I would like to present an error message to viewers of my website when a video is blocked in their country due to legal requirements. Currently I have the following:
This video is unavailable in your country.
I feel that many non-English speakers will not understand "unavailable". Do you kn...
My problem is that I'm somewhere in between his POV and the ELU mods POV—I think there's stuff that could really be improved, and that we could all work together to make it a place that's friendly to experts and professionals.
@Dori i agree. if we could get Jeff + mods and any other interested parties into a room, i'm sure we could work this out. it's just... someone had to get someone's attention in order for that to happen
@Dori — Uncleared flags are one thing, but why not make that explicit? To suddenly go medieval on the mods here in a semi-veiled way is at least passive-aggressive if not outright hostile behavior.
@Dori Thanks for popping in - really appreciate the opportunity to sort this out... As someone who's devoted a fair amount of time to (I thought) adding value to the site, I'd be really grateful to know what the "quality problems" are.
@Robusto Yes - this is certainly how it has come across to me. We all thought things were just fine, and then suddenly it's "severe quality problems" and "a litany of standing problems". I'm all for constructive feedback, but I'm at a loss to know what's wrong with what I/we've been doing...
@Dori That's 78 questions. Out of 8256. And we were greenlit to have them, after that Boobs vs Tits question proved that we are capable to deal with them in an academic fashion.
@Dori Let's take a step back here. Certainly there must be a number of things that we could do to improve content, as with almost any SO site. Someone needs to address whether Jeff's actions in dealing with this issue were officially endorsed by the SO powers that be, and whether his treatment of mods and other users was appropriate.
@Dori Equally there's a fine line between a translation question and a "How do I express this concept neatly in English" question. Often the "I'm trying to express something I know how to say in another language" is background... and questions where it's not get closed very quickly.
@Dori This conversation we are having now about the vulgar questions, this is a conversation we could have and should have had before everything that happened in this meta thread.
@Dori Really? Examples, please? (If you can successfully answer a question without knowing any language other than English, then it's, ipso facto, not a translation question.)
Just say, "RegDwight, stop posting those polite comments welcoming total noobs to the site and trying to explain to them how it's supposed to work. Instead, just ban them." And I will happily do just that.
@Dori: What we're talking about now, it has nothing to do with my problems. We actually discuss these very things you are talking about, trying to make them better.
@Dori Look, let me put it this way. This site is still run by the very same people it was run by 10 months ago. We are all still here. If you are seeing problems, just talk to us. Like you are doing now.
@Dori — Well, then, as much as I hate to say it, and as much as I would hate to lose @Kosmonaut here, maybe the only thing he will understand is the departure of good people.
@RegDwight And that's what I'm here trying to do. Not respond to "but Jeff said this," but to work to help make ELU a better place (ideally, imo, with the current group of elected mods)
@Dori So when I come home from campus today, and my wife wants to know why I am so down, she'll ask "something bad with your dissertation"? No. "Something bad at work?" "No. It's the website I moderate, I'm getting a lot of crap from my "boss" there." You know what my wife will say? Just quit the damn thing!
@Dori We have a number of users I would like to see gone for at least a year, but I am not sure I can bring up anything against them other than them bringing the tone and the quality of the site down in very subtle but constant ways.
@Dori — Excuse me for pointing this out, but this is an unfortunate comparison. The "good cop" is the one who pretends to befriend the accused to manipulate cooperation. I'm sorry, but this is EL&U and we care about the meaning of words here.
As in... the thing that most people seem to be upset about is that this "quality" issue seems to have come out of nowhere... a post on Meta to discuss whatever is perceived to be the issue would have headed off a lot of heartache...
@Dori Technical question, then. Can I ban people without messaging them under the current system? I suppose the answer is no, which is fine with me, it's just that I don't feel confident enough to word that message.
I don't want to sound ESLish while banning people.
I love to pick over the questions and decide if questions are really good or bad, and whether we can narrow things down to keep things at high quality. And figure out how to run the site better. But something ELSE happened.
@Kosmonaut I can't offer a real apology for what someone else (particularly my boss's boss) says—but I do think it was over the top, and I'm sorry you got hurt.
@Dori If you're in the position where you can't do/say anything more than that — and I can understand that kind of professional situation — and if there is nobody else who can address it or feels it is warranted to address (and I know I don't want to have a conversation with Jeff himself about it), then I am completely stuck.
I have to go, but I want to leave with one final thought. Deciding what is a good question and what is crap is a lot harder on this site than on probably on any other SE site. If you ban all "jokey" questions and all questions by non-native speakers and all the rest of it, pretty soon you are going to whittle this place down to Atheists.SE. And at that point no one will care because all of us will be off doing other things.
@Kosmonaut I can try to get Robert involved, but he's the guy in between us, so I don't know what else he can say. I do know that Jeff was coming primarily from a point of frustration, and that some of that is my fault—It's been on my to-do list for a while to work with y'all, and I keep getting caught up fighting fires.
@Martha That's the deal, I'd have to trick myself into doing that. Because when I compose important stuff, I start wondering if "start wondering" is grammatically correct, and then go look it up on Google and it takes forever and the end result is an NNSish patchwork.
@RegDwight Yeah, really, that just means someone else should get the task of writing those. Some people are actually good at that task and that may be something worth adding to the Mod team if it is lacking.
@Dori Well, just to be clear, it's not like we were not frustrated with all that crap that kept coming in. But it's not like we haven't been fighting it. This room is extremely active at pretty much all times. It's just that our thresholds turned out to be different from Jeff's, which is okay and all, but then he shouldn't have been keeping it to himself for so long.
I put a lot of effort into the site, but am always finding ways I could improve my work. I know I am not ever going to handle the site in the exact way that Jeff would want in every instance, no matter what I do.
The thing is, this site is not just questions. Heck, this site is not about questions at all. This site is about the community. And we have an awesome core community here, active 24/7. They can deal with problems. Even the recent influx of crap questions has not driven them away. They are ready to fight it. But they are not ready to fight needless humiliation out of the blue from TPTB. That one thing could drive away the strongest man.
@Dori I am in a crappy time zone, but you should know that I try to read as many transcripts of as many things as a human could possibly get his hands on.
And again, if you were to say, hey people, English.SE is declining, you're not handling it right, then I would have shown up any place you say at any time you deem necessary to talk about it.
@RegDwight I still don't understand what's considered a good question verses a crap or uninteresting question, as I try really hard to make sure my questions are according to the FAQs.
@Dori But that's the problem. You do the right thing 500 times in a row, and the wrong thing just once, people will not remember the 500 times. They will only point you to that one error.
And I don't blame anyone for that, because that's just Psychology 101.
@psmears Two things: ① it's a good place to find out what TPTB are focused on right now, ② it's a great place to ask questions to see what's hot network-wide.
@RebeccaChernoff You really catch me off-guard there. Again, I am not used to people changing their habits just for me. If there is important stuff about this site crumbling, I'll try to be there live, hell or high water, job or wife. But if it's just the usual "this is what's on elsewhere", then the transcript will do the job for me because I won't be able to contribute to it better than others already do.
@RebeccaChernoff Okay, duly noted. And thanks a bunch. But right now I am really more worried about keeping Kosmonaut onboard than about chat schedules.
I don't want to act like I am so great. This site will continue whether I am here or not and do fine. But things seem really out of whack with the way things went down and the fact about how I feel is just a fact.
Again. I, for one, would not feel bad about closing or even deleting 50% of the questions that came in today. But I can't be closing stuff unilaterally like that.
Besides, as I have stated time and again, every question is stupid, basic, and worthless if you know the answer to it.
> That begs the actual question of where we draw the line. Every question is trivial if you know the answer to it, or where to look. To take an undeniably awesome answer by an undeniably respected user as an example, this could be written by anyone who can type americancorpus.org in his browser's address bar. So what?
> And on a more general note, I always thought that we want to be the ultimate resource; we want to be that first Google result. Has that changed? When? Why?
And the only answer I ever got was "@regdwight There Is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question. And the "general reference" one is pretty harmless. – Jeff Atwood♦ Jan 31 at 9:09"
I'm sorry, that just doesn't cut it. What was he expecting me to do after that?
Close everything as general reference? Nothing? Something?
there are some questions on the site where simply typing the question title into google gives you countless perfect answers. a random one: english.stackexchange.com/q/10659/982
@RebeccaChernoff Yes. And I would happily close that one. Except that it got multicollidered so everyone and his dog must have seen it by now but nobody ever complained.
This is something that comes up in the mod room often enough.
You've got the guidelines in the faq backing you.
I think the programmers.se and SO mods could have some great guidance for you if you talked to them regarding closing questions the community thinks are great but that are against the faq.
@RebeccaChernoff Sometimes it takes an entire community, or at least several pairs of eyes to decide whether something is answered perfectly elsewhere or not.
@RebeccaChernoff But how is poor Joe Newbie supposed to tell apart the utter-crap answer from the perfect answer? Especially when both answers are on the same site?
@RebeccaChernoff This is why I spend time answering questions here. For almost any question the answers you will get from google will be 50-100% crap. And what's worse (unlike SO questions) it's impossible (for someone who doesn't know the answer already) to know the difference...
@RebeccaChernoff BTW, others have said that already, but I have not, so: thanks for actually showing up. And we're sorry for using you and Dori as a proxy. But such is the system.
Another issue I feel exists with the "ELU quality is low" attitude is that often with language questions, the right answer is a lot more subtle than it appears. So you can ask any native speaker, and immediately get a clear and definitive answer. Or ask the same question of ten native speakers, and get fifteen different answers...
@kos I have amended my comment; my frustration comes from the fact that nearly every time I visit this site, I am embarrassed to be associated with the sort of banal, least-common-denominator questions that appear here. If this site is indeed intended for experts, it needs far stronger moderation.
@RebeccaChernoff The thing is, sometimes a question that is answered by opening a dictionary can be answered much more awesomely. I kind of tried to set an example this very morning.
I've recently encountered these two variations of the spellings for the informal word for "expensive." My dictionary and the online dictionary seem to indicate that both of these spellings are correct, but I have yet to discover why there are two variations of this word.
Are both of these spell...
The comment about lack of flags and flag handling is interesting though. Our stats show that the average flag handling time on the site is double any other site on the network. (;
@RebeccaChernoff Personally, I think this is something that the ELU community doesn't appreciate enough. If we accidentally close something, we can reopen it just as easily.
Okay, I've got to go. I feel like I am wasting my time. If Jeff's additional comments were supposed to be somehow an apology, then there is really no hope.
@RebeccaChernoff But I still feel we're in need of a "clear bright line" - or at least, as close as we can get to one - for what's "good enough". When what often seem to be very basic questions - about very simple words - often have really fascinating answers from a historical/linguistic point of view.
@Kosmonaut Take some time away if you need to—but don't leave. You (all of you) have been doing great work; we just need to sit down with a cup of tea and figure out how to best focus it to make the site even better.
I am afraid I have to go in a few minutes, too. My wife usually doesn't spend more than 3 hours in the bathroom in the evening, and it's been two hours and fifty minutes.
@RegDwight It would be great if you could pop into the mod room and explain this. Why are post-its needed? Perhaps we can improve the tooling. I'm not sure I see a need for leaving them around, but that conversation is better for the other room.
@Dori The message we're hearing from the top is that the site - that I and @Kosmonaut and @Regdwight and many others have spent a huge amount of effort on over the past months is a "litany of standing problems", with "severe quality issues" that are "embarrassing to be associated with".
@RebeccaChernoff I'm afraid I helped start the practice, if they're still using them the same way. I would leave a flag if I wasn't sure how to act on a particular item. A moderator-only chat room would have worked better, of course.
@RebeccaChernoff Well, I'm often on the fence. And since this site is about language rather than ones vs zeroes, even doubly so. And since I am not a native speaker, even triply so.
So while I really appreciate you coming in here to help, saying "make the site even better" comes across a bit hollow (though I'm sure you didn't intend it that way) :-(
@Dori I know, but I would like to hear a more or less official response from as high above as possible. I know that if I just ask it in the Teachers Lounge, then the nice folks that are Anna Lear or Mmyers or whoever will just say, "I don't think that's too grave of a problem".
@RegDwight This is about the flags? Maybe, instead, the question should be, "how do other sites handle getting mod consensus on flags?". It's a great place for that kind of brainstorming.
@Dori Sounds reasonable. But again, I am not sure I could just ask it out of the blue. The chat cast provides a framework where I am kind of expected to be asking stuff like that and people are kind of expected to respond. The daily routine in the Teachers Lounge is a very different setup.
@RegDwight Except that in the chat cast there's usually 2+ other questions on the table at the same time, and people want to give quick answers—this is one that lends itself to a real discussion.
Hmmm... I'm still hearing that the message is "improve quality" and "close more stuff". But I for one would find it really helpful if someone could put into words the criteria by which we can know that a question that we currently consider "good" is actually "bad"...
@Dori Hopefully a dedicated chat can be set up (I think that's where it was heading, before fizzling out) and gather the objectives of those concerned and concentrate on the ones that matter.
I would like to present an error message to viewers of my website when a video is blocked in their country due to legal requirements. Currently I have the following:
This video is unavailable in your country.
I feel that many non-English speakers will not understand "unavailable". Do you kn...
Too Long; Didn't Read
I've recently encountered these two variations of the spellings for the informal word for "expensive." My dictionary and the online dictionary seem to indicate that both of these spellings are correct, but I have yet to discover why there are two variations of this word.
Are both of these spell...
delete delete delete delete delete vdelete
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…