I can vote in a month or so.

@Mσᶎ we're in the wrong business. Never met a poor politician.

but maybe its a conscience thing

@PeteH I know quite a few. But then, I hang out with The Greens and their ilk...

@Mσᶎ do the greens get elected over there?

whose version of rorting allowances is to use their "X full time equivalent staff" by employing part timers on a living wage who are expected to also do voluntary work.

NZ has proportional representation (unicameral), Australia has weird systems for the senate (multi-member preferential) that have a similar effect. Reading about our federal senate may well make you laugh out loud/

But yeah, NZ has ~8 Green MPs out of 120, Australia has I think one lower house one (federal) out of 600-odd (10-ish lower houses, we have states) and probably 10 or so upper house ones across 7-ish upper houses (don't ask, just don't ask).

I do wonder how clean they'd be if ever they held sway, though. I think it is largely a human nature thing.

Certainly the "socialist" parties here are these days quite some distance from what I'd call socialist. Most of them, anyhow.

@PeteH you might be surprised. The Greens in NZ have stayed remarkably clean, and their problem is more electing dippy flakes from time to time. In Australia it seems to be similar. The main thing is that candidates are locally selected and there's internal party democracy. Which distinguishes it from the soviet-style "managed democracy with leadership override" practiced by the other parties.

@PeteH Hahaha. In NZ Labour has a hard right faction who appear to have decided that if they lose the current election and focus on getting "their" MPs elected in the debacle, they can regain their dominant position within the party. It is very sad to watch.

Whereas Labour in Australia don't have that problem, their "left" faction is purely decorative insofar as it is not neoliberal. They're also deep brown almost to a member, which has led to a number of unions breaking away and either not supporting them, or outright supporting The Greens.

@Mσᶎ yes the larger parties here have adopted a central stance too. I find it very off-putting, I like to think that I vote for a person not a party. Albeit a person with similar views....

I had a lot of trouble after Iraq, when all of the main parties here had a pro-war policy.

I felt I couldn't support anyone on that basis.

@PeteH I vaguely watch your politics and I did not get that impression. I thought they had clustered around a "not quite as far right as the USA" position? There's no "maybe we shouldn't invade other countries, fund terrorists and commit war crimes" side to match the "yeah baby, bring it on" side (just to pick one issue)

I mean socially you have "screw the poor", "oh, did we not say we were going to screw the poor" (actually you said you wouldn't), and "historically we don't screw the poor but we're looking for a third way".

A lot of it here was either outright pro, or couched in support for the military - "we shouldn't be in Iraq, but since we are, we should support the military"

which of course is a convenient position

When I asked my Conservative candidate, he said "we supported the was at the time, but if we'd known then what we know now" which was also very convenient

@PeteH "we shouldn't be selling arms to genocidal dictators, but since we are..."?

@PeteH at the time they were "how dare you doubt the US president just because there are experts contradicting him", which was also very convenient.

We had very much the same issue, and we don't even have an arms industry to suuport.

@Mσᶎ Well yes exactly. We are seeing a lot of Ukraine at the moment (not to mention Gaza) and we are responsible a lot of it by arming them

@Mσᶎ the trouble is, the older I get the more depressing it gets.

Did you ever hear of Tony Benn?

He was very principled, in terms of politics he was a big name, he often botyh spoke and voted against his party (Labour) if he felt it went against his principles.

He also wrote copiously. (I'd highly recommend.) I remember him saying that as he got older, he sometimes felt he could not get up some days, he was so depressed....just at world affairs

He was an ex cabinet minister. At one time, he would have had some influence

@PeteH yes. Have read about some of his stuff. Oz has Bob Brown (greens leader/founder) and a few interesting Labor (yes, that's how they spell it) pollies, but the ones they hold up tend to be complex characters.

@Mσᶎ I had a brain fault when I saw your msg :

:17140661. The only thing I decided was that it'is the 1099768th prime number.

@PeteH Turns out I lied (well mis-remembered) - we require learner drivers to get 120 hours, not 200. I haven't had time to dig out the accident stats though.

@andy256 ??

ok, that was weird. Gary.Ray came along and reverted the edit on the survey question so the link was visible, waited 10 minutes, then deleted the question.

@Mσᶎ Happy not to be a mod?

@andy256 that'd be @Mσƌ then ;-)

It's funny, I always thought that in life there are poachers and there are gamekeepers. I always felt more comfortable poaching.....

Ugh.

Send all flag for great justice!

close vote cast

@Mσᶎ It was actually automatically deleted. Questions are auto-deleted if they are marked as spam six times.

@Mσᶎ You may not have seen it, but Gary.Ray left a comment suggesting this post regarding why we shouldn't edit out spam links: meta.superuser.com/questions/3574/…

Aaaand we've come full circle :)

@nhinkle I tell you what, I'm now intrigued what the guys survey was in the first place

@PeteH you'll have to find a 10k'er to dig it up!

he didn't even post a link

kind of like when people ask a question and have a title of "A quick question about my bike...."

@whatsisname not sure which is worse, that or the guy who posts the question saying "what tools do I need to maintain my bike?". I mean, if someone has a problem then I suspect most of us will try to help. If someone can't be arsed searching on Google, that's slightly different.

yeah

@jimirings You might not have seen it, but I made a comment suggesting that we do. The "you can't post that link here" question stayed up for 12 hours.

And as you saw, the user who posted that came straight back and posted it again whenh it was deleted.

I suspect my comment tipped him or someone else into marking it as spam rather than just closing it.

@PeteH @Mσƌ - lol! Enjoyed that :-)

@PeteH hence the banning of "let me google that for you", the ruder alternative to a google link (also banned)

I had "I'm not your google b!tch" INYGB.com registered and set up the same way for a while. But LMGTFY is a little more polite :)

@Mσᶎ I still think that if it had been "real spam" it would've been gone much faster.