@Eric Starting out with a 50 hour one isn't a good choice. ChäoS;HEAd is quite a bit shorter and you should play it anyway before Steins;Gate. Plus ChäoS;HEAd is a case where you really have to play the VN, since the anime was terrible.
But the anime did a pretty good job considering the difficulty of adapting a VN. A very large portion of VN adaptations of good games turn out to be terrible anime.
@Eric I think it's significantly better, but that's a debatable point. But the VN for ChäoS;HEAd is way better than the anime.
I've got it. Suppose you have edit privileges and you're in a FGITW situation with a fairly new user who probably isn't checking the page more than once a minute or two. You introduce an edit that creates errors in their post, but within 5 minutes (time scale needs to be worked out) you switch the edit back to something minor like a grammar correction. If they accumulate downvotes during that time, you've eliminated them from the competition, and even if they don't it's basically untraceable.
I did it in both of my identification answers today, even. First post the answer, then google for the necessary links and copy the synopses.
Admittedly, there's not much need on this site, but I was timing myself in case I ever decide to go back to Math and compete for the homework questions.
@Eric If all you want to do is troll, you can post almost whatever you want on any site for 5 minutes. Even that SO question took about 10 minutes to close.
Better trolling method: Ask a legitimate question. Wait 5 minutes. If no one answers then abandon it. If someone does answer within that time, change the question to a different one which makes their answer look stupid.
@Eric I'm trying to find the worst ways to abuse the system assuming mods can't see the merged edits. That's the best way to convince SE that they shouldn't merge edits untraceably.
@LoganM Well, I'd say targeting questions as you've been doing is the best way. It's hard to exploit one of "many" in a many-to-one relationship. I have a feeling there is a more sinister way to do this, though...
You could ask a question which is independent of the programming language, then tag it with a language, then switch language if it's answered in 5 mins.
Still not sinister, but another idea.
I think it should be 1 minute after the original post and 30 seconds after other edits.
@Eric Hard to say, and I don't think it's any more OP than editing the whole question to something else entirely. Tags are used differently on different sites. On our site it would be hard unless you can come up with a question that's valid for two different series. I think I could abuse [homework] on Math by tagging a question as such, waiting for hint-style answers, and then removing the tag and explicitly adding a "note:not homework" message to the question.
People on Math don't like hint-style answers for non-homework, but are apparently fine with it for homework.
I think we're going about this the wrong way though. The goal can't be random trolling. It has to either be targeting a specific user/group or else advancing your own position.
Nothing jumps out at me as abusable. Especially not when you can basically legally get mortarboard via serial voting. Most badges are either too easy to get via other means, or too hard that this wouldn't help. Sportsmanship might be the closest to something this would help with.
If there were badges for controversial posts, that would be something. But there aren't any that I can think of.
But I don't see how you can get reversal from it. You need to be the answerer. So either you use a second account to do the edit (which is just piling on already abuseable things) or you make it obvious that you've edited the question. Let's say you get away with that. While you might generate downvotes on the question, once you "fix" it you'll still need at least +10 or so on your answer (that's being generous), and a -5 question which is reasonable will get at least +5 if your answer gets +10.
@Eric Ah, I thought of something. You get a second account to post a question that quickly gathers -10 or so within 5 minutes, and post an answer from your main. It's still tricky to pull off, but I bet it could be done.
"Immediately" meant within a week or so. But in any case I think you still run into the problem that when your answer brings in voters, some of them will upvote the question too.
I think the easiest way to get reversal on SO is to just grab 20 accounts and go answer some questions that aren't likely to generate upvotes. You can farm quite a few in one day, and the serial upvoting script the next day won't reverse the badges.
But that isn't breaking the edit mechanic at all. It's breaking a totally different mechanic which SO people aren't likely to do anything about.
Actually, farming a lot (100 or more) of reversal badges overnight might be the one thing that would cause SE people to change their stance on removing badges. I don't think there are any other gold badges which are as farmable with this exploit.
@Eric Yes we did. I'm still thinking about the silent edits thing. It's clearly asking to be exploited, but the best exploits seem to be sort of minor.
@LoganM Not very. The harder part would be not getting banned for slamming the servers. (It would probably be pretty obvious if they all hit your question.)
@Eric It can be used to win FGITW battles, especially if you use a second account, but I'm not sure it's any safer than strategic downvoting from a second account (and leaving the downvotes. Cancelling them will trigger more flags).
@LoganM Yup. Unless you did a random wait() in between. A reddit view would have a bell-curve to its hit count. Start slow, work up, then slow down. Hitting it from proxies would be 50/sec, for example, easily noticeable.
@LoganM Well yeah, if you had two legit accounts you could prob get away with it. Except for the IP issue.
Speaking of which, if you really hate another user who does FGITW, use a secondary account to strategically downvote other answerers. You might even get him banned if you're lucky.
Anyway it's pretty clear there are lots of exploits with the current system, but the merging edits seems to be surprisingly hard to exploit. Admittedly, it's not as ridiculous as having 20 accounts, but the best we've come up with is winning some FGITW and trolling. I'd be very surprised if that were the best we could do.
@Eric Let's first consider editing other people's posts. I'll assume you're on your primary account because secondary accounts are easy to exploit. To pull it off, you need to have edit privileges. You also need to be on a site where it's very unlikely that the post would be edited again in 5 minutes, even to fix vandalism. But it has to have enough traffic for something to happen in 5 minutes, and most of those people can't realize in that time that you've vandalized the post.
Those are some pretty heavy restrictions. SO is probably the closest thing to filling them, and I can't see it being used to much benefit there.
FGITW might be an exception because all you need to do is draw a single downvote to the other answer and then yours will be on top. But even that seems risky
So let's focus on editing your own posts within 5 minutes after posting them.
@Eric If someone notices that you've vandalized the post, they're likely to downvote your answer and flag you. Even if you survive the flag because of merging edits being untraceable, if it happens repeatedly eventually mods will catch on.
I could see this being used for what I'd call "activism". Post a bad question, then wait for people to downvote, then edit into a good question and then go complain on meta about how people are downvoting well-thought-out interesting questions.
@Mysticial I tend not to bother finishing my answer after I see the upvote storm. I mean, I'm still a junior programmer compared to people like you and paxdiablo.
@Eric That's a nice touch. You could even make the user have a slightly controversial but allowable username like "I LUV FORTRAN" or something stupid, and have this happen repeatedly. Then make a case that the user is being targeted despite having reasonable and interesting questions.
@LoganM They probably would if someone did it. If you made 3-4 accounts and pointed out all of them getting repeatedly downvoted on good questions, to the point where meta posts about bad downvoting are getting +30 or +40... they might see it as an issue when you came forward.
But that's really pushing it.
@Mysticial I've only had a better-than-upvoted answer once, and only because it was more detailed. Which apparently is not a good thing.
One form of abuse is drawing downvotes to convert them into sympathetic upvotes. A -4 or -5 correct answer is very likely to get at least enough upvotes to get back to neutral (at least on Math), and sometimes it overshadows the higher upvoted answers if it gets posted to chat or something. An answer that would have sat at +1 or +2 is an effective +4 after that in terms of rep.
@LoganM Then perhaps you could do what we discussed with the Reversal badge. Garner -5 or so, change it to a good question, then get upvoted back to 0. With 5, you'd get (5 * 5) - (5 * 2) = 15 rep for a neutral question.
@Eric That's the thing. I want something that I can argue to SE that it's abuseable. If I have to do it myself to demonstrate that it's abuseable, then it's not good enough.
@Eric I'm not sure SE cares about badges, even if we do. They ban "heinous cheating" which apparently includes creating other accounts to upvote your answers to get Enlightened or Good Answer, but doesn't include creating other accounts to upvote your posts to get Mortarboard.
@Mysticial They should care about other badges on sites other than SO. Arqade has almost 8 times as many Famous Question badges as they do Mortarboard badges.
A private beta with 2500 users. That's 5 times our current size, and we're public. x.x
Not that I thought we had any chance of being as large as SO anyway, but it'd be nice if we could at least bring in new users faster than a couple per day.
@JNat Interesting. Chat doesn't give me any notification when a mod edits my posts, though I can tell it was him from the history. I would have thought I'd get some notification in the same way that I do when it happens on the main site.
@LoganM You shouldn't need to. It would be annoying if all chat changes had notifications, due to the frequency that they can occur in a given time frame.
@MadaraUchiha I agree that's why they should happen, and I'm not questioning that most of the time that is the case. What worries me is that mods can edit old posts that not even the original posters can edit, nor are they warned that their post was changed. Admittedly anyone reading can check the edit, but in practice I suspect very few people would bother to do so.
Math had enough problems with moderators doing well-intentioned but practically untraceable controversial things, like deleting contest problems until the time period expired, that things like this tend to worry me. That's also why merging edits on the main site is a bit troublesome.
I have just seen this within the past few days and cannot figure out how it works. The video I talk about is here:
It's the top rated answer from this Stack Overflow question: Why was this program rejected by three compilers?
How is this bitmap able to show a C++ program for "Hello World"?
I am having some difficulty compiling a C++ program that I've written.
This program is very simple and, to the best of my knowledge, conforms to all the rules set forth in the C++ Standard. I've read over the entirety of ISO/IEC 14882:2003 twice to be sure.
The program is as follows:
Here i...
@Eric And no, I'm not watching anime at work. All of the streaming sites are blocked, and I'll be damned if I'm going to install VLC on my workstation.
@Eric Generally, not too much. I do have a lot of books on computational magnetohydrodynamics, which is a very specialized subset of fluid dynamics, but not too much other than that.
@LoganM Why on earth do you have books specifically about computational magnetohydrodynamics? Is it some weak attempt at trying to make yourself seem smart?
@LoganM Well, I'll throw this at you anyway: If you have a bucket full of water, and a hose coming from the bottom of it, does the weight of the water contribute to the water pressure from the hose? Or only the height differential between the water surface and hose end?
@Krazer Ah, I've got 1920 width. (I only know how many tabs because I have TooManyTabs which has a counter on it.) But I can see all the favicons until I have 63.
@ShotgunNinja When I was in high school I was working on plasma physics at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and everything in plasma physics is just computational magnetohydrodynamics.
I run a patched gnome/metacity and I'm really annoyed about overlapping windows, so I've got tons of workspaces, each with only 2 or 3 windows, so there's 8 of them that each have 1 firefox window
Oh wow chat lags a lot for me. @Eric you need to consider both in general. The weight of the water is used to get the pressure at the start of the hose (i.e. at the bottom of the bucket). You'll need to apply Bernoulli's principle to get the pressure on the other end.
I don't know how easy it is to run multiple profiles on windows/mac, but it's great for separating the leisure browsing, with the ones related to work, with the ones related to high-risk like online-banking, mutual funds, invenstments, credit cards, plus a 4th profile with everything vanilla for testing
@Eric When I'm getting fanart I regularly have hundreds of tabs open on one window. The most I ever got to IIRC was ~400 before I decided to save them all.
HardOCP has an image with an equation which apparently draws the Batman logo. Is this for real?
I have just seen this within the past few days and cannot figure out how it works. The video I talk about is here:
It's the top rated answer from this Stack Overflow question: Why was this program rejected by three compilers?
How is this bitmap able to show a C++ program for "Hello World"?
I am having some difficulty compiling a C++ program that I've written.
This program is very simple and, to the best of my knowledge, conforms to all the rules set forth in the C++ Standard. I've read over the entirety of ISO/IEC 14882:2003 twice to be sure.
The program is as follows:
Here i...
