The Side Channel

By the way, stopped my secretary / new members stuff at the kayaking club. Too much negativity on the board. And it got to be a bit much. MIght rejoin.

b degnan

12:24 PM

I just cannot image kayakers with negativity. My partner makes wooden kayaks, and everyone with whom she goes out is almost too chipper

Maarten Bodewes

Meet our vice 80 year old treasurer.

If you think actual CC is a joke, you've got another one coming. And dear you if there is a letter in the wrong place.

But yeah, she's from the time that you remake the paper garland 4 times.

If it were up to her I suppose we should stop kayakking to make sure that the contribution can be lowered.

Maarten Bodewes

12:49 PM

Her way of handling things is to throw everything at you in the monthly meeting, leaving you to defend for yourself. Instead of e.g. calling the member or me and resolving it in a friendly way. That's kind of hard to take if you just spend days on end managing the club during COVID-19.

SEJPM

1:37 PM

3

A: Migration Paths for Crypto.SE

What you were told in chat by Grace Note was (emphasis by me): Just make a meta thread demonstrating the need, anyone can do it. We'll then review it and then enable the path if it seems appropriate. As Abby explains in this Meta post on Data Science (again, emphasis by me): We add addi...

^ @mentallurg this may be an interesting read for you and its references (also for others who wonder why they can only migrate questions to crypto.meta.se)

Along with the info that we have less than 5 migrations away per month and per site regardless of site

which 10k users can check here: crypto.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats

mentallurg

@SEJPM: Thank you. It was really a puzzle to me, why the only migration target is meta. Now I understand that. The reason is to collect statistics. But to me this sounds weird, really. Any 1st yes student with an IT background can create a script to get such statistics for questions migrated to particular date.

SEJPM

@mentallurg oh yeah, you can collect the stats and the data from that migration page yourself

I suppose SE needed something to give 10k users and being able to more easily inspect the state of the site and its migrations was one idea

mentallurg

@SEJPM: To me it sounds like following: "I am manager of SE. I don't understand what is going, but I can get some feeling if I see posts here, on meta". To me this just not professional from teh point of view of SE. Tell to Joel :)

@SEJPM: To me, a solution can be simple: Ask users, take top 3 or top 5 options, let it go. Check in every 3 month. Or (since SE has problems asking community) ask at least moderators and implement what they suggest.

SEJPM

1:54 PM

@mentallurg you mean for migration paths?

mentallurg

yes

SEJPM

I think they said at one point they don't like the current migration system

because it's really messily implemented

and they rather want to see less migrations than more

mentallurg

??

:) :)

SEJPM

so not giving sites migration paths makes sense to them I guess

mentallurg

instead of repairing? :(

SEJPM

1:56 PM

well, that would probably take a lot of time and they probably don't see it as worth it

instead I think they announced they wanted to have some better integration between the big / programmer sites

mentallurg

may be you know, on SO there is a change in place since 6 months or so - closing a question requires 3 votes, not 5. Unbelievable, that SE was able to be so flexible :)

SEJPM

lemme go and find it

SO probably needed that though as they have a way higher volume of close-worthy questions

mentallurg

@SEJPM: I have a feeling SE as a company has became more bureaucratic. SE is missing people Elon Musk.

SE doesn't want to be valuable to users, doesn't want to be cool, modern.

@SEJPM: I have to go for a couple of hours. If you post anything, I'll check it later.

SEJPM

bye

SEJPM

2:13 PM

76

Q: What does "Should we add technical Q&A sites like Server Fault, Super User, and DevOps to Stack Overflow?" mean?

The site satisfaction survey has the question: Should we add technical Q&A sites like Server Fault, Super User, and DevOps to Stack Overflow? I find it very unclear what this means. It could be: Should we merge technical Q&A sites like Server Fault, Super User, and DevOps into Stack Overf...

seems to be what I thought about

72

Q: Merging technical sites with Stack Overflow

Listening to the recent podcast A chat with our CEO about the future of our company and community it seems that merging other SE technical sites with Stack Overflow is imminent. That was also vaguely hinted in most recent Survey What does “Should we add technical Q&A sites like Server Fault, Sup...

discussion podcast

kelalaka

4:06 PM

Hmm,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Jonathan Hutton

6:48 PM

Can I ask this question on Crypto or is it just a waste of good time and brainpower, moderator strain, and down votes to me?

If a one time pad reduced a theoretical plain text to a cipher text to all of the same number, this would be considered unbreakable under what proof? This would obviously only work if the key was secure. The idea is to add a perfect example of indistinguishably of a cipher text is if all the cipher text was a repeated number or series of numbers. Example being: attackthefortatdawn (plain text)

indistinguishably *typo indistinguishability

kelalaka

7:15 PM

@JonathanHutton everybody can ask questions. To ask a well-recieved question one first establishes the research they made, then exhibits their understanding, solving, finding, etc, and then ask the question.

Maarten Bodewes

@JonathanHutton As it stands it is not a good question in my opinion as it depends too much on the details; you should list the entire algorithm. Ciphertext indistinguishability is not about the ciphertext for a single message, it is about achieving indistinguishability of the ciphertext over multiple messages (using the same key), even when chosen by an attacker.

kelalaka

7:45 PM

Can the mods see how many votes are cast currently?

SEJPM

Yes, we see numbers with daily resolution

Any 25k user does

kelalaka

8:25 PM

Could one of you share ?

Maarten Bodewes

8:41 PM

I guess we have an average of 60 votes a day, with high on 120 and low on 30 with a clear distinction with weekend (low) and week (high).

Sharing the full graph is kinda against the idea of privileges :)

SEJPM

@MaartenBodewes meh

Maarten Bodewes

Traffic hash slowed a bit lately but not by much

SEJPM

63

Q: Proposed micro-privilege: site analytics

Remember when I asked a few months ago: Help us identify micro-privileges for top users? The idea was to be able to start rolling these out quickly and not take too much developer and designer time. In particular, the idea I suggested in the question, site analytics, should have been a quick turn...

feature-request status-completed moderator-tools privileges analytics

is the post introducing /site-analytics

> Please understand that we are making this a high level privilege because we think our most engaged users can make the best use of the data and not because we are being secretive. We won't sign these folks to confidentiality agreements or anything, so they are free to use the data for things like answering meta questions. But mostly the idea is to give a fun little perk to people who have given so much more to the community and the success of the site.

note that this is not the mod-only analytics of /admin/analytics where we should be a bit more careful

18

A: Which data from the moderator analytics can I share?

There's a lot to unpack here. tl;dr is "use your best judgment" but that's probably not very helpful. So, in no particular order: For one thing, the message is just plain old. I think it's as old as the mod analytics page itself, and I don't think it's ever been changed, even as the analytics ...

And I think a fear of low votes from a few semi high rep users threatening trust in the system is enough to share some rough data

^ these are the total votes (up+down) accumulated per week for the last two years

(note the y-axis not starting at 0)

Page traffic seems to be a little bit lower than usual at this time with the usual summer drop

and the decline being a bit more immediate (traffic dropped by 20-30% at the start of may rather than the usual decline throughout may / june) than in the past years

It will be interesting to see if and how much traffic amount recovers in early september as it usually did

So TL;DR: no unsen drop in voting activity and the summer traffic hole is a little bit stronger and earlier than usual (probably due to covid)

kelalaka

9:15 PM

Thanks alot.

kelalaka

9:26 PM

I see this is up and downvotes. I wondered the number of elections voters that cast. High probably not allowed.

SEJPM

@kelalaka election stats will be published but only as aggregates

2015 example: crypto.stackexchange.com/election/1

2018.1 example: crypto.stackexchange.com/election/2

2018.2 example: crypto.stackexchange.com/election/3

> 1,528 voters were eligible, 485 visited the site during the election, 321 visited the election page, and 183 voted

^ during the last election

and actually there's also stats for right now (I didn't realize)

> 2,848 voters were eligible, 532 visited the site during the election, 435 visited the election page, and 233 voted

so we already got more voters than during all previous elections!

2

(at least in absolute numbers)

kelalaka

9:49 PM

Thnaks.

Maarten Bodewes

10:36 PM

Ah, OK, that's very reassuring. Also that all the calls to vote do actually help :)

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