@Mego Regarding PPCG v2: What happens if it takes off and requires more of your time?

that's a very real possibility you are aiming for.

...Are we really going to have 3 candidates for an election for 2 moderators?

Is there a problem with that?

well, I'd hate to be the 3rd

"We picked literally everybody else except for you"

I mean, I know they won't take it that way, but still

I'm just surprised by the number of candidates

We probably had too many last time :P

Besides, there's still time for Maria to swoop in

@FryAmTheEggman Who?

Digital Trauma :P

@NathanMerrill There has to be three, or the election won't come off.

@NathanMerrill PPCG v2?

@Hosch250 This | Chat room

@Mr.Xcoder Why?

So you have more control over the site?

Wait, so "PPCG v2" is actually a competing website, yet it's advertised in the Community Promotion Ads, with the text Shape the future of PPCG! to boot? That doesn't seem right.

@Hosch250 1) There are some features we need that SE cannot offer: Automatic TIO execution, leaderboards, Automatic Sandbox support, templates for different types of challenges such as CnRs, Answer-chaining, etc. 2) Voting would be significantly different, and we'd finally get rid of the HNQ effect. 3) It would be less prone to spam, because It would be outside SE.

@Mr.Xcoder TIO?

(I wanted to send this message a couple of minutes ago but the mobile chat doesn't let you send messages for some reason)

@Hosch250 Try it online! ಠ_ಠ

Oh.

So basically like the inline HTML/CSS/JS thing?

Not quite

@Mego It did meet the threshold in 2017. I'll try not to derail the topic of this chat room and take this discussion elsewhere now.

eh, seems like it's too easy to derail this chat room's topic, it's hard to keep it together ;_;

@NathanMerrill me irl

Q for the candidates as I was a little late: What would you do if a user produced some brilliant answers, but kept deleting them without warning? How would you stop them (if you would) from removing great answers from the community?

(Sorry if this is similar to any of the other questions in the Q&A)

@Dennis ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ No one wants to design a less crappy ad

@NathanMerrill I mean, I really want to win, but if I end up being "the candidate who ran so that we could hold an election", then c'est la vie.

@cairdcoinheringaahing You should ping the 3 candidates so they know to respond

(Although I'm pretty sure 2/3rds of them have already seen it :P)

@cairdcoinheringaahing CC @Mego

And here I was crafting a meaningful sentence :P

@cairdcoinheringaahing Depends a bit on why they are deleting them... as far as I'm aware it's impossible to prevent someone from deleting their own posts, even with the "locking" system currently in place (which only prevents edits).

@PhiNotPi Repeatedly deleting questions with answers will lead to your account being prevented from posting questions

But that doesn't prevent the deletion of any currently-existing questions, does it?

Nope.

@PhiNotPi Mods can undelete them.

I'm pretty sure they can lock them so they can't be deleted too, but I'd have to double-check on that.

Historical Significance lock => Can't be deleted iirc

wall of text incoming

@cairdcoinheringaahing Surprisingly enough, this is a very common issue in Charcoal, which I'm heavily involved in. Over there, the policy when finding a vandalized post (when the OP edited out all useful information), is to roll back the edit and write the following comment:

> Please do not vandalize your posts. By posting on the Stack Exchange network, you've granted a non-revocable right for SE to distribute that content (under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license). By SE policy, any vandalism will be reverted.

IMO, deleting a bunch of answers is no different then vandalizing your own posts, and should not be allowed. If there wasn't a clear reason edited in to the post (Not valid, longer than some other answer, breaks a rule, etc.), I would undelete all of them, and write a similar comment on one of the posts or in a mod message.

If they are on a spree of vandalizing/deleting, I would dole out a short suspension to minimize the damage they can do. And if a delete/undelete war starts, I would lock the post in question.

I would also let the user know that they can have posts disassociated from their account if they truly don't want their name on it.

But in the end, due to SE Licensing, once a user posts an answer/question, it belongs to the community, and they don't have a right to delete it willy-nilly

I agree with the above, in that ultimately users should not be allowed to arbitrarily delete their own answers. I can kinda envision a few scenarios in which this can happen: (1) the users deletes a large number of historical answers at once, (2) they delete a good historical answer every once in a while, (3) they have the tendency to post and then quickly delete their new (but otherwise good) answers.

In the case of 3, it's basically fine, IMO

Case 3 is fine.

3 isn't ideal, but it's certainly better than the other cases

In the case of 3, I'd probably try to figure out why they were deleting so many of their posts, but it's not a huge cause for concern

But might indicate that it's worth talking to said user... maybe it's a confidence issue or something and hopefully can be resolved.

ninja'd

lol

IIRC, there's an automatic mod flag raised when one user deletes too many posts too quickly

The other website I've modded simply didn't allow people to delete or edit their own posts after a 5-minute window.

Which site was that?

fluther.com/users/PhiNotPi

nb4 people go through all my old stuff

I ended up taking away the "mod" banner next to my name because if anything I've just been doing tech support in recent years.

@PhiNotPi Don't worry I already am

TBH, Fluther has kinda gone downhill recently, 90% of which is due to tech issues that started to pop up over time, with me being the only guy who had time to look into fixing stuff.

Imagine trying to debug a website while having ~0 contact with the people who actually wrote the website.

@PhiNotPi Having rescued a wordpress site from an ingrained, personally-targeted hacker, yes. I know.. you have so much respect from me. I can't imagine doing it if I wasn't getting paid, but volunteering..

In the end, I think I accomplished a lot (despite only being able to code on a live website and not having any proper staging): added the ability to ban all users on an IP address, added a way to see a list of all new users who'd recently added a profile page (#1 source of spam), added a box on the main page to list out users who were currently in a chat room, added the ability to flag profiles, and created an entire new Q&A section of the website just for moderator use.

Speaking of which... that website is still so buggy in so many terrible ways.

My #1 most upvoted answer was where I shared a URL that caused people to upvote my answer when clicked.

I wish SE had that :P

@PhiNotPi Thast's... I would be irritated, but then find it so funny that I'd upvote it anyway, which it would have done automatically.

So, the long and short is they do their upvotes with a Get request?

Promptly digs into SE

@Hosch250 Probably not even as complex as you're thinking. This is the link (don't bother clicking because you're not logged in): fluther.com/lurve/great/response/2514414 They literally implement the upvote button as a link.

:O

I'm not on Fluther.

So does SE :O

OK, try this (just a favorite): codegolf.stackexchange.com/posts/155281/vote/5

> 404

Yeah. Looks like SE is better about this.

The post itself is a 404

That might have something to do with it

Yeah, SE has it handled for the basic cases, anyway.

I'm sure someone could break it, but it isn't worth it ATM.

And of course, I'll let them know if I do.

Immediately after you exploit it to prove that it works, right?

Before.

@PhiNotPi I'm actually having a hard time decided who to vote for. I liked your answers the best (I think), but you also have the lowest moderation score

@PhiNotPi Should exploit it on the meta post bringing attention to it, for the chaos factor

I'd report it publicly on Meta SE with an upvote link to my post.

Heh, ninja'd.

The content would be "SE is broken. Click this link: {url}"

the key here is to exploit it twice on your post

the first exploit is an upvote, the second is a downvote

Wow. That could get interesting.

@NathanMerrill vote me vote me vote me! lol

Phi has my vote. He's always been nice. Mego's answers are better than DJ IMO, but he has a conflict of interests, so...

I've worked with Phi on a couple projects.

Conflict of interest?

Do you mean PPCG V2?

Yeah.

He wants to be a mod so he can take down PPCG and force people to his site.

Actually...there's a really interesting meta post if it gets popular:

"Can I cross-post?"

I mean, the answer should be Yes, but it means that people can copy-paste answers

and potential license issues as well?

The licenser is the poster. They can license their content to multiple sites under multiple licenses.

SE only owns the content posted on their site. They do NOT own the original of the content, even if it was only posted on their site at one point.

So, SE can only use the content in CC-by-SA. The content creator can use it however they like.

One of the reasons PPCG doesn't have a real Core Wars implementation is that we'd just invite copy-pasting from competitors who'd already written excellent bots over the course of years.

I made my Core Wars KOTH specifically so that it did not compete with other implementations.

I believe BF Jousting was a real KOTH before being posted on PPCG.

So there could be pros and cons to having duplicate contests.

Might attract off-site people who already have answers, but also anybody on site with a good answer will just go compete at the pre-existing arena.