!!/watch razacomputers\.in

@PM2Ring a work of pure genius. the drop in the middle could bring world peace or extinguish all human life

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@M.A.R. hypothetically speaking, we want the biggest book we can. Professes a belief in encyclopedia and throws the good book(s) all 13 giant volumes at AI users

@JourneymanGeek Those poor Adobe Illustrator users deserve better than having books thrown at them.

It, perhaps might be a mercy :D

Yeah, something to rid them the curse of using Adobe products :P

The spammers are being mighty frisky today

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@JourneymanGeek very true

wow, first Meta SE spam I’ve seen in a while

@controlgroup it's not that rare: metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&site=4

that you don't see it that often is a stamp of approval for our regulars & Charcoal :)

the lack of rulebreakers is a testament to the power of the rules…

This is just the first time I’ve been on site for the twenty seconds or whatever the spam was

@controlgroup No

There are tons of rule breakers

Smokey does not forgive, nor forget.

The fact you don't see them, to the point you don't even believe they exist, is a testament to the effectiveness of our methods of handling them

🚽

@Starship amendment: apparent lack

@Starship yes, this is what I meant

Yeah okay quit showing off

@Glorfindel Interestingly, seems we have lower than average spam this week on MSE. About 3-4 a day. which is comparable to weekends. Usually most working days it's about twice to maybe 10-ish.

@JourneymanGeek won't work, different AI are all trained on every book ever

@KevinB why not both

We need a different rep for moderating

@M.A.R. Agreed

@starball Sorry, that's far too techno for my taste. I had to bail in under a minute.

@M.A.R. My main motivation for answering is the expectation of learning. Rep is nice, since it lets me do stuff, and it lets readers know that I (probably) know what I'm talking about. But the main reward for me is seeing that I've passed on knowledge & skills. But I need some form of feedback from the readers so I can see that they've actually learned stuff.

@PM2Ring uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh, go on

@PM2Ring haha no worries. I sent it more because I thought it was funny

I was happily helping people on forums for well over a decade before I joined SO. But those sites were much smaller, with a stronger sense of community. So you kind of got to know the regulars, and you could see that people were making progress. That doesn't scale to a site as big as SO, but it does happen to an extent on smaller sites like Astronomy.SE, and even a bit on Physics.SE, especially when you include chat rooms in the mix.

Are you saying the "People reached" metric isn't a good indicator of your knowledge being passed on?

i've reached 8.6mil people on SO alone

@PM2Ring I got it! We don't need a homework section on the site, but part of the site bulletin dedicated to on-topic jokes about programming! With bangers like "I need glasses because I can't C#"

@KevinB wow what shoes are you wearing?

It is a useful indicator, but it's a pretty crude one. :) And maybe they just copy & pasted my code without really understanding it, or my explanation. I don't mind that, but it's much more rewarding if they do understand it, and can pass that knowledge on.

it's a meaningless number

Eh, I think it's okay.

A single number can never tell you much anyway

I feel like energy potentially spent on refining that could be spent better elsewhere

Like top jokes in bulletin

We need funnier content than SO blog

Some of the best learning on the network happens in the chat rooms. But the number of people who see that stuff is relatively tiny compared to the number of visitors to the main site pages. And that stuff tends to get buried - chat search is notorious.

On Physics.SE, we have a very strict homework policy that only permits conceptual questions. Any homework-like questions that focus on specific calculations, especially "check my work" questions, get closed. However, one of the top contributors spends a huge amount of time helping students with homework & calculations in a chat room.

But of course new visitors don't know that room even exists, and they can't post there until they've earned some rep. But they'll never earn that rep if they persist in posting "check my work" questions...

seems like a problem that could be solved with some help from stack

Yep. Some minor enhancements to chat could have a big impact in its usefulness & user-friendliness. IMHO.

@EmmaBee recently mentioned expanding the scope to include "messy" questions that currently get closed on main sites for being too unfocused / vague / opinion-based. But we already deal with such questions in chat. You generally need ongoing dialogue to provide the kind of help desk service that such questions require.

However, we don't earn rep for doing that work. And it doesn't have good visibility or searchability, as I mentioned above.

i more meant something special for physics.se, a block on the left column, or right even, that invites users to that chat room with a special case for that room that lets them participate

@KevinB I suppose that could work, unless the room gets flooded. ;) But it would definitely be nice if ROs could invite low-rep members to chat.

@PM2Ring It's totally a hypothesis :D Although, others have mentioned similar here in chat and noted this comment "Everything is a discussion at the beginning and people can vote to promote a discussion to Q&A if it fits the criteria." from this answer: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/433774/21167450

@PM2Ring Also, while folks have mentioned it, anything like that would require thinking through an entire model from top to bottom, including incentives, as you say, so I don't want to make it seem like this is an easy problem to solve, even if its an interesting framing.

@PM2Ring What are some of those for you?

@EmmaBee I think the top priority is improved searching. It would also be nice to have better threading in chat. And a more selective way to save conversations.

@EmmaBee As one example (that may have been mentioned at some point), the image uploader could use an improvement, although IMO that's a QOL improvement.

@PM2Ring Ah, yes! The team is looking into all of those. I note you didn't mention anything about rep requirements, but the issue you raise above seems to suggest an access issue, gated by low rep. Is there more about that you'd also like to share?

@EmmaBee In theory, we can have several simultaneous conversations in chat, but that can quickly get messy or confusing. During a conversation, it's common to keep pinging to a minimum. But if multiple conversations are happening you kinda need to make every message a reply.

@EmmaBee Well, I agree that we need some way to stop trolls & spammers from invading. But it's very frustrating when you spot a new member who seems genuine who could benefit from a chat conversation, but who doesn't have enough rep to chat.

^ That. I'd love to be able to invite brand-new users to chat. But if that means we get support spam flooding chatrooms, that's not OK. Thinking about AU for a second, something where ROs have an option to allow any user over 20 rep to give out explicit write access (without all the other RO options) might be nice.

We occasionally see chat posts from members who just earned enough rep to chat. But due to timezone issues, they post when the room is inactive, so they don't get a response until hours later. Or they may never get a response at all, if they just posted a greeting without a tangible question. And then we never see them again...

@cocomac If it's just the invite mechanism, available to users with n rep, how would spammers flood chat?

These chats could have dog ears or whatever to distinguish them from normal chat, so chat homepages don't turn into hot messes.

I've been getting caught by the Cloudflare CAPTCHA wall a lot, lately – but it goes away if I load another Stack Exchange page in a different tab, without requiring me to solve the CAPTCHA. I'd report this properly, but it's bizarre behaviour and I don't understand it well enough to write it up.

@M.A.R. It wouldn't, I just didn't separate those thoughts well. I meant "Something like every 1-rep user can chat would be problematic. However, that could be one possible solution"