The Whiteboard

enderland

1:51 AM

fight the good fight @Robert

Robert Harvey

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Why doesn't any of this make sense — Qix 3 hours ago

enderland

I might actually answer a question here again:

5

Q: How to fit a rules engine in a microservice architecture?

... when it requires lots of input data? Current situation We are implementing (and now maintaining) an online shopping web application in a microservice architecture. One of the requirements is that the business must be able to apply rules on what our customers add to their cart, in order to...

Robert Harvey

A perfectly good question.

How 'bout that.

enderland

I'm amused the number of people who think that you can make macroservices into microservices just by splitting it into pieces

enderland

2:52 AM

ok that took a while after getting distracted, ha

Robert Harvey

3:27 AM

@ThomasOwens: Seems this discussion has ventured into chat territory.

Thomas Owens

@RobertHarvey Yeah. I'm about to go to bed, but I want to answer your question about what's not in the SDLC that's still on-topic. I found two things so far. We decided that software source code escrow was actually requirements and design and history is on-topic.

I think everything else here is someone telling them that their question is off-topic.

Licensing is up next after the name change happens to discuss again, though.

Robert Harvey

Licensing is gone.

Thomas Owens

No, it's not. The scope hasn't changed.

It's just been clarified. It's not a bullet point anymore.

Robert Harvey

Licensing has nothing to do with the SDLC.

And there's plenty of consensus on Meta.

Thomas Owens

So I don't understand where that idea is coming from. We used the SDLC to normalize discussions. It's not the be all end all of the scope.

Robert Harvey

3:31 AM

It is as far as I'm concerned.

Thomas Owens

In fact, in the early discussions with Shog, the scope is not changing. It's just being clarified.

I'd like licensing to be off-topic. It makes it easy.

Robert Harvey

Exactly right.

Thomas Owens

And I have been migrating the good questions to Open Source and Law.

But I also haven't been closing them as off-topic.

Robert Harvey

Well, that's contradictory isn't it?

If the good questions are migratable, the bad questions are closeable.

Thomas Owens

Usually, I've found dupes on Open Source.

Robert Harvey

3:33 AM

We're not going to keep shit, just because we're "Not changing the site scope."

Thomas Owens

I think I've migrated 3 since they were about nuances in AGPL and...somethign else.

Robert Harvey

And cross-site dupes are not a factor. You've said so yourself.

So what was all the discussion about the SDLC about then? Was I just wasting my breath?

Thomas Owens

No, it wasn't a waste. It normalized the discussion.

Robert Harvey

But we apparently are not taking it seriously as a scope tool.

Thomas Owens

I'm almost done. I think the only not SDLC topic that's on-topic that we've never mentioned is history.

Robert Harvey

3:34 AM

If History is in, I need to change that post I just made.

16

A: What is this "Software Engineering" site you speak of, and what kinds of questions can I ask there?

Why is this name change occurring? Because the name "Programmers" invites all sorts of questions that are only vaguely related to software engineering, questions that we don't want. Has anything else changed? Yes. The Tour and the Help Center have a new tag line, the public description of the...

I pretty much assumed it was gone, because it's the only "weird" topic left.

Thomas Owens

Yeah. It should be history of those things, though.

General computing history? Nope. Gone.

Robert Harvey

Well, why a caret was chosen for a programming language 30 years ago would be a real stretch, then.

If the guy had just said "I'm building a programming language, and..." I don't think anyone would have voted to close his question.

Thomas Owens

I totally agree with that.

Where you draw the line with history is something that I think we need to discuss.

There are some bad history questions. There are also great ones.

88

Q: Why is 0 false?

This question may sound dumb, but why does 0 evaluates to false and any other [integer] value to true is most of programming languages? String comparison Since the question seems a little bit too simple, I will explain myself a little bit more: first of all, it may seem evident to any programme...

language-design history error-handling

Robert Harvey

That one seems fine to me. It's fine, because it has contemporary relevance.

Thomas Owens

It's not the worse. But if you're going to ask about why a value for false was chosen, how do you distinguish with why a caret was XOR?

Robert Harvey

3:40 AM

You might as well ask what color Babbage painted his bikeshed, and why. How the fuck should I know? Ask Babbage.

Thomas Owens

That's definitely off-topic here. We don't do bikesheds.

Maybe ask on Bicycles?

Robert Harvey

:)

Thomas Owens

I think they take questions about storing bikes.

Robert Harvey

Anyway, that's why we have voting. Five people decided that the question had insufficient relevance.

Thomas Owens

And 4 (+ me) voted to reopen.

Robert Harvey

3:42 AM

It's a contentious post, no doubt about it.

Thomas Owens

I wouldn't have done a mod reopen on it.

Robert Harvey

I was torn on whether or not to cast the fifth reopen vote, after that great answer.

Thomas Owens

But we have no guidance that history is off-topic, guidance that says it is, and evidence that it works on other similar sites (CS, EE, Math, Stats).

I felt comfortable casting the 5th reopen vote. Especially with that answer. I do wish the question was actually about the problem, though.

Robert Harvey

That's why we have edit capability.

Thomas Owens

It would invalidate that good answer, though.

Robert Harvey

3:44 AM

Why?

Edit completed.

Thomas Owens

I see.

I was going to blow away most of the question and replace it with a copyedited version of the comment.

Robert Harvey

Can we clean up some of those comments, or toss them into a chat box?

Ah, never mind. There aren't that many off-topic ones anyway.

Thomas Owens

The comments were either superseded by that answer or about the closure, so I blew them all away.

Robert Harvey

OK.

Thomas Owens

But yeah, that's a good edit without destroying the good answer.

Although I still think a better question would focus more on the maintainability of code that uses ^ for exponents or something along those lines.

Although wording it to avoid opinions may be hard.

Robert Harvey

3:49 AM

I can live with it in its present form.

Thomas Owens

Yeah. And I made a note to myself to revisit history and licensing after the new name is up.

Which, we should be hearing from SE on a timeline on Friday.

Robert Harvey

Licensing is a dead-end. Open-Source.SE answers those questions much better than we ever could.

Thomas Owens

Law does a good job, too.

law.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/software

Robert Harvey

Law is an amazing site. They've far exceeded my expectations, just as Code Review has.

Thomas Owens

And not just licensing. Plus, Law is out of beta.

I blew a whole lunch break and then some reading Law.

Robert Harvey

3:52 AM

My thinking is that, if we can get the kind of singular focus on topic that those sites have, our site could be great too.

And that's what I think SDLC is.

Anyway, I've taken up enough of your time.

Thomas Owens

I agree with that. I do think there is some value in the history, though.

We'll revisit that one first after the name change. I'd like to hear any argument for killing it.

But not tonight. I'm out.

ibubi

6:09 AM

hello anybody?

gnat

6:36 AM

@RobertHarvey call me a pedantic formalistic bureaucrat if you want but I don't want to (and I won't) be voting to close licensing questions until we have an authoritative meta post on that. With all bells and whistles, you know - faq-proposed, after a while mod-promoted to featured (preferably after featured tag expires on one of the current posts about name change), then mod-promoted to faq...

...Using such a post to provide a thorough and clear explanation of why licensing goes away won't hurt either

and it makes no sense to hit me with a big stick of "oh but licensing is not SDLC". I've read attempts at explanation that it isn't and attempts to explain that it is and so far none looked convincing

Toby

9:18 AM

hello guyz

gnat

9:49 AM

delete votes please: "need help for converting this simple php curl script to C# .NET"

Duga

12:23 PM

Perhaps better to ask on programmers.stackexchange.com — Kwebble 57 secs ago

enderland

9 hours ago, by Robert Harvey

But we apparently are not taking it seriously as a scope tool.

9 hours ago, by Robert Harvey

So what was all the discussion about the SDLC about then? Was I just wasting my breath?

this is what it feels like to me, I obviously missed how all the "you need to define your scope" meta direction from SE was... not actually resulting in scope definition

Duga

I was also thinking about asking it on programmers.stackexchange.com but wasn't really sure. — Matej Ridzon 5 secs ago

@MatejRidzon if your goal is a "what tool should I use?" it's off topic on programmers. — enderland 20 secs ago

Duga

1:27 PM

My point is that you're soliciting for feedback on your design, which is off-topic for Stack Overflow. You could try on the Programmers or Code Review sites on the Stack Exchange network. Be sure to first read about their respective rules to determine where it fits best, if any. — CodeCaster 26 secs ago

Duga

2:03 PM

I think the best answer you are going to get is "it depends" as given by Almo Do. Also I think this question is better suited for programmers.stackexchange.com as it is a conceptual question — Balkrishna Rawool 33 secs ago

@gnat: true. I wished to say move the question from here to Programmers Community. — Balkrishna Rawool 17 secs ago

Robert Harvey

2:30 PM

History can be thought of as everything that isn't happening right now. That isn't what is off topic. What's off-topic is anything that ONLY has value from a historian's perspective. Simply having value from a historian's perspective doesn't make it off topic. Doesn't make it on topic either. So it would need another reason to be on topic. Doesn't matter if the OP frames it for a historian or not. So the ugly history of waterfall that led to agile is on topic. The reasoning behind Java being named after an island that exports coffee is not. — CandiedOrange 9 hours ago

Very well said.

enderland

2:56 PM

I'm just so confused about what the purpose of the last six months was

Robert Harvey

It's a product of differing ideologies. The community members involved in the scope discussions (well, except for inclusionists like Rachel) all pretty much agree that the scope needs to be clarified and tightened. SE is more concerned with friendliness and inclusivity. They got their four bullets, and pretty much forgot the rest.

They have different constraints than we do. From a corporate perspective, all of the sites need to have the same format, and the same overall Help Center tone. A couple of years ago, I rewrote the Help/On-Topic article for Stack Overflow, incorporating all of the close reasons so that people got exposure to them at least once. Shog wasn't wild about the makeover, but he let it stand. It still has four bullets, however.

And there's no way to derive an understanding of the site's culture from those four bullets alone, nor is there any way to do the same here.

All that might actually matter if new users actually read the Help Center, but they don't.

Shog9

3:36 PM

meh... Friendliness is nice, but inclusive - when it comes to topics - is overrated.

What's critical is that folks are able to understand what's on-topic. Ideally, what's actually on-topic is slightly more permissive than folks' average expectations, so that fuzzy edges like tooling or history or whatever is allowed when it benefits the site's audience.

What's tended to happen here - for years - is that folks' expectations are far more permissive than what's actually on-topic.

So you spend all of your time shutting down polls or discussions or coding questions and dealing with the angst.

Sure, one solution is to just make all that on-topic. But... Kinda tried that once.

Better solution is to just rein in the expectations severely. Then y'all can be magnanimous in applying your scope and folks are pleasantly surprised rather than bitterly disappointed.

2

Duga

4:06 PM

Maybe this is more something for programmers.stackexchange.com — Kwebble 35 secs ago

Aaron Hall

What's important is to decide first, then rationalize with cherry-picked data and logic later.

Wait, strike that, reverse it.

Robert Harvey

It seems perfectly reasonable to allow questions like licensing and history, until you actually turn it loose on the community and find out that all they want to do is bikeshed.

Then you have to make a decision. Do you continue to let such topic areas become a magnet for poor questions, or do you simply do away with them?

user114359

@RobertHarvey I'm not convinced there's much bikeshedding going on there, other than the occasional "which license should I pick?" question that is POB. I get annoyed that a lot of them are poorly-written and are very close, if not over line, asking for legal advice.

Robert Harvey

Licensing questions suffer from three problems: repetitious, frankly uninteresting questions from people who either can't read or can't understand the licenses; the tenuous relationship that they have to software engineering, and whether not it's really just a legal question.

The problem can be seen for what it is when you migrate such questions to other sites, and find out that not only are such questions welcome there, but they actually get great answers.

In my view, these questions really have nothing to do with Software Engineering, and everything to do with legalities, which makes them completely off-topic here. Most people who ask such questions here either want to know: "which license should I pick," or "can I do this under that license," neither of which we're qualified to answer.

And the ones that we've always considered on-topic here ("How do I apply this license") are the most mundane of all. Read the license, and do what it says.

These kinds of complex formulas for determining scope (It's on-topic if it's a licensing question without legal content that is relevant to the Software Engineer's daily work) are the reason nobody can figure out what the site is about.

enderland

4:27 PM

^

Robert Harvey

Which is why I'm inclined to simply eliminate Licensing as a category altogether.

Especially since other sites can handle these questions much better than we can. It's such a self-evident win-win to me.

enderland

that's why I thought we were doing "SDLC and not implementation?" -- it's an easy check for anyone familiar with SDLC to fairly easily check topicality of a question

Robert Harvey

Old habits die hard.

enderland

@gnat: guess we'll find out :P

user114359

Licensing is technically part of SDLC - the lifecycle includes deploying of software. Licensing is as much a deployment artifact as is the installer, the software itself, and user documentation.

user114359

4:33 PM

I agree on all the other points - those questions are awful here, and better asked elsewhere.

enderland

It's also easier when you can just say "SDLC, except implementation and licensing"

or something like that

not "SDLC, minus a few things, plus a bunch of random edge cases"

Robert Harvey

Licensing is the application of a legal process. The subject matter expert for licensing is a lawyer, not a software engineer.

And since neither the picture or the Wikipedia article mentions licensing anywhere, I'm not overly concerned about people conflating the licensing process as part of the SDLC.

user114359

In a corporate environment, yes, the legal department will write up a license. But if I am the lead on an open-source project, "how do I incorporate a library with license X" and "if I license my software with Y, what are the implications?" are parts of the SDLC for my project. Maybe Wikipedia disagrees, but that is how people view it.

user114359

I have always advocated for making those questions off-topic because they are boring, stupid, and we usually do not provide quality answers.

Robert Harvey

Sure, but if you have a legal question, you ask a legal person, not another software engineer.

That's, frankly, the blind leading the blind.

user114359

4:43 PM

Which is why those questions should be off-topic.

user114359

Does your licensing question require the expert advice of a lawyer, while not asking for legal advice? Ask on Law. Needs the expert advice of a software guy? OpenSource.

Aaron Hall

I have had 4 undergraduate law classes and 2 graduate level law classes. Just sayin.

2 undergrad and 2 grad were business law.

user114359

I stayed at a Holiday Inn once.

user114359

9 mins ago, by enderland

It's also easier when you can just say "SDLC, except implementation and licensing"

Robert Harvey

@AaronHall Which makes you a legal person, of sorts. But this is a software engineering site.

user114359

4:46 PM

I also have four semesters of math, but I am not mathematician. My undergraduate required 3 calculus plus discrete math.

Aaron Hall

Yeah, but that means you can probably discuss cyclomatic complexity and algorithms intelligently.

user114359

I can. But licensing? I have a basic understanding from an OSS perspective. I understand copyright law. But I am not qualified to give advice in the context of possibly being liable for said advice.

user114359

which is the crux of the issue: IP lawyers are authorities on the topic, and comfortable enough in their knowledge to represent a client and assume liability for their advice. Random internet people should not be giving that advice.

Aaron Hall

I know that, e.g., investment advice is not regulated when given for the purposes of journalism or education. This site says we can discuss legal information and it not be considered "advice": hirealawyer.findlaw.com/do-you-need-a-lawyer/…

gnat

after I heard rumors that licensing questions are better handled at other sites I stopped worrying if they belong to SDLC or not and instead only want to know if these rumors are true. Look, coding and debugging are definitely part of SDLC but we know that these are better dealt with at SO and we throw them away from scope and nobody cries "oh but they are in SDLC"

Aaron Hall

5:01 PM

ok, we have a pre-existing body of content regarding licensing - is it bad? Is it discussion we'd rather not have?

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/…

Robert Harvey

For me, it's just completely uninteresting material as a Software Engineer. If I genuinely had a question about licensing, I would not come here to get it answered; I would go to some place that has subject matter experts. It's like asking a seamstress how to fix your car engine.

That said, I'm not particularly bothered by such questions, if we can get the site primarily focused on SDLC.

I just have no interest in reading or answering them.

Aaron Hall

ok, but it's hard to imagine actual lawyers writing better answers than the ones we currently have.

I'm thinking of these questions as "how do I as a software engineer deal with potentially thorny legal issues?"

And who better than other experienced software engineers to answer?

enderland

... I doubt any non-small company allows their software engineers to solve those problems

Robert Harvey

Like I said, licensing questions don't particularly bother me. But if it's a choice between allowing licensing questions and getting folks focused on SDLC, I enthusiastically vote for the latter.

user114359

Speaking of licensing...

user114359

5:07 PM

0

Q: Dual license with GPL and a closed source license

I've done a lot of research on this, but I'm still quite confused. I'm currently working on an Arduino-compatible software project. The project is open source, so I want others to make use of it as well, but I don't want them to create derivative works with closed-source licenses. I would like t...

licensing gpl closed-source

Aaron Hall

@enderland doesn't matter if they're the ones "solving" - they have exposure to "solutions"

e.g. - I work for a huge enterprisey firm, we use the Python standard lib and misc. backports from PyPI, and we build our own libraries that leverage these libraries, and our legal compliance people are happy as clams. If someone asks "can I do that?" I can answer, "a lot of people do that with lots of legal oversight."

Robert Harvey

Well, that was easy.

0

A: Dual license with GPL and a closed source license

As the copyright holder, you can do whatever you wish with your own code. Nothing prevents you from closing your own source in your own projects, if you hold the copyright.

Aaron Hall

:)

enderland

-1

Q: What is wrong with this?! thegame part of this code

print 'Welcome to the Pig Latin Translator!' original = raw_input("What's is your name buddy?") if original.isalpha(): print (original) else: print "That is not a name" thegame = raw_input ("Left or Right?") if answer: "Left" print "You are correct!" else: print "You are so wro...

python

that was fast

durron597

@RobertHarvey if this faq is obsolete, perhaps someone should write a new answer to it?

17

A: When is a software licensing question on topic?

As a rule of thumb, questions are on topic if they are answerable by expert programmers, as opposed to expert lawyers. Additionally, here are some questions you can ask yourself to determine if your question is on topic or not: Is the question about the spirit of the license, or the detailed ...

be retagged faq-obsolete

Robert Harvey

5:20 PM

Oh, I don't know. I'm starting to think that simply removing Licensing from the Help Center is good enough (it's already been removed). If people ask the occasional licensing question, meh.

2

And that post is a pretty good description of the current crop of licensing questions that we've historically allowed.

Not sure it's worth fighting this fight again.

durron597

It's not a fight, it's just updating an existing faq post to state the rule change

assuming there is a rule change

Robert Harvey

I don't think there has. Maybe there doesn't need to be one.

enderland

either all the meta discussions on scope were about redefining the scope, or they weren't, in which case licensing is still on topic

Aaron Hall

Licensing is on-topic on the DL.

Robert Harvey

What is the DL?

enderland

5:24 PM

are recent questions like this every day?

Aaron Hall

"down-low"

Robert Harvey

Oh.

Aaron Hall

you know, quiet-like. ;)

wink-wink nudge-nudge say-no-more!

durron597

@RobertHarvey specifically, your answer to the name change question explicitly states they are off topic

so either the rules are changed or they are not

these aren't Schrödinger's rules

Aaron Hall

aren't they?

enderland

5:26 PM

@durron597 this is why I'm so confused about all this

Robert Harvey

I was debating whether or not just to remove that. I don't have to mention licensing or legal or anything else to declare a question off-topic on the grounds that it simply isn't a part of the SDLC.

enderland

I have seen many people agree that those questions are out of scope here in the meta discussions

user114359

@enderland the problem is, I am not convinced the moderator team agrees with the community.

enderland

it's really confusing to anyone who hasn't read all the chat transcript to figure out wtf is going on with the name change (and/or scope change/definition/clarification)

@Snowman by "team" you mean Thomas, right?

I don't think I've seen other mods post much (or any) on any of the meta discussions

user114359

@enderland programmers.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators

enderland

5:30 PM

@Snowman sure. but of those five who else said anything during the meta discussions?

user114359

@enderland Many of them spoke up.

Robert Harvey

Yeesh. Programmers has five mods?

@durron597 I removed the licensing/legal bit.

enderland

oh gosh what did I start

@Snowman I don't remember this, I guess

durron597

@RobertHarvey THE WAVE FUNCTION HAS COLLAPSED

enderland

chrisf made three total comments, mapleshaft had a couple answers (didn't remember these) with a couple comments, and World/Yannis nothing at all

I guess that's why, 3/5 of them made a total of 3 comments :P

durron597

5:35 PM

(thanks)

I don't post here enough to care about what the rules are anymore, just the fact that I'm super anal makes me want them to be consistent, that's all

@enderland Yannis is too busy moderating Mythology

user114359

5:49 PM

@enderland right, several of them spoke up but honestly they didn't say a whole lot as a group.

Duga

@DanielA.White Indeed. This question belongs to programmers.stackexchange.com - even though the target group might be reading it here. — Herdo 24 secs ago

gnat

6:22 PM

am I the only one who thinks that silence of most moderators looks normal? Thomas represents them as a team and makes it clear this discussion is authoritative, other simply check things (Yannis who is blamed as too busy elsewhere tagged name change explanation featured just yesterday - apparently he pays close attention). If community did something worth disagreeing with I bet they would raise a voice but while things are generally okay why interfering

enderland

there's no reason I can't just delete .pak files right?

user114359

@gnat moderators are part of the community and should be active in chat and meta. If they are disinterested or lack the time, why be a moderator?

gnat

@Snowman I see. That's a good question. First, let's make it clear that one of them is very actively involved, right? I mean Thomas. Now, think of how it would look like if this would be two... three... four of them just as active, how it would feel like. To me it would feel more like mod-driven change, not community driven, and I wouldn't be comfortable with that

Aaron Hall

Aren't they mostly elected, though?

enderland

if it would have dropped a few months off the process, I think that would have been more than fine for most of us folks ;-)

@AaronHall years ago

gnat

6:36 PM

@enderland I think it wouldn't drop even a second off the process. Bottleneck here is SE team: change is impossible without them and things were going at their pace. Saying that all 5 moderators agreed would not make a stronger push than what we had (almost 400 upvotes to name change proposal and 2 or 3 months of it hanging featured)

Aaron Hall

ok, do we need to elect more?

enderland

march 2013 looks like last election here

Aaron Hall

chants more mods, more mods, more mods...

gnat

(gnat checking his flags summary and 10K tools pages) I think we have enough mods and they do their job well enough

Aaron Hall

Where's your ambition, gnat? :D

enderland

6:42 PM

PSE needs champions, not mods

Aaron Hall

What we need are some old-school managers to crack the whip. hums Devo

Devo's music isn't very hummable...

enderland

I'm being 100% serious

user114359

@gnat I am not saying the discussion needs to be mod-driven, only that they should be part of the discussion just like any other high-rep, active user.

enderland

I can't really recall anyone other than Michael and a few folks here really championing the site as a whole

this is a community building piece of the site, it's not some massive thing like SO is where everyone's a cog

user114359

Every moderator on this site is 20k+ and has been active for years, certainly longer than I have been around and active. Yet I was more vocal in the rebranding discussion than any single moderator. These are people who are handling flags, helping to curate content, etc. they have a stake in this too.

user114359

6:50 PM

Well, Thomas might have been more active than me in the discussion

Aaron Hall

Yeah, so... how do you champion a site? I know what an "IT champion" is.

user114359

Advocate for ways to improve quality and attract useful contributors.

user114359

Sites like this have a positive feedback cycle. Good quality attracts people who make the quality better, which attracts more people... or it can go the opposite way.

2

Aaron Hall

I'm happy to consult for this site for free in my spare time, but I gotta have fun while I do or I'll go type-A.

enderland

@AaronHall you actively participate. you post questions/answers. you engage new users. you actively try to shape the site into a better place. you listen to others, engage with experienced users, and accept that site differences will exist - you work with those people anyways. you post in meta. you patiently over and over help newer users understand the site culture. you care about the site

Aaron Hall

6:53 PM

ok, well I've said we need to change the site's name for a while now.

enderland

you take ownership. it's not someone else's problem, it's your and our problem.

Aaron Hall

I've done a little bit of all of that, but I don't know if I can take ownership. I'll burn out too quickly.

gnat

@Snowman I think I understand. Well for topics other than name change it would probably better to see more public activity from moderators. As for name change I prefer to keep it the current way - the way that is abundantly clear about it being community driven

enderland

the problem that PSE has faced for as long as I can remember is that there are many more bystanders than there are active, champions, and many of those bystanders LOVE(d?) to whine about the champions without doing anything

user114359

@AaronHall That is why we need multiple people. However, the last batch was left in the oven for too long and got burned out.

Aaron Hall

6:56 PM

so sounds like we need more mods

19 mins ago, by Aaron Hall

chants more mods, more mods, more mods...

enderland

no, being a moderator doesn't make you a champion at all -- if anything your mods should be champions, but it's not a "become mod, become champion!"

user114359

Five is probably as many as we need given the amount of traffic here

enderland

only thomas fits the criteria for being a mod and champion here

Aaron Hall

No way, you need at least twice as many to avoid the burnout.

enderland

you don't burnout if you are a mod that isn't a champion, and PSE has only 1 of those right now

Aaron Hall

6:58 PM

Assertion vs assertion, which one wins? Who knows...

ok, so mods that are champions will burn out because we have too few mods to be able to be both. :P I win.

enderland

PSE needs people who care about the site, not people who want to be sarcastic and <censored> in chat

Aaron Hall

I can think of a couple of people in here that I'd be willing to nominate.

user114359

When I talked about burnout, I meant the high-rep crowd who were actively editing, closing, and deleting content but either deleted their account or stopped participating.

user114359

When you try to advocate for the site but keep hitting roadblocks, it is very difficult to continue to care.

Aaron Hall

Yeah, with more mods, they wouldn't have to spend so much time closing and deleting.

user114359

7:02 PM

Personally I still do care, but I am demoralized by Stack Exchange's overall (non)response to our pleas for help since I started contributing here.

Aaron Hall

What's the downside to more mods? Why the pushback?

gnat

@AaronHall elections take much effort, that's the only downside I think

enderland

@AaronHall treating symptoms rather than the core issues gets us nowhere

user114359

@AaronHall Personally, I would remove mod status from some of them (not naming names, don't ask) and elect some new ones. Maybe 4 or 5 total.

user114359

We really only need one mod though, @gnat. He patrols the site 24/7 with ruthless efficiency.

3

Aaron Hall

7:08 PM

Only need to take away mod status if they lose our trust.

So there we have it, we need more mods. Time for a mod election!

gnat

@Snowman if I was mod that ruthlessness would have to go. It's easy to be ruthless when you know that your actions are guaranteed to be reviewed and your mistakes are likely to be corrected. When it's binding and when the only way to get reviewed is through terrible 10K tools page it's different. A while ago I've been wondering why World Engineer promised that after elected he won't cast votes down. Now I think I understand

Library for programmatic video manipulation - any volunteers to be ruthless about this? :)

Aaron Hall

I think mods should use their power when they're 100% certain a post should be closed/deleted.

enderland

> You voted to close this question 57 secs ago

Aaron Hall

If they think it's questionable, then let others vote.

Serious question: Why did you think that this would be an ok question here? (By the way, there's a site called Software Recommendations that might be able to help you - don't cross post, perhaps we can get a migration there.) — Aaron Hall 28 secs ago

gnat

@AaronHall with closing it is probably bit softer, this one is easier for others to review and revert. Mod closing works at Server Fault and seems to work well. With deletion, yes, 100%

Aaron Hall

7:19 PM

When one mod can do the work of five community members, those other 4 have more bandwidth. We need more mods.

We need an elected figurehead position too. This individual's job should be to hang out in chat and make reasonable suggestions that carry no actual weight. I'll toss my hat into the ring on that one.

user114359

@AaronHall I agree, for clear-cut cases mods should be okay with closing and even deleting crap questions. The way I see it is if I were looking through the review queue and knew in 5 seconds or less that a question needs to be closed, then a mod should have no problem closing it. If it takes more than that, or if I would be inclined to press "skip", then a mod should leave it be. Just because it takes the collaboration out of the process.

gnat

@AaronHall ...or same mods more actively casting close votes. In ancient times when site scope wasn't settled as firmly it was normal for mods to avoid interfering too much. Nowadays it is much clearer and hesitation to close seems to make less and less sense. And sometimes, even abstaining of fast deletions makes no sense...

@RobertHarvey Personally, I have been. Ever since Shog strongly suggested faster deletions in The Whiteboard. Previously, I was hesitant to delete questions that would otherwise be Roomba'd, but I am now. I guess I don't see that as a change that is related to the rebranding at all. — Thomas Owens ♦ Aug 12 at 17:17

user114359

to @gnat's point, I know as a regular user that if I am trigger-happy on the close vote I cannot do much damage. Either it takes four more people, or I am the fifth and four people already decided to close.

Aaron Hall

I think SE considers trigger-happiness a group-think thing and wishes we could cut back on that too.

gnat

Jul 22 at 19:22, by Shog9

Same way we do it on MSE every day: delete everything that's blatantly off-topic as soon as it appears.

^^^ that's Shog's recommendation Thomas refers to

@AaronHall ^^^ you see some trigger-happiness is now officially endorsed :)

they probably learned that forcing folks being soft and tender on everything doesn't work. Unsalvageable stuff should go away quickly to make room for community to work on what could be fixed

Aaron Hall

7:30 PM

Oh, absolutely, but he's not talking about marginal, he's talking about blatant.

user114359

@AaronHall there is a difference between erring on the side of closing, and "it showed up in the close queue so it must be worth closing."

Shog9

this is also why having a clear-cut scope is handy. If any idiot can know at a glance that a given question is far and away off-topic, deleting it out of hand becomes a non-issue.

No one in their right mind thinks programming questions are on-topic for MSE. No one ever complains when I delete them.

Similarly, no one cares when relationship advice requests are summarily deleted on SO.

user114359

This is why I like Robert's answer. Pictures are pretty, can't argue with them:

user114359

16

A: What is this "Software Engineering" site you speak of, and what kinds of questions can I ask there?

Why is "Programmers" changing to "Software Engineering?" Because the name "Programmers" invites all sorts of questions that are only vaguely related to software engineering, questions that we don't want. Has anything else changed? Yes. The Tour and the Help Center have a new tag line, the pub...

Shog9

It's the edge-cases, stuff that - if you kinda squint - could be ok... That's where you need the close, review, debate, hand-hold, maybe delete a week later... cycle.

Aaron Hall

7:32 PM

Yeah, and give them a chance to improve/fix.

Shog9

@Snowman if only it wasn't a picture full of text

gnat

@Shog9 I guess you now plan for rename implementation, correct? how long it might roughly take? Or are there still some blockers along the way there

Shog9

@gnat tons

naw, Ana's working on this. Big hang-up is just that we need multiple people's schedules to align. She'll work it out.

gnat

@Shog9 got it, thanks. Sounds like nothing is now needed from site folks side, that feels good

Shog9

whisky is needed.

gnat

7:41 PM

@Shog9 I won't share mine! let site die with old name but I'll keep it all for myself

Aaron Hall

Need me to drop some off? There's a liquor store on the way from Broadway & Fulton, where I work.

enderland

be a long afternoon dropoff... :P

Shog9

:)

I guess I'll nurse the bottle I have.

Aaron Hall

Google Maps says it's 5 minutes: google.com/maps/dir/222+Broadway,+New+York,+NY+10038,+USA/…

Shog9

now we just need portals to connect the various offices and my liquor cabinet

Aaron Hall

7:44 PM

:(

user114359

I need to hit the store after work. I think I need steak and whiskey for dinner.

enderland

one drawback of WFH friday is I will miss the beer fridge today

user114359

8:00 PM

@enderland you're working from home and don't have a beer fridge? WTF is wrong with you?

enderland

but... free!

user114359

There is a reason my house has two refrigerators.

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