Not a bar, but plays one on TV

Derpy

07:40

@Miniman nope. The people that protested against the joke on twitter were just regular users with low-to-zero visibility. Their voice was "hidden" by far more tweet that praised the idea.

Their "bad advertisement" impact is negligible.

so, @Yuuki is probably right. With these premises I don't expect anyone to recognize an error or to apologize.

Had someone like April made a post about it.... I guess we would have seen a more Discord-like reaction.

Derpy

07:55

Quick recap since @doppelgreener asked what I was talking about.

The April Fool joke this year caused confusion and pain to a lot of people because site accessibility was poorly considered. Also, while I recognize that the prank was originally intended as an harmless parody of some of the '90s bad design tropes, some of the comment about it made it seem a parody of how amateur programmers used to design sites back then (see the words "a monstrosity made by someone with just enough knowledge of DHTML to be dangereous).

Miniman

@Derpy Yeah, I wasn't serious.

Derpy

As for the post I was talking about @doppelgreener , you can see it here.

@Miniman I was kinda serious. I do think that if those tweet had came from someone with a lot more followers - and visibility - the reaction would have been pretty different.

trogdor

@Derpy yes but mini was just making a joke

it wasn't meant to evoke an actual oppinion

which is admittedly hard to tell via text

Derpy

08:21

... and in the meantime, somewhere else - new accounts with NSFW avatar pictures continue to appear daily on the main Meta site.

But if they don't post no one will see them unless they look at the user list, so apparently that's fine.

trogdor

08:35

I wouldn't say that means it's fine

just that maybe there aren't eyes there

Derpy

@trogdor Sorry, I should have given a little more context, forgive my rant there.

122

Q: Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?

Super User got hit by another batch of spammers creating profiles. They've got accounts on other sites from what I've heard from other mods and from the comments here. Last time it was streaming. Now it's insurance sales... with phone numbers (as of december, looks like they're spamming scammy f...

^ I was kinda referencing this.

trogdor

ah

Derpy

We get a lot of "spam profiles" - accounts that are created just to use the "about me" section to post links to spam site

that has always been kinda dismissed by many as "If you don't look at them, you wont see them. They don't post so you won't see them by chance - you have to browse the user list"

Problem is.... Google does indeed index those profiles too.

example:

Devil's advocate here, but who's paging through new-user listings to see what kind of random noise inactive non-users have left in their profile? Does anybody see it? Is there a use case to browse through profiles with ZERO content? This feels like a "if a tree falls in the woods..." situation to me, but maybe it gets fixed. I just hope you're not spending any time actively seeking this out to clean up what feels like a non-issue — unless I am missing something here. — Robert Cartaino ♦ Nov 27 '17 at 16:12

Two years later, the issue is still there.

But instead of simple "car insurance" sites, we also get advertisements for NSFW stuff.

BESW

10:22

@MystyVander @SheRaRoleplay After @FreyjaErlings pointed out the 2006 April Fool's joke WotC did about the My Little Pony RPG, it's hard not to see how "things liked by girls" get used as the butt of jokes. I believe you when you say it was unintentional. It just sucks is all.

Tweeted by HyveMynd on April 2, 2019 at 12:10 PM in reply to MystyVander

Derpy

@BESW will have to check who is the company behind Tails of Equestria. It is obvious Hasbro is involved, but I didn't take notice of who actually is publishing it.

BESW

10:41

@Derpy River Horse.

Derpy

an appropriate name I guess :P

I see they also made a Labyrinth board game

By the look of it it seems to be a collaboration game... I wonder if it is as impossible as the LoTR one I own.

BESW

We need more collaboration games.

Derpy

10:57

@BESW Context: this is the game I was talking about

It is a pretty decent game, really... with just one main defect.

Difficulty scales up pretty quickly.

Since on the narrative level you are getting closer to Mt. Doom, they displayed that in the game by ramping up the difficulty the more you get close to winning.

Now, this isn't necessarily bad - just know that any first player will probably not expect the game to "change" so fast

BESW

I just sort of take it as read than anything derived more or less directly from Jolkein Rolkein Rolkein Tolkein is gonna have significant challenges.

Derpy

yep, that obviously true. What I mean is that it will take new players off guard and thus I had many friends being put off by the difficulty on their first game.

goodguy5

13:38

@BESW what do you do?

BESW

in RPG General Chat, 2 days ago, by BESW

@Ben I'm a freelance graphic designer with a specialty in print media and an indigenous intersectionality focus.

goodguy5

and what does that mean?

BESW

Freelance: I'm self-employed, people hire me to do a specific project for them, I do it, and move on.

goodguy5

"specialty in print media" and "indigenous intersectionality focus"?

BESW

Graphic designer: I'm a certain kind of artist who specializes in layout that aids communication of someone else's idea. Somebody tells me what they want to say and I help make sure the way they're saying it, visually, helps communicate their message.

Specialty in print media: I don't do web design or video games or that sort of thing; most of the things I make get printed out as physical objects like posters, books, business cards.

goodguy5

13:43

shirts?

BESW

Nobody's asked me to do that yet.

If/when they do, I'll learn.

Indigenous intersectionality focus: there's a lot of graphic designers out there. I set myself apart by being sensitive to cultural implications and designing for the local reality rather than assuming my American education gave me universal tools. As a white guy in a colonized community I seek jobs that help me amplify marginalized voices and empower people who are usually not heard.

As a really direct and obvious example, I was once hired to do a logo with a local plant after the previous person hired for the job told them that the plant was ugly and couldn't be made into a nice logo. So I looked at how Native people from the area depict the plant in their art and used that as inspiration.

goodguy5

neat!

Do you facilitate the printing yourself, or just provide the files?

BESW

For a more subtle example, I was hired to re-design a literary magazine with the goal of making it a visual space that was more friendly to Pasifika authors experimenting with what their cultural literature can look like--because written literature is relatively new to many parts of the Pacific, and doesn't get widely published if it looks "wrong" to Western journals.

If the client wants me to work with a printing company, I can do that too.

goodguy5

that's all very interesting. Thanks for sharing ^_^

BESW

My pleasure!

Derpy

14:01

@GcL If I got what you are asking here... You have two options.

Old style "solutions" have access to code that runs on the server. Therefore, they are packaged as a .cab archive (think Zip archives, cab is just another standard by Microsoft). The cab contains both "human readable files" that use some eldritch "xml like" language to declare artifact structures and the standard Windows .dll files that contain code that you application will use.

Recently, Microsoft has been trying to move away from this - the idea being that custom code run by the server is a potential security risk.

So, now app mostly run in the browser and interact with SharePoint thru some web services it exposes

this mean that many modern SharePoint app are actually written using HTML and Javascript

(this is a simplification, but please bear with me - don't want to make you fall asleep with the more technical details)

BESW

@goodguy5 This is the poster I finished today.

GcL

@Derpy You won't bore me. I used to deal with COM objects and the windows 16bit api. I'm familiar with the cab files and the hazardous methods MS used to use to integrate libraries.

JS and HTML doesn't sound that bad. You're writing against a backend api. At least the artifacts are all text so could be in version control of some sort.

Derpy

@GcL AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH now I understand what you had in mind.......

Nononononono, you misunderstood.... it is not like you can't have a SharePoint solution under source control....

it is just that some people here must think that is a waste of time.

GcL

svn actually handles versioned binaries pretty well, but ugh... svn. I thought there were some forks of or additions to git that handle non-text assets, but I've never had a reason to look into it.

@Derpy Sure. It's yet another arcane system to learn that can cause a lot of headaches. Also, if they're not developers, having an expectation that they know how to use the tool is a bridge to far.

Derpy

@GcL nope, we actually work as developers, that's why it is odd.

GcL

14:17

@Derpy I have no love for developers that don't put everything permanent under version control. If it's truly a one off, my rule is save it in /tmp.

Derpy

@GcL then I guess you understand my pain every time I get to work on a project that wasn't source controlled and only exist as a bunch of html and js files on a test server....

This time I was lucky enough to escape in time :P

GcL

I don't mind taking over projects that don't have tests or aren't under version control. I'm absolved of all responsibility for it being messed up... which is usually the only reason I'd come across a project like that.

The problems I usually see on those projects are developers that don't want to work in any acceptable manner. Luckily, I can walk away from those.

Derpy

@GcL the part " I'm absolved of all responsibility for it being messed up" is sometime where we fail at.

goodguy5

14:36

:O
awesome!

GcL

@Derpy Yeah. That's why playing an artificer on a table top is much more fun than irl. Just chuck an explosive flask and walk away dramatically

Derpy

15:00

@GcL unless you are playing Paranoia, in which case probably are required to test the explosive flask and gather data on how it explodes... and later hand in the still intact flask when you are done with testing ^_^'

Derpy

15:22

Closed and downvoted as off-topic because it only affect one site in the network, an hour later get reposted by one of the original closer and gets up to +5

I hereby officially abandon any hope to understand the main Meta site.

@trogdor ^ I don't know what to think.

BTW, I won't probably be around much in the next days, so if you don't seem me that's normal. I think I will be back to my usual schedule around next Wednesday.

Transcript for

Not a bar, but plays one on TV