gnat

Flaggable plagiarism in troublesome questions of this kind that I've seen so far was maybe in about 1/3 cases. Issues in most of these questions were of the kind typically reported by "repeated characters" heuristics. And just in case if this matters, almost all of them looked like immediately closeable as duplicates of the questions where titles were copied from, although unclear or too-broad close reasons were better fit.

gnat

Dec 14, 2022 07:47

The only site that looks worthy of suggested check seems to be SO because at smaller sites such issues are essentially guaranteed to be found and handled without any automation. List of popular titles can be static - if refreshing it once a year is an option, that would be nice (though not necessary). Change "new account" to "1 rep account" looks totally acceptable, maybe even an improvement over what I initially asked for.

gnat

Dec 14, 2022 07:47

@Makyen Regarding amount of titles, it can be made somewhat less than 7,5K (though not orders of magnitude) - other viable options I checked are questions with over 600K, 700K, 800K views having about 5300, 4000, 3000 titles respectively (at Stack Overflow). The type of matching I'm wanting to do is: when title of a new question contains (exact match) the title of an old one.

gnat

Dec 13, 2022 20:10

is there a way to teach SD detect when post titles copy/plagiarise titles of very popular questions - say those with over 500K views (stackoverflow.com/search?q=views%3A500000), about 7500 total? Other indicators of thoublesome posts using this trick are: these are from new accounts and have quite brief text, like under 200 chars

gnat

Jun 7, 2021 07:59

@tripleee I can ping user who complained at MSE and ask them to list more examples here so we may try to derive heuristics, would that be OK? ("implicitly static" along with specific link to MS docs is one I see now but without seeing earlier examples I can't tell if it will work longer term)

gnat

Jun 7, 2021 07:38

folks, is there a way to somehow detect posts from "implicitly static" troll in c# tag? For context, example of their posts: stackoverflow.com/questions/67866972/… and MSE discussion: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364781/…

The Water Cooler

General chit-chat for workplace.stackexchange.com. Feel free t...

gnat

Nov 17, 2022 22:05

^^^ isn't it about time to rename our site to Soap Opera Plots Stack Exchange

gnat

Nov 17, 2022 22:05

> I set up a camera facing my work computer, and then went to sleep. My thinking is that if I could show them that I never touched my computer, it would prove my innocence. (Probably a better way to do this, but I'm not much of a computer guy). Watching my video the next morning, I see at 3:20am in the morning, somebody does come to my computer: ME. To my shock, I saw myself stumble in the middle of the night, login, and type something, giggle to myself, and then stumble away.

gnat

Dec 4, 2021 08:59

in just a few hours we've got three questions from three different user accounts, all about mentioning someone's mistake: first, second, third. It looks as if some troll making sock puppets or maybe some college class has got an assignment to write an essay on that matter

gnat

Sep 30, 2021 21:24

@JoeStrazzere I am talking about how this answer looks now, not about how it was in the past. I know how it was before (and I didn't complain back then) but I don't see how this helps. For someone not experienced in how to dig through obscude question revisions history (ie for like, 99,999% visitors coming from search engines) things look like someone asked about one country and got an answer about very different one and everybody around seems to be okay with that

gnat

Sep 30, 2021 17:30

@Revenant_Evil I was talking about different answer, not the one you quoted. @motosubatsu if this is okay, how about adding 200 more answers each specific to particular country

gnat

Sep 30, 2021 17:29

@JoeStrazzere is it 6th or 10th or 1st doesn't really matter here. Top answer and accepted one, no matter what is their score are normal in that they both attempt to address the question asked and it is totally normal that people compare them and vote on which one is better. Norway one is different in that it reads, "I ignore what's asked and type into the answer box whatever I want"

gnat

Sep 30, 2021 14:18

answer explicitly assuming Norway to the question about Japan, sitting at comfortable 9 upvotes without a single downvote, broadcasted to all network audience via HNQ. Stuff like that turns addressing real workplace issues into a useless circus. Sad

gnat

Sep 30, 2021 09:32

@Jeroen I saw somewhere at meta that mods quite firmly abstain of discussing suspensions details. Given that this user was fairly active in comments one can also assume that it was triggered by comments not answers

gnat

Jul 24, 2021 15:20

we've got user who pollutes site with a senseless non-English stuff, can moderators please take care? First time I saw it I thought they maybe did it by mistake but now it looks more and more abusive - workplace.stackexchange.com/users/127559/…

gnat

Jul 18, 2021 05:56

^^^ desperate fight against chatty comments at EL&U :)

gnat

Jul 18, 2021 05:56

A: Why are so many questions suddenly being locked?

There are no metrics. There is only the decision of individual moderators. If this were something an algorithm could do without human judgement in the loop, it would. But it is not. The aim is to encourage actual answers to questions asked. We are a question and answer site, not a question and co...

gnat

Jul 8, 2021 22:40

tell me this is just a coincidence. First we get a question from somebody pretending that they left alone of the team of handful engineers and considering whether to basically quit and focus on appearing to be working, okay. Few hours later, we get a question asking for a friend of somebody who have been managing a team of handful engineers with all of them resigned and only one left. And soon after that, we get yet another question asking how to disappear at work meaning appearing to be working

gnat

Apr 15, 2021 06:26

@Old_Lamplighter pestering answerers in comments like you describe is not OK, especially now that answer chat room was unfrozen. If you see folks doing this again, I think you better just flag your answer and ask moderator to put a comments lock on it for 5-7 days

gnat

Mar 8, 2021 19:21

@Old_Lamplighter the guidance refers "direct claims of suicide or bodily harm, but also other more subtle things" meaning it is not only about posts from suicidal people. Anyway, it's mostly gray area to me (there are also links to mod-only guidelines there unavailable to regular users like me) so I just flagged to let moderators take care if needed. Have no interest to dig deeper into this stuff

gnat

Mar 8, 2021 16:27

^^^ we recently got a HNQ related to these matters

gnat

Mar 8, 2021 16:26

A: What are our policies regarding self-harm and suicide?

Situations that should be reported Please escalate any situation you come across where you suspect potential for self-harm, even if the user does not explicitly talk about considering suicide directly. This can include direct claims of suicide or bodily harm, but also other more subtle things. If...

gnat

Feb 16, 2021 07:46

this has got 8 votes down and 3 votes close on the question and 67 (that's sixty seven) votes down on the answers. And despite all of that it is advertised to whole network at the very top of the HNQ list (#4 to be precise). Over time I got mostly used to general stupidity of hotness score algorithm but sometimes the way how it ignores negative feedback from site regulars really borders on insulting

gnat

Dec 29, 2020 21:45

@Neo ah, fat-fingering is just what I suspected, thanks for explaining. This is not surprising, because at our site blatant non-answers are quite infrequent (compared to eg Stack Overflow), meaning that moderators don't have enough practice to avoid mistakes deleting these. I think this is a good thing overall (I mean it's good that we rarely get non-answers:)

gnat

Dec 28, 2020 21:29

@Lilienthal workplace.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/104956 :)

gnat

Dec 28, 2020 15:12

question to moderators, what's the point of keeping this non-answer visible? I flagged for deletion and my flag was marked helpful but that "answer" is still there, do I miss something?

Discussion on question by HarryJ: Sho…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Aug 3, 2022 16:05

Does this answer your question? Underpaid and overworked, how should I approach my boss?

Discussion on question by Asish: Mana…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Mar 17, 2022 18:23

Does this answer your question? How to disclose the negatives of my negative job, without seemingly badmouthing my ex-employer

Discussion on question by Gregory Cur…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Jan 13, 2022 14:02

agrre that moderators over here typically tend to leave this to community. However this doesn't look like a typical case - I checked first revision of this question and it looked very close to previous question about booster shot, possibly close enough to warrant direct mod intervention. I rarely see questions looking so much like a plain repost of a previous one

gnat

Jan 13, 2022 14:02

@GregoryCurrie looks like it is typical indeed, see for example this canonical discussion at MSE: How soon should I "vote to close"? and a bunch of related discussions linked to it

Discussion on question by Danubian Sa…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Dec 17, 2021 11:20

this is probably related: My boss decided to add a "person to blame" field to every bug report. How can I convince him that it's a bad idea?

Discussion on question by rjscr: How …

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Jun 27, 2021 15:08

Does this answer your question? How should I properly approach my boss if I'm feeling underpaid?

Discussion on question by LazyColleag…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Jun 7, 2021 21:04

Does this answer your question? Employee effectively not working during notice period

Duga's Neighborhood

It's a beautiful bot in the neighborhood. Would you be mine, w...

gnat

May 17, 2021 07:59

@SimonFosberg I think it would be OK to filter out Duga notifications like this one: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/58018275#58018275 These all have the same text "See also: Open letter to students with homework problems - Software Engineering Meta Stack Exchange" posted by the same user: "MikeCAT" (and typically lead to removed homework dumps at SO:)

Discussion on question by Kaushal28: …

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

May 7, 2021 12:53

Does this answer your question? How to deal with interviewers who are mistaken during job interviews?

The Whiteboard

General Discussion for softwareengineering.stackexchange.com P...

gnat

Apr 28, 2021 06:13

A: Are Design Review questions on-topic?

I think that, generally, design review type questions are on-topic. However, the problem is how broad they are. My concern for this type of question is that most of them may be more suited to a discussion environment. I do think that there are good design review questions, but they need to be cle...

gnat

Jan 20, 2021 13:45

^^^ @gparyani

gnat

Jan 20, 2021 13:42

you'd have to choose whether you want penaly removed (to simplify the system) or increased (to make it work as it did in the beginning, when HNQs were listed in "collider dropdown"). Also you need to choose whether you want to have this for all penalized sites or make an exception for Stack Overflow. And, if you want this the same way for all sites including SO then you better consider how to tame possible consequences. I have similar feature request at MSE about another HNQ parameter

gnat

Jan 20, 2021 13:37

@SonictheCuriouserHedgehog for the sake of accuracy, due to misunderstanding of the implementors about how system works the penalty you mention has noticeable (and I would say overall detrimental) impact only on Stack Overflow. As for all other sites you can consider it absent. Workplace is a great example of implementors misunderstanding: its penalty was introduced to address case of 5 site questions in the hot list but even after getting it there were observed cases of 6-7-8 site questions in the list — gnat 20 hours ago

gnat

Dec 28, 2020 00:37

@SimonForsberg yes. Quite infrequently, but still. Maybe there are still SO oldtimers who didn't pick rename. Or maybe it comes from ancient posts at MSE / MSO, or from some older comments at SO. This doesn't feel worrying because it seems to be shrinking, and possibly Duga alerts help here

gnat

Dec 27, 2020 22:41

@SimonForsberg "programmers", yeah. Rate of false positives on this keyword is now certainly higher than it was back then. However, remaining correct alerts still make it worth keeping. Guess we need some more time before it gets safe to drop

gnat

Dec 27, 2020 19:32

@SimonForsberg I recall when Duga was just established you spent quite a while to tune its alert thresholds and it's cool to see how it works so well for all these years. Amount of false positives is not too high to be annoying and in the same time, not too low to make me suspect that it may miss something worthy

gnat

Dec 27, 2020 15:41

@SimonForsberg flagged one of my posts at main site asking moderator to help in that

Discussion on answer by Mister Positi…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.meta.stackexch...

gnat

Feb 23, 2021 13:20

@user119079 anyway, my main point is, sometimes these questions pop in sidebar long after expected removal from hot list. When this happens, it really feels like a bug and if I was a moderator I'd be heavily tempted to remove it, just to make things work. Luckily I'm not a mod so when I first saw this I merely considered posting bug report at meta (didn't do this back then because when preparing meta post I found that it was already asked and answered)

gnat

Feb 23, 2021 13:20

looking at question timeline it is as if it was kept advertised at sidebar for quite a while even after closure and mod-removal from HNQ, did you by chance deleted to prevent off-site visitors landing on question that was not expected to be shown to them? This very meta question also makes it look like someone clicked the question listed at sidebar when it wasn't supposed to be there. Such questions sometimes (not often) stick in the sidebar due to caching, making it look like something is broken there, maybe you thought one needs to try harder to make it work as expected?

Discussion on question by Pender: Sen…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....

gnat

Jan 18, 2021 13:20

this reads very much like a rehash of a recent popular question Departing senior engineer refuses to introduce replacement to open source community/peers