The Water Cooler - 2014-03-24

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12:00 AM

yeah, it's not a good idea to use that as a standard

I mean, as long as there are more positive questions than negative ones, I don't think there should be anything to worry about...

They don't have to hit 40 or even 20 upvotes...

<--- has never had a question get more than 3 upvotes :P

yeah, I just looked at the other side of the question list

we've got approximately 7 * 50 questions w/ a score of -1 or less

that's 350

not counting deleted ones, I'm assuming?

not counting those

or do you mean on hold or closed?

because I can't see deleted questions

I see... I meant to say it does include on hold or closed questions?

12:05 AM

yup

it would be less if we didn't include those

then again, even if we did include those, it's still ~10% of all questions

so it's not THAT bad

true

I have noticed on this site in particular that people tend to vote a lot more on everything, probably because there aren't as many questions as, say, SO

11 hours later…

11:35 AM

no hope for us, only SO is protected from lemmings. Next time Shog brags about how troublesome other sites are, remind him of this:

2

A: "SO questions are penalized" in the hot list - how does that work, can it be done for other site(s)?

This isn't the kind of thing you could easily exploit to keep a site from appearing in the hot questions list too often. This is designed to ensure that a single site doesn't dominate the list, and that users see a good sampling of questions that are likely to interest them throughout the network...

1 hour later…

12:57 PM

@JimG. it must have been linked somewhere though, I've picked up tons of upvotes in the past week I was gone and I'm not sure why that happened

1:25 PM

This question appears to be off-topic because it is asking for opinions about your job responsibilities and is not a practical question about the workplace. — enderland 7 secs ago

This should be closed ASAP or it's going to pick up comment types of questions

having to pick a specific reason for offtopic flagging is so retarded

there should be a single reason: it's not about the subjects we deal with on workplace.se

@AlexM. someday I'm going to make a good reference like what programmers.SE has

15

Q: Why was my question closed or down voted?

Help! My question was closed (or down voted). Why? And what can I do about it? Downvoted Duplicate Off topic What language to take up next Recommend a tool, library, or other Career or education advice (MSO) Which computer science / programming Stack Exchange do I post in? Are you still confu...

discussion featured close-reasons faq-proposed down-votes

how does that help when flagging though?

like, when you see a question that is obviously offtopic

but the exact reason is just not in the list

ooh. you meant flagging :P

I used to flag for moderator attention in those cases but from what I've heard, that is not the same as flagging for offtopic

I mean, they go to different queues

and an offtopic question does not require the attention of a moderator

1:54 PM

these SO questions are answered about as enthusiastically as ours, but there are so little upvotes! stackoverflow.com/questions/22607441/php-check-if-is-integer (9 answers in 2 hours), stackoverflow.com/questions/22609779/… (7 answers in an hour)

@gnat So SO will have a potential audience of 20 million next year... we have a potential audience of ~4-5 billion+

2:08 PM

@Chad audience this large will kill us I think :)

but... just thinking of votes that may come in with 4-6 billion readers... :)

2:33 PM

@Chad I think it would be prudent to have more than just 3 moderators for a while at least until there are more people with 20k rep here who are active

3:01 PM

@enderland I agree.... I would like to keep the 3 we have and just add 2 or 3 more in the near tearm

But I doubt SE will let us do that

@gnat I dont think we will actually get near that but I can see this site eclipsing the size of SO in a few years

@Chad me too. i'm actually somewhat concerned with scalability too because of this

@enderland yeah as we grow its going to be harder to keep on top of the duplicate questions and the me too answers

I can see the # of new questions per day is getting bigger

but to get that huge?

@AlexM. nearly the entire world can ask (or answer...) questions here

well yeah but SO is like the goto site for google results for basic programming questions

3:06 PM

Actually we are really limited to the english speaking world... so that brings the real audience down to around a billion

@AlexM. Hopefully we will be the goto site for workplace questions

won't mind if that's the case

this feels fitting:

Neal Stephenson thinks it's cute to name his labels 'dengo'

I am seeing up pop up more often in stuff I type into google

here's a random bunny

user image

bunnies are so cute

it's like nature invented them so we could d'aww

and eat them

3:09 PM

yeah that too

ok seriously, where is that brainsizing question linked at that keeps getting me rep

3:24 PM

I wish SE had a "review queue" type setup for posts you: 1) voted to delete 2) downvoted 3) voted to close that put all posts into it whenever they have edits

@gnat is there a feature request about something like this? I might post on meta.SO

(I just assume you have all of meta.stackoverflow in your brain at once, seems fairly safe assumption)

-1

A: How do I say "I need company stock, or I'm getting a new job"?

This is job, not a club. Bargaining is what they do with you, why should you do anything else? You can't have two jobs if you charge less. They could get more business if they charge less their clients. But they don't, because they are greedy. Why shouldn't you be greedy? It is really a bad st...

this is a really crappy answer

it is

3:40 PM

@enderland IIRC there is such a request, quite a popular one. Wait a bit, I'll try to find it... Don't forget, one can't revoke delete vote

hmm, I guess that's true. I've cast quite a few of them when I go through the flag queue

While nice and perhaps the only workable strategy, not everyone is in a position they can just "quit" and ignore fundamental workplace issues they have. See this discussion for why answers fundamentally saying "just quit" are not good for this site. — enderland 13 secs ago

w00t, I'll soon get my coding puzzles rep to exceed that on SO

this is going better than expected

394

Q: Allow an edit to notify downvoters: "I think I've fixed the issue now - please check"

To me, a downvote usually indicates a problem with an answer. When I downvote it's to mark the answer as having a problem, not the person. If the answer is fixed, I want to remove that downvote - but it's tricky to keep track of all the questions I've looked at over the last few hours. I don't a...

feature-request status-declined edits voting notifications

@gnat ahh, that's more the "problem" but doesn't have a solution path really

11

Q: Make option to be notified about edit on post I downvoted

When one downvotes a question, he usually does so because it is low quality, but still considerable for the site (when it's not considerable, downvote should be avoided and question closed). It would be nice to have an option to get notified when such a question is edited; it likely means that it...

feature-request edits voting down-votes notifications

^^^ solution closed as dupe

3:45 PM

I think a more comprehensive "implement this" solution is what that's missing

both those are talking about hte problem but not really showing a good solutino

awww, cute:

Do you understand English? — Vietnhi Phuvan 1 min ago

the answer pictures a legit approach

in The developer's code by Ka Wai Cheung, the author describes of an approach applied in his company

@AlexM. yes, sort of, but presentation of this approach looks quite unclear

where each developer gets two hours worth of time during which nobody is allowed to disturb them in any way, no matter how critical the situation is

Can we get some delete votes on this? Talk about "not an answer"...

-1

A: How can I promote my problem solving skills (instead of just knowledge) when networking?

I am mou roy, i have 10 months daughter.she was so sleem.i want to gain weight of her.she has asthma so as a mother i request to pl help me.

yeah, flagged it earlier

3:51 PM

@MonicaCellio also a good spam flag candidate

I've 5 flags waiting it seems

@enderland I would have flagged it for spam, but again:

> This answer is effectively an advertisement with no disclosure. It is not useful or relevant, but promotional.

@enderland I wasn't sure -- it does have the ring of the "please give me money for bus fare" scammers you sometimes see on the street, but it doesn't seem to technically be spam. I flagged it earlier, but came across it again so figured I'd raise it here.

it is not an advertisement, nor is it promotional

6

A: Interrupting Work Productivity: The Name?

In general when you talk about stuff like this the common term is: flow the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized b...

meh. I guess I flagged as spam because enough of those flags auto delete things... perhaps I should have not adopted that approach lol

3:52 PM

92

A: How to explain a layperson why a developer should not be interrupted while neck-deep in coding?

Try the following analogies: First one: "How long does it take for you to fall asleep?" "X minutes" "Now imagine that when you are close to falling asleep, someone walks in and interrupts you, how long will it take you to fall asleep now? Those few seconds you had left, or will you have to start...

While I'm at it, I flagged this as offensive yesterday and I'm guessing a couple others did. If we get to 6 before the flags age out, it dies:

@gnat oh I agree with that answer, but a quip and one other sentence doesn't really help me know why I should answer it

-4

A: I missed a meeting because I misread the email how should I approach this?

I know truth can be stranger than fiction, but you take the cake. I am sorry but taking in every word you speak as true, you don't come across to me as an effective individual at all. In fact, you are coming across as incredibly, miserably ineffective, a real life Inspector Clouseau. You can't em...

that person seems to be prolific in posting those sorts of answers

@enderland yeah, I just noticed there's something of a pattern there.

3:54 PM

@MonicaCellio I rather hope they can be "converted" - I know quite a few people here started out posting that sort of answer but now are solid contributors

@enderland agreed. I seem to recall seeing some hints that this person can be a productive contributor (don't remember, not going through the profile now), but some tutelage is needed.

I just saw your edit to the "be a pal" answer -- thanks.

@MonicaCellio yeah I figured that comment to me basically was the "why

it doesn't have to be a long answer for it to explain why

Right -- we don't require essays (and some long answers ramble too much anyway). Just support for the statements being made.

I've notcied that in particular when I have a "bullet list" of ideas as an answer, sometimes you can say "do this, because this reason" and it's literally a single sentence for a mini-answer

While nice and perhaps the only workable strategy, not everyone is in a position they can just "quit" and ignore fundamental workplace issues they have. See this discussion for why answers fundamentally saying "just quit" are not good for this site. — enderland 16 mins ago

^^^ well I for one am mostly worried when a post (thanks to lemming upvotes in a hot question) makes an impression that just quit answers are welcome. We really need moderators serious enough about this sort of abuse

user image

troublesome pop-slogans are better be deleted to avoid broken windows and turning Q&A site into brainless polling device

Blog - Stack Exchange: The Trouble With Popularity

Jeff Atwood on January 31, 2012

Way back in 2008, we had Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit, on the Stack Overflow podcast. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, but one of the things they said that always stuck with me was that Reddit always took an explicitly hands-off, no moderation approach to their content from the very beginning.

I found that a bit shocking, since I’ve… never seen that work. Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation — and more so with every passing year. We have literally hundreds of community moderators. We spend …

21

Q: Is 'Quit your job' an acceptable answer?

A lot of the questions on Workplace are getting an answer along the lines of 'You should quit'. There are some cases where i can see this as a viable answer but the majority of the time I think it shouldn't be used. The main reason why i disagree with it being an answer is that people come to W...

discussion answers

4:28 PM

0

Q: What job titles should I be searching for if I want to do develpment without design?

I am recently returning to system development after more than a decade in other things. I live in Peru but would like to find work with a company in the UK that allows developers to work remotely. I have put together a couple of applications and uploaded my code to get up to date and have writt...

job-search applications

this question seems totally off topic but I'm not sure how to explain why

yes, which is why, again, we need a system to flag things as offtopic that is not undoubtedly stupid

I want to edit it to basically be "how can I get a better feel for what job responsibilities are just from job titles?" but I'm not sure this is what they are asking

I just don't understand what the issue would be with a custom flagging reason text box

for the offtopic section

like look at this, and how absurd the offtopic bit is

user image

user image

or any other thing that is clearly offtopic but not in the list, even though in the first screen the thing clearly states anything that is not mentioned in the help center falls into that category

4:54 PM

am I the only one who thinks downvoted questions w/ upvoted answers are anomalies?

@AlexM. one of my top voted answers is one of those :D

@AlexM. huh, weird. When you can actually vote to close (as opposed to just flagging) there's an "other" option under off-topic where you can provide a new reason. I didn't know that wasn't available for flagging.

@MonicaCellio ah yes I remember now

it's reputation based

Hi, welcome to The Workplace. Unfortunately, this sort of question is not really on topic - see here for a list of off topic questions. If you edit to focus a bit more on your practical and tangible question it will be considerably more on topic here. — enderland 5 secs ago

CV's please, this is a "tell me what to do" question right now

@AlexM. voting to close is reputation-based (3k now that we've graduated). But I'm puzzled by the difference in the interfaces on this point.

4:57 PM

no no, extra flagging options is also rep based

which seems weird to me

I can't think of a reason for that to be that way

yeah that's really weird

I have a "custom text" flag reason

> other (needs ♦ moderator attention)
This question needs a moderator's attention. Please describe exactly what's wrong.

I also have that one

but that calls for moderator attention

while offtopic flags can be seen in the review queue I think

moderator attention flags are separate

and afaik they should be used only when things need to be deleted completely

I think I'm wrong here, in the review queue there's close votes and stuff

@AlexM. You can have good answers to bad question

in Game Development, Jan 24 at 22:22, by Byte56

The thing is, you're flagging for moderator attention, when really it's just a close vote.

here's what I meant

@MonicaCellio It is avalable monica but the others do not show up in the flag cue

5:05 PM

in Game Development, Jan 24 at 22:24, by Byte56

OK, I guess that's an SE issue then. Close flags don't usually alert us in the same way as moderator attention flags.

@Chad I don't see it in your screen shot. I'm talking about "other" under "off topic" (the second stage), not "other - needs a moderator" in the initial flag dialogue.

@MonicaCellio yeah its just the needs mod attention

@Chad what do you think makes a question bad in this case?

I think only a good question core can spawn good answers

and any bad question with good answers can be fixed so that the good core gets highlighted more

thus, questions with -3 votes having answers with 5+ upvotes should be considered for fixing

main problem is normally bad questions with lots of downvotes are hard to edit the core question without screwing over existing answers

@AlexM. When it asks something bad subjective.

5:13 PM

yes, and answers to subjective questions should never be upvoted

because they're not real answers

@AlexM. There are problems with "Fixing" someone's question. What you really mean is completely change the question

which creates problems

@AlexM. You can have a good answer to a bad subjective question. The problem is you are morelikely to attract bad answers

Though I still prefer to close the question quickly before the answers come in

but subjective questions have to be closed for being opinion based, right?

usually off topic

answers to subjective questions should not be upvoted simply because they do not follow the rules, just like the question doesn't either

almost nothing that gets asked here should be closed for being opinion based. Most should be off topic, too broad, or unclear

5:20 PM

@jmac:

1

Q: Auto-protect questions that get more than N answers from new users in a 24-hour period

Expanding the criteria for auto-protection has been discussed in the past: Should we automatically protect all questions with more than N answers? But I think that discussion addresses the wrong problem: Protecting a question with a large number of answers doesn't do anything to fix the probl...

feature-request new-users protected-questions

@Shog9 oh man I would love something like this, even as a stop-gap measure. Being able to immediately protect questions has been huge for us (even though I only do that after at least two answers are on the "downvote and delete" train)

@enderland not everyone is as judicious with protect as you are. I've seen a few questions "preemptively" protected here, and more elsewhere - it's pretty depressing, particularly when the existing answers suck.

2

Would like to train folks not to do that.

@Shog9 well that's a symptom of another problem - workplace is unique because any of us can do that after 0 hours. other site moderation has to wonder, "leave question to be a bad answer fest" or "protect now when I go afk"

(perhaps, not sure on why people protect elsewhere, I know mainly programmers and workplace perspectives on this)

@enderland I'm not necessarily talking about fast protections - if a question is a week old and gets a lousy answer, then someone sees it & slaps protect on it, then it sits and rots for the next month... That's even worse!

@Shog9 ah, gotcha

5:29 PM

So yeah, I'm trying to address this notion that some folks have, "If I don't protect it now, I won't be around when it gets 30 of these answers and THE SKY WILL LITERALLY FALL AND CRUSH US ALL!"

unfortunately, that sort of thing happens on a lesser scale here almost always

@enderland definitely more frequent than on SO, but still there's the problem of correctly identifying scenarios where it is happening vs. those that are just getting a lot of views (& no / few answers).

@enderland While I agree we do get some bad answers as our user base has grown, I do not see the problem as scaling linearly

@Chad in a good way or bad way?

it seems the same problems we had with bad answers still exist, but they are not getting wors

5:36 PM

no, but I feel like I spend a lot more time downvoting/commenting on bad answers now

2

which means as the user base grows if the trend remains the bad answers will start getting washed out at some point.

@enderland because we are getting more questions. I am starting to wonder if our history is creating more fear of what could happen than the reality of what is happening would bear out

@Chad hmm, I suppose part of it is I'm now one of the few who can actually cast delete votes

@enderland yeah there is that

having mainly only jmort active as a mod too I guess makes it feel more significant to me - otherwise the "flag queue" would start getting cleared out a loooot faster

@enderland I agree what we really need are mods

5:41 PM

there's only four of us with 20k+ rep right now

which I believe is what you need to delete answers

@enderland yeah it is

im 3500 away :p

so unless 3/4 of us hit "Delete" on an answer, then the only way they get cleaned up is moderator involvement or flagging

5:55 PM

@enderland more voting! Help us help you! :-) (Just kidding; I'm thousands away yet.)

@enderland yeah, I've seen that on some other sites too and it's a real problem. It needs to be easier to delete bad content.

@MonicaCellio I don't think the community flag queue even shows up for most people either, unless you have 10k+ rep (iirc)

6:13 PM

@enderland when Stack Overflow was young, I dedicated an hour each day to closing and deleting questions. Not that I didn't do either outside of that hour, but 4:30-5:00pm was "review 10K lists" time.

@enderland yes, the flag queue is for 10k users (I see that, and run through it every day). But as a 10k, not 20k, user, I can't vote to delete, so all I can do from there is downvote and reflag.

(Sometimes I use a custom flag to request a post annotation, or a fast deletion.)

@MonicaCellio this will be streamlined within a few days.

@Shog9 glad to hear it!

LQ queue changes are mostly in place as of late Saturday - anyone with edit privs can review a flagged post, things that can't be deleted by the community are automatically forwarded to moderators.

Needs a few days to test/bake, then we'll be redirecting NAA flags.

@Shog9 this is so useful for this site, in particular, SO has a lot less problem since an "answer" can be stand alone code

I'm excited to see that

6:28 PM

@enderland well, y'all have more of a problem with answers that are legitimately intended to address the question but, per the rules of the site, don't; SO has more of a problem with things that are in no way shape or form answers.

user image

That's moderator-handled flags on Stack Overflow

.... wow

@Shog9 yes, and that's been a source of some confusion about NAA flags -- does NAA mean "didn't intend to answer" or "didn't intend to answer within site rules"? Different people do different things. It'll be nice when that's all funneled into a review queue.

alternatively it'd be nice if sites could just customize their flags :)

I expect some other sites have this problem too -- I assume Skeptics does, and I know BH does.

And there are 80+ sites I've never visited; wouldn't be surprised if some of them have this issue too. :-)

Eh; there's a fine line to walk between customizing everything per-site and not creating such wildly different expectations for how things work as to make it impossible to document.

6:31 PM

I think programmers would like similar stuff to what we want

You hit a point where the nature of questions make answers impossible to moderate effectively - we have several sites walking the line there.

@Shog9 the main problem is whether there are enough active users/moderators though, relative to question volume

a site with 10 questions a day and mostly inactive mod/users will have a problem too

@Shog9 wow. (And... comment vandalism? That's a thing?)

@enderland well, that's a failure-mode for a site, but it intensifies dramatically when there aren't clear, easily-evaluated rules for what is and is not allowed. Attempting widespread deletion for incorrect or misleading answers on SO would be madness - but that's exactly what some sites require, so... You have to do something there that SO does not: come up with easily-explained rules for when it's appropriate to delete something.

@MonicaCellio yup. It's pretty rare - you might say occurrences oscillate.

@Shog9 oh, yeah. I get that -it's among other reasons why I'm so quick to downvote mediocre or low quality stuff

6:38 PM

@Shog9 yeah, I see its share of the graph; I've never seen one of those as a mod so had no idea it was even out there.

@MonicaCellio IIRC, we "adjusted" the criteria for it a while back to make it even less frequent - it's really one of those situations that wouldn't even be worth a flag if it wasn't effectively impossible to detect without it.

@Shog9 and the situation that's flag-worthy is somebody deleting a bunch of his comments? Given what's often said about the value of comments, why do we care about that? How is deleting comments vandalism? Must be some rage profile I haven't encountered, but I'm wondering what the big deal is.

@MonicaCellio That's why we adjusted the criteria - we really only care if someone goes through and deletes all of their comments, when they have a lot of them. Breaking hundreds of threads in an afternoon is disruptive and will end up just leading to more work later on.

And yeah, this happened which is why we built something in to prevent it.

(IIRC, this was also the origin of the "view all comments" mod-tool, but I might be misremembering that)

@Shog9 ah, that makes sense. It'd probably take months to find all the now-obsolete comments left stranded by something like that.

comments are a mess

it also might be interesting to auto protect questions with a certain ratio of comments/posts...

6:49 PM

comments, n. a mess

7:03 PM

ahhh damnit accidentally hit "leave open" in the CV review queue on a bad one. lol

> Thank you for reviewing 20 close votes today; come back in 4 hours to continue reviewing.

2 hours later…

8:46 PM

-1

Q: What job titles should I be searching for if I want to do development without design?

I am recently returning to system development after more than a decade in other things. I live in Peru but would like to find work with a company in the UK that allows developers to work remotely. I have put together a couple of applications and uploaded my code to get up to date and have writt...

career-development job-search applications

can we get a few close votes on that

9:10 PM

moderator elections?

wasn't it unlikely to happen?

Why are you still here? GO NOMINATE!

5

Election discussions - no softball questions, these mods gotta be TOUGH!

3

10:13 PM

→ 15 messages moved to Workplace 2014 Election

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Transcript for

Mar '1424

The Water Cooler

General chit-chat for workplace.stackexchange.com. Feel free t...

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