@Spevacus Congrats! That's an awesome opportunity, and I'm glad to hear it went so well :)

@V2Blast Thank you!

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@Spevacus ah nice. What did you talk about?

(assuming that's something you can share. Else as they say "Fine, Keep your Secrets"

@JourneymanGeek The first few questions were about who I am, what a moderator does, and how I got involved in SO. After that we got into what was important to me as a public Q&A user, and what the company may not be paying enough attention to. Then I spoke on the ever-present "unfriendliness" problem that SO has, as well as the unfriendliness problem that's intermittently present here on Meta.

ah

The latter was also about how it relates to staff interacting here and, well, I had a lot to say.

Naturally :D

On the unfriendliness problem on SO, I'd like to mention something that I said at the event, which was basically just telling a story

I think 'dogfooding' and integration with the community can never ever ever ever ever be overstressed enough ._.

A friend of mine who had used SO before told me that, in retrospect, he recognizes that Stack Overflow is criticized as unkind by people who have visited and had their posts moderated, and not by its lasting value. Or, rather, you judge SO based on when your skin is in the game and you come out mangled, rather than judging it based on the many times you come to it as a reader and come out educated.

That struck me as wise because I think it’s unerringly true: The lasting value SO provides borders on irreplaceable, and the way they got there was through the content quality guidelines it’s generated over the years, and the way they are enforced can come off as really unfriendly to a new user.

ya

How you fix that problem is... Tough. But, hey.

I think it's worth recognizing that not enough people give SO the regard it deserves when talking about it because of the user experience and not what that potentially bad user experience can bring about. Pearls not sand :P

If it was easy, it'd be solved ;)

Also I should mention that it's not a problem we should ignore, but we do have to temper our approach.

Obviously :P

I think its true of users too

We shouldn't be accomodating too much to users who don't want to be here the way it is, if its totally alienating the people who are

and those changes need to be ... whatever the opposite of hamhanded is

(Also, its very positive that they have community members come and speak to them now I guess?)

When we got into open Q&A, I was asked why I used SE Chat, to which I said I primarily used it as a way to collaborate with other users about site action, but we also engage generally socially sometimes. I was asked what my favorite site was and whether at least some sites deserved to go, to which I responded that Gaming.SE was a great site, and that I thought that the cryptocurrency sites should proooobably be merged, at least partially.

@JourneymanGeek I'll also share that Philippe emailed me after the event stating that it was a great time, the reception to it was loud and very positive, and that they're going to try and do more stuff like that in the future (as in there's more buy-in for this kind of stuff to happen more).

So, yes, hopefully. :)

@Spevacus one of my big "I want a puppy" level wishes is for people to move back into SE chat from outside, least partially

(but that needs 4-5 other things to line up, + time)

Its like playing snooker in an earthquake :D

@Spevacus I think that consolidation makes sense, but I've no idea if the mechanics exist

I think they have done merges before but on this kind of scale? Probably close to impossible.

But yet I still feel it should probably be done.

@Spevacus I think this is one of those cases where partial sunsets should be an option

We have a few sites on the network that're just close to zero activity, and I sadly include one of my personal favorite lil pet sites Community Building among them.

if a site is 'dead' in terms of activity, running a check and read-onlying it makes sense

Yeah.

@Spevacus tbf, to a large part it never hit critical mass, and there's a bit of cannibalism from the mod team

also, post graduation swag. :D

(I really wish SE would work out the swag situation. Better trust + people loving the network + swag store might be at least enough to have someone run swag.)

Still waitin' on my t shirt ;)

As are you I think

yup

I'm waitin on a lot of things :D

@JourneymanGeek @Spevacus Based on some not-public info, I have reason to believe the T-shirts should be coming soon

@cocomac XD. I figure it'll come with it comes.

I was thinking more broadly

@cocomac Hell yeah

So long as it came sometime this year I was gonna be satisfied

If it started getting into 2026 I was gonna be like... Hey. I know it's free, but like... Any word?

lol

See chat.stackexchange.com/messages/67584480/history FWIW

cool <3

@Spevacus lol, I'm vaguely more interested in the intangibles

@JourneymanGeek The intangibles are what they are. If this whole thing went up in smoke and I got a t-shirt out of it, I'm fine with that.

@Mithical I figured it was cause the spam levels are too damn high

(Obviously I'm mostly joking)

@Spevacus "SE caught fire and burnt down, and all I got was this T shirt"

Precisely

which reminds me

I need to find my SU mug and bring it to my place :D

why is this so hilarious ☠️

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kisses armpit

how do you get a shirt?

I hear they are legendary.

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard It was How does one get a Not a Robot T-shirt?

@starball did someone say the forbidden word?

@cocomac ok

just an email?

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard I just sent a polite email asking

@starball Hey, I trained under Sha for some time, and played some WAG, so would people like it if I made my own den?

@cocomac and ye got one?

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard It hasn't arrived yet, but...

hmm

but like didn't Jon (Mo)Skeet(o) get one for being good at C#?

like can I be good at english?

For this set of t-shirts? I don't know if Jon Skeet got one. You'd probably need to send an email and ask if you'd like one.

found the stache!

Hm. I wasn't aware of that page.

same person

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard back in the day, swag was super common

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, it's been ages without some good swag... :(

(I don't need another t-shirt to sleep in. I need an extra mug and a new bottle :P )

Or another apron!

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard I don't think those Dens that are now deleted have been great examples of 'chitchat' rooms. I wouldn't make one like that.

A room mostly filled with bots, bot commands and wag isn't exactly 'chitchat'...

@Tinkeringbell At least it kept that stuff out of here...

@Sonic-missesShadow-Hedgehog That's true, but perhaps it should just be kept off of chat instead of just 'out of this room'.

At the very least, the motivation for having such a room wouldn't be that it would be another room that encourages 'chithat', like the message Twinee replied to was about (more rooms for chitchat).

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@starball ... Some time ago I told something to Emma about the chat. That post was greeted by other users with the standard "chat is not for chatting, it is for coordination on curating content / asking questions on site use". Coincidentally usually similar arguments are also meet with "not here to make friends" or the more aggressive "not your friend" variant. I would suggest you to drop the idea to defeat that windmill giant.

was that just 10 seconds to purge a spam question on meta 🤯 I didn't even have enough time to fire up flag dialog holy shot

the spam user is even gone within like 1 min, now we're talking some really good reaction time...

I guess that's some automation sorcery from smoke detector (though considering there're only 4 evil downvotes it was probably a mod involved who nuked the post&user right away)

Meta is like thw worst place to spam

lol

Also everyone on meta knows what to do, and its a low traffic, high engagement site

good times have come, we should now teach spammers where to post to not get nuked within eye blink (what a noob tbh 😭)

@JourneymanGeek by the way when it comes to engagement it actually feels like people now vote more on meta (then they used to 10 years ago), I was absolutely not expecting to score 26 upvotes on my last half-serious-though-legit bug report about missing 404 image

@nicael "Somewhere else"

@nicael People love bugs

lol

@nicael nope, it was me.

**tf2 engy voice** job well done!

:D

@JourneymanGeek profiles.

@ꓢPArcheon well ideally not that too

@JourneymanGeek those are sure to last longer though.

better tooling for that is on my wish list

dealing with some of it is my to-do list but current actual spam's taking up a good chunk of time

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@JourneymanGeek Yelling "Drop the price" during the next Nintendo Direct is probably more effective at changing their mind...

@ꓢPArcheon I will make sure to do that. Maybe ask for a Nintendo Switch 2 while I'm at it.

@ꓢPArcheon we got work on chat improvements started. Maybe community hires again. I think I can keep at it a bit

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard you either know too much and are also seeing why Nintendo set themselves up to go out of business with the new console... or too little and didn't realize that was about the Switch 2 in the first place ^_^

@ꓢPArcheon drop the price to free!

hello @Spevacus

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard o/

hi

used to getting worried when mods enter the room lol

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard Only if you're guilty of something

ARE YOU?

also, main rooms for network sites should always have mods

@JourneymanGeek uhh

@JourneymanGeek yeah, I agree

@rene sorry about what I said a few days ago I was just kinda sad or maybe mad so yeah

Regarding: Changes to reporting for the [status-review] escalation process - is the backlog SE working on only based on questions? There are quite a few reports of issues as answers (to the announcement of a feature) and I wonder if those would ever be looked at. Some of them have a status tags, others don't but maybe the tag doesn't really matter if answers are never looked at.

Different teams may track them in their own ways. But on a systematic level we only have the means to track questions.

@VLAZ meta.stackexchange.com/a/407929/135565 I asked about that :D

Though, I'd assume answers as issues are tracked in the scope of the project being used in some way

@JourneymanGeek It kind of feels like they are just dumped into the recycle bin most of the time.

@VLAZ eh, depends. They do use ertaz tags sometimes - and if something's left out, that feels like the right time for a follow up question that can be tracked

I'm really disheartened by that. I personally think that if a change has a major negative impact on existing functionality, it should be a priority. But a new question for each thing means: change -> question for big problem -> "fix" -> another question for another aspect -> "fix" -> ...etc... It's a recipe for never really addressing the issue thoroughly.

I don't know how I feel about trying to report all the issues I've pointed out in answers as new questions.

Well, ideally no, but least on the short term, it feels like the system that's expected

there's a disconnect between what 'we're' comfortable with - meta as a sort of amorphous 'everything' tool - handling everything from community, to software/system design to bug reports, and 'formal' software engineering (made worse by the potential that the person that's handling a problem's no longer at the company cause the quarter's earnings are not good enough and tribute is demanded)

I'd love for staff to pick up on those posts and formalise them - but that's probably a little away if the current thaw holds

@Slate :( Please chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/4?m=67009357#67009357

(When time allows of course)

I'd love for changes that make using certain features impossible to be addressed. Like, at all. At this point in time, I don't think I have any faith left they would be. All the announcements and assurances feel like empty promises. We've had the same assurances that things will be improving for years.

In fact, I think the thing that drained the last bit of faith off of me was finding a post of mine complaining about this. From like 2 years ago or so. And remembering how it was already getting old at that point.

@VLAZ XD

I'm pretty sure some of my list's been there longer. I'm sure some aspects won't be addressed but the easiest way for those things to be forgotten is to let them be

(and this dosen't mean sealioning your pet feature all the time.)

I'm still waiting on full data dumps - I'd said I'd request them before the offical announcement, I'm still waiting on them, went from weekly, to monthly, to now roughly quarterly reminders

@Spevacus Yeeeahhhhh

I'm pretty sure I'll be asking for them next year but gentle pushes are important

(well or I'm no longer an independant member of the community, cause I miraculously got hired, but finding some poor quixotic fool to take over is part of my mod offboarding list :D)

@Spevacus I mean you don't hear it as often as the complaints about mean moderation but I think moderation also has a problem with preserving good, lasting value. For example, there's a non negligible portion of people out there who purge good answers by virtue of them being attached to "bad" questions (which they close and delete). Other than obsessively patrolling the tooling (recently closed + recently deleted) there's not a good way to counter this behavior, or even sometimes know that it's happening (at least as a non-mod)

Can't find a question for it but I gotta assume it's been asked before: is there a way to stop Community from bumping meta questions that are resolved, without posting an answer like "This question is resolved, please upvote this so it stops being bumped"

eg ell.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5997/… the tag was deleted (a year ago) but the question still gets bumped. It'd feel silly to say "as the question says, the tag was deleted a year ago. updoots to the left :)" but it rly doesn't need to keep showing up

(in this case i could upvote the answer but. 1. that doesn't work in all cases 2. i don't think it's a particularly good answer since the tag was never about the present simple)

it's possible to reconfigure bumps by the community user

or turned off

make a meta post on ell meta requesting that community user bumps be turned off, then once you get a bit of consensus, flag a mod to add [status-review] :)

@Kaia It's since been upvoted, but otherwise downvoting the answer to -1 also stops bumps

(probably shouldn't be voting on posts just for the purpose of making the community user or roomba do or not do something)

hello (::

o/

hi

o/*

you forgot the hand

that looks like someone trying to dunk a basketball

lol

|__  o\
| W    \O
|       |\_
|      /-\
|    /     \
|
|

see

lol

👋

@Laurel wait, so it's strictly for answered questions with 0-score answers?

@Kaia yes

it's for questions with non-accepted answers that haven't been evaulated by the community yet

the purpose is so that the community will evaluate them, aka vote on them, to indicate whether or not they are useful

Do we do answer-bumps for old long-ago-completed tag cleanup posts? I had that particular post marked as "completed" in my spreadsheet; I've just been leaving the already-completed posts alone

eh, well, obviously some of "we" do

@bobble generally there is no need imo

your rep may vary

fills backlog with stars

The lights messages in the sky chat are stars

?

note to ROs: you are free to unstar the messages above

@Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard do not do this

alright