Chat of Things

Aurora0001

11:18 AM

The Area 51 page isn't looking great in terms of views now

Under 100

Aurora0001

12:00 PM

@BenceKaulics did you have any luck with the LinkedIn group?

Bence Kaulics

I have successfully joined the groups with the most members. But have not posted yet.

Working on a good itroduction so I won't e thrown out as a spammer.

Aurora0001

@BenceKaulics good idea, if you want a second opinion feel free to ask

Bence Kaulics

Maybe I will ask for review.

"The most important one is that the ‘PROMOTIONS’ section has disappeared." Pinned post from last year. Unfortunately LinkedIn removed the proper way of advertising in a group.

Aurora0001

@BenceKaulics I think it's less advertising and more sharing the site so people know it's there

If you want inspiration this might be helpful: reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/5hy0is/…

Bence Kaulics

Looks promising.

Aurora0001

12:07 PM

The trouble is that after about a day a Reddit post will be seen by pretty much no-one

Not like SE where questions/answers get bumped by various things

Bence Kaulics

12:20 PM

@Aurora0001 How much should I rephrase your text?

It is quite good as it is now.

Aurora0001

@BenceKaulics as much as you need to - probably best not to use it exactly the same because that will look like spam :P

I would get rid of the tl;dr bit for LinkedIn; it's mainly a reddit thing

Bence Kaulics

Yes, I certainly will repharse it. And OK tl;dr is not necessary then.

Bence Kaulics

12:58 PM

I have posted in one of the groups. Let's see what happens before I post in the others.

3

Aurora0001

Yeah, good idea; hopefully it'll go well

Bence Kaulics

1:51 PM

0

A: Community Promotion Ads - 2016

Aurora0001

Upvoted that

Bence Kaulics

Updated my answer on IoT meta.

Aurora0001

Also, might be worth keeping an eye on the iot tag on Stack Overflow for questions that we could migrate

stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/iot

Bence Kaulics

Good idea.

Aurora0001

It's not much use while we're in private beta but I can always comment on ones that might work well here

Bence Kaulics

1:54 PM

I go and subscribe for that tag so I can keep on commenting about us.

Aurora0001

This question could definitely be migrated if we were public:

0

Q: Turn Philips HUE Lights on When the Ambient Light is Below X

I have Philips HUE Lights throughout my office and I've been trying to find a way to get them to turn on when it gets below a set lux / ambient light luminous so we don't have to wait till some realises its way too dark and turn them all on. It would be far better if they supplemented the lightin...

Bence Kaulics

Absolutely.

Aurora0001

9 days left (at a minimum) though in private beta

Bence Kaulics

1088 question tagged with IoT, wow.

But yes pretty much is about programming.

Aurora0001

I don't understand how the suggested edit counter is supposed to work now

I submitted 2 tag wiki edits

and it's showing "3" on the edit counter

Well, I should say 'review counter', I think it counts everything

But there isn't anything for me to review at all

And now it's zero after my 2 edits were approved

Bence Kaulics

2:14 PM

Did you read Helmar's meta post about it?

Aurora0001

yeah, it just seems strange that it counted 3

I assume it might have been a reopen vote item that I'd already voted to reopen before so I wasn't eligible

Helmar

That counter is just beyond useless^^

2

8.6 questions and <100 views

We neeeed to go public beta

Aurora0001

@Helmar honestly I think January 2017 is most likely at this rate

The SE team will probably be inactive over the Christmas period

My bet is Tuesday 3rd January 2017

Because they like launching things on Tuesdays it seems

Helmar

Yeah, otherwise they would be picking pro-tems and then just leave them alone because all the SE guys are on holiday :)

Bence Kaulics

1 Like for my LinkedIn post.

Yay.

Aurora0001

2:25 PM

@BenceKaulics better than none!

:P

At least there's no downvote equivalent on LinkedIn

Helmar

Can you link it or is there a login barrier to see it?

Bence Kaulics

I think you have to join the group first. But here is a link.

Aurora0001

Yeah, login only

Bence Kaulics

Yes, that is the other thing. So login and join the group, pretty complicated.

Helmar

Meh, I don't think anyone will invite the fake account I just created^^

2

Bence Kaulics

2:31 PM

I do not know if the admins approve all join request or it is enough a simple invitation by me.

But there are 93000 group members so maybe they do not care much.

Helmar

So you can invite into the group?

linkedin.com/in/ich-bins-74b041135

That's my amazing fake profile

Bence Kaulics

I see, and yes the name seems really fake. :D

Aurora0001

"Alternative Medicine" hahaha

Helmar

First in the list :)

Aurora0001

If anyone asks you're developing internet-connected herbal remedies :P

Helmar

2:37 PM

Exactly with residue free dissolving network modules on each tea leaf :)

Bence Kaulics

Helmar

strange

Bence Kaulics

Maybe you should be my connection.

Helmar

Maybe, but I don't wanna spoil your profile if you are using an actual one

Bence Kaulics

But if you do not mind I won't add your fake profile. ^^

Helmar

2:41 PM

:)

Aurora0001

2:52 PM

So we need 2 votes for our ads on EE, Super User and RPi

And 4 votes for Home Improvement

Then we can take advantage of about 10 days worth of ads before the 2017 ad thread starts :P

Helmar

3:16 PM

Holy shit, that was a fast up vote

Aurora0001

Well, that was a good answer :P

Only 3 unanswered questions now as well

Helmar

Yeah, the answer rate is very nice

Aurora0001

1 of those is waiting for clarification from the OP as well

So answer rate has gone nicely above 90%, and views have gone annoyingly under 100/day

Helmar

Yeah

Questions dropped well below 10 as well

Aurora0001

@Helmar yeah, I'll have to think of a couple for today if I can

Unfortunately I don't have an infinite supply of questions, so I'm trying to do only 1 per day to save my ideas

Fundamentally, the problem is this: we need more users :P

I could always share at the /r/amazonecho subreddit, but it might seem a bit spammy for my last 2 reddit posts to be promotions for the same site

Helmar

3:26 PM

I can post there

Aurora0001

That'd be pretty good - did you see the quantcast graph I posted earlier?

quantcast.com/iot.stackexchange.com#/trafficCard

I strongly suspect the spike on December 12th is from Reddit

The only issue is the users came but didn't stay mostly

In more positive news, we're near 500 registered users

Helmar

Likely, yeah. Combined with Monday mornings where nobody wants to work and everyone just opens SE :D

Aurora0001

@Helmar hahaha definitely true

I never realised how much traffic SO lost on weekends

quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?country=US#trafficCard

Helmar

:D

I hadn't seen it as graph either

Aurora0001

Shows how many people are using SO for their job :P

AI Stack Exchange don't seem to be doing well - look at the 90 day graph:

quantcast.com/ai.stackexchange.com?country=US

1 massive spike

then nothing

Helmar

3:35 PM

I'll adapt your reddit post if you don't mind

For the Echo reddit

subreddit

Aurora0001

Not a problem, just be aware some people may subscribe to both

So if they're too similar it may look like spam

Anyway, I'll be away for an hour or so, but feel free to ping me and I'll read things when I get back.

Helmar

3:47 PM

reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/5iv08y/…

Hopefully I didn't miss anything big with my first reddit post ever :D

Aurora0001

4:16 PM

@Helmar it got caught in the spam filter

shows as [removed] to me

If you look on the sidebar

you should see a 'message the mods' option

you should be able to send them a message asking for it to be removed from the spam filter

Helmar

Where do I see that it has been flagged for spam?

Or deleted for that matter

Aurora0001

It's impossible for you (while logged-in) to tell

If you open an incognito tab and go to it, you'll see what I mean

It is almost certainly the spam filter, because it got my post too

Helmar

Ok, I see

What do I write the mods? Are there magic words to mention?

Aurora0001

Not really, just something like this will work:

"Hi, I just posted a thread recently but it seems to have been caught by the spam filter. Here is the link: ____. Could you take a look?"

Helmar

Ok, I'll do that

Aurora0001

4:34 PM

On a positive note, at least our beta isn't going as badly as Moderators

0.3 questions per day

27 views per day

Helmar

That's pretty much just dying slowly

Aurora0001

Yeah, the content that's there is good though

It's worth reading this:

12

Q: How can I promote my site/forum?

As a moderator on a young Stack Exchange site, I've been wondering how I can promote my site. This is a general question, so it shouldn't be Stack Exchange specific. Many forum moderators face this question, too. I don't want to go to places like Reddit and just spam links all over the place. Bu...

site-growth promotion

Helmar

They went almost a week without any question between Dec. 06 and 13th

Aurora0001

Yeah, we don't want IoT to be like that

This one's also a good read:

11

Q: How to attract experts of the field to my community?

I'm a moderator on a brand new site, how can I help drive expert users to it? This will help grow the community as well as improving the content on the site.

site-growth

Ghanima

@Aurora0001 since we've got both those questions on our meta, would you like to write up additional answers citing the best of those two linked?

Aurora0001

4:39 PM

@Ghanima can do, just reading some other relevant threads as well

Ghanima

Thanks

I am on mobile, everything is cumbersome

Aurora0001

5:06 PM

0

A: Where can we get more Subject Matter Experts?

I've done some further research around this question, because it is almost certainly the most important question of this beta. I can summarise almost all the sources and opinions I've read into three simple words, though, despite this being an enormously complex topic: content is king. The arti...

@Helmar looks like your post got removed from the spam filter

reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/5iv08y/…

Helmar

Apparently mod restored it about 5 minutes ago according to my inbox

Aurora0001

I've upvoted it though so let's hope it goes well

Helmar

Yeah, we need tons of biased upvotes

:)

There's also a Smartthings subreddit where we can post something in another week ;)

Aurora0001

Yeah, it might be best to wait a little bit in between

I'm a bit hesitant to post there because one of the new users who joined seems to be a mod there

iot.stackexchange.com/users/406/jody-albritton is probably reddit.com/user/jodyalbritton

Helmar

5:21 PM

Well maybe we can ask him in a while if he'll make a post there.

Aurora0001

@Helmar yeah, hard to contact him though unless he comes on chat

Helmar

That's true

Aurora0001

Could always message him on Reddit though

Helmar

Yeah, of course, that's possible

Aurora0001

The 'greatest hits' are looking... not great

iot.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits

In other positive news:

- the lowest voted answer is 0 (which means no-one has a negative answer score)

- the Community user nuked some of the worst questions

plus one more upvote until I get the totally useful power of synonymising

except you need 4 others to upvote your synonym proposal

and only Helmar has that privilege at the minute

Helmar

5:29 PM

Eh, no voting on synonyms is not based on 1250

It's worse, it's about score in the tag

Which means that functionality is basically useless

Aurora0001

iot.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms

You have to have some rep in that tag and have 4 others upvote the suggestion

Helmar

Yeah, on ELU almost all tag synonyms are created by mods because even for clear cut synonyms with lots of questions we can't find enough eligible people to vote on them

Aurora0001

It would make much more sense to scale it down to 2 users approving (or just not bother) for beta

Helmar

Just look at that barrage of diamonds: english.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms

Aurora0001

Mostly diamonds, yeah (but there are a few of yours)

After tag synonyms, there's another useful privilege: protecting questions

Something I'll never need to do

Ghanima

5:49 PM

Protecting questions is not as cool as it seems

Aurora0001

Doesn't Community just do it anyway when it's really needed?

Other than that it just deters new users

Which is not what we need :P

Ghanima

Community does after a certain number of answers has been deleted

Sometimes it is useful though

Aurora0001

Hoooray! 1251 rep now

Ghanima

Darn

Aurora0001

I had my moment of being ahead of Helmar, but he's now nearly 100 rep ahead

I'm winning in badges though

The sad thing is I'll probably just get near 2000 rep by the time we leave private beta

then the rep requirements will double

Oh well, it's worth it :P

@Helmar looks like your post had 2 upvotes and 1 downvote on reddit so far

And on reddit you upvote yourself by default

Helmar

6:07 PM

@Aurora0001 Oh no!

Although it's hard to earn badges right now

Nothing gets enough votes really

Aurora0001

@Helmar yeah, I'm not really far ahead anyway

Doing 1 review (your first one in each queue) gets you a bronze badge

And getting 10 upvotes on a question gets you a bronze badge

Seems like a bit of a disconnect to me

Helmar

But the second is awarded multiple times

Aurora0001

That's true

Helmar

There are two types of bronze badges

The ones that nudge users to try site functionalities and the ones that honor minor contributions

Aurora0001

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of the 'easy' ones

Like reading the tour

Helmar

6:11 PM

Autobiographer ;)

Aurora0001

@Helmar that too, yeah :P

Helmar

6:49 PM

1750 protect questions :)

Totally useful with about 100 visits a day

Helmar

7:00 PM

Is edge-device a sensible tag?

Aren't all IoT devices edge-devices

Aurora0001

Not sure what the point of it is - one user seems to tag all their questions with it

@Helmar thanks for the edit, no idea how I wrote that :P

I think your link on /r/amazonecho may have worked since a lot of users who joined recently have no other SE sites registered

Take a look at iot.stackexchange.com/users?tab=NewUsers&sort=creationdate

Helmar

@BenceKaulics

"Both of them are pretty common, so finding sensor would be a problem IMO."

Are they common or uncommon? If they are common, why is finding a sensor a problem?

@Aurora0001 Yeah, at least 6 1 rep users

Aurora0001

The Quantcast stats tomorrow will be the best indicator

Oh dear... "7.6
questions
per day"

Here's an interesting idea

Can IFTTT be connected to the Stack Exchange API?

Helmar

7:15 PM

Idk

Aurora0001

Might be an interesting question

Or at least part of the process will make a good question

There's been a lot of voting activity recently

I'm pretty sure these are from new users

Helmar

Well if the new users are from the Echo subreddit, they are not voting on my Echo related stuff ;)

Aurora0001

My echo question seems to have got a lot of votes for what it is

Bence Kaulics

@Helmar Forgot to add a "not" fixed it.

Helmar

7:36 PM

@BenceKaulics I thought so, wasn't entirely sure though

Aurora0001

7:53 PM

@Helmar I think you broke reddit...

"2 points (76% upvoted)
4 votes"

It's impossible to have 76% upvotes with 4 votes isn't it?

Should be 75 surely

Helmar

Oops

Aurora0001

It's a shame though, they used to show vote totals properly (e.g. 1000 up, 500 down)

Now they don't for some reason

Helmar

Wasn't that the new algorithm that Randall Munroe suggested

Aurora0001

Oh no, that was the sort algorithm

It used to be a Stack Exchange-style order by score

now it's the "hot" sort

Helmar

oh

Aurora0001

8:09 PM

Going for Strunk & White @Helmar?

Helmar

@Aurora0001 Not really, that's just an ancillary effect

Aurora0001

Fair enough, they're good edits nevertheless :P

Also, 3 questions until we hit 100!

Helmar

Nice, 100 is a good milestone

10

Q: How to instruct Google Home to play YouTube videos from *my* playlists

Everytime I ask Google Home to play a YouTube video, it searches for (seemingly) random playlists that may contain that video... sometimes it doesn't. I have my own playlists, with a specific video. How do I instruct Google Home to play a video from my YouTube playlist? Edit: Requests I've tri...

google-home chromecast

That question is only very implicitly about chromecast, is it?

Aurora0001

I would keep it to be honest

Or, if you do remove it, make it more explicit in the post body

since it doesn't actually mention Chromecast

Helmar

I think I'll not edit it out for now

Questions is back to 8.1

Aurora0001

8:25 PM

That's not so bad

My question keeps getting buried by all these edits :P

Helmar

I'm done for now

I'm actually a bit surprised that you could still create the ifttt tag

Aurora0001

Why wouldn't I be able to?

Helmar

No, I mean we are on day 10 and nobody before asked an ifttt question

Aurora0001

Oh, I see what you mean

Yeah, doesn't seem as popular as I expected

I can't help but feel like IFTTT want you to store passwords insecurely :P

Helmar

8:39 PM

I haven't really looked into it yet

Helmar

8:54 PM

Great you crashed it

isitdownrightnow.com/ifttt.com.html

ifttt is down

Aurora0001

wow

Just as you said that, my browser crashed...

Ghanima

9:23 PM

You need to stop

Ghanima

10:12 PM

Uhm. Just in case that someone reads the transcript later on. I was of course referring to Helmar and Aurora to stop answering as they make it impossible for everyone else to ever catch up.

Helmar

@Ghanima I wanted to, but the last answer to Auroras Echo question was just plain wrong

Ghanima

10:30 PM

Hmm

Well then, have fun und gute Nacht

Transcript for