« first day (2868 days earlier)      last day (466 days later) » 
01:00 - 18:0018:00 - 00:00

1:21 AM
Morning
 
 
2 hours later…
3:47 AM
Lazy spammers
@CommunityNoDiamond. this has been an issue in the past when someone tried to pass their actions as being some sort of officially blessed thing
Needless to say, if you do that your name will be different
 
Hahaha
 
Are any of them really non-lazy?
 
They have been Shogged. :P
Speaking of spammers, I saw a question by a user asking if it is possible to know the identity of anonymous editors who vandalize the posts.
 
@Shog9 I'm curious if you've heard anything from the Teams Team about why closing/flagging aren't possible in a Team. I'm contemplating asking about it on MSO but I'm not sure if I'm missing something stupidly obvious. I've obliquely asked about it but not directly.
... Wait... there is flagging, apparently... but it's configurable? meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368555/… :/
 
4:06 AM
 
4:18 AM
@Feeds does e-books count as... books?
Also, e-bookshelf
 
Why not?
 
@Catija something something HR problem
Actually... There was a HUGE discussion internally about closing
 
Client HR problem or SE HR problem?
 
wait, no
the huge discussion was about downvoting
Jon tried to do a discussion about close voting, but I answered with some long rambling reply and apparently discouraged anyone else from participating
LET THAT BE A LESSON TO YOU
 
really? That's surprising.
 
4:22 AM
Shocking, I know
 
That was actually a response to the down voting thing...
 
Anyway, long story short: the only non-controversial close reason that actually works well in practice is Duplicate
 
And I suppose there's no ability to turn it into a configuration option, like flagging?
 
The rest of them either represent problems that aren't necessarily problems for Teams, or are borderline useless unless you have gobs of users with the privilege
 
Well, dupe votes only take one person...
 
4:25 AM
@Catija right, which is how one could make, say, Unclear useful: make it a privilege, not a vote
...which, arguably, we should probably do for public SO too, for the same reason...
...but that's, uh, a controversial concept
 
Gold dupe hammers are already sort of troublesome.
 
I think you mean "awesome"
 
If they cause complaints on meta, they're trouble. :P
 
everything causes complaints on meta
 
... and?
 
4:28 AM
that's... kinda why meta exists
it's like... y'know those weird handles where the bit you grab is sort of a coil of wire around the handle?
...I don't know what they're called. Seems like they should have a name :-/
 
I know what you mean.
 
"spring handle", apparently
 
Is "Sarah Williams" an actual person who's being slandered?
 
 
2 hours later…
6:53 AM
@Catija huh? What? Well, there's this user. What about her?
 
7:16 AM
@Catija or her name is randomly generated ;p
 
@SomewhatMemorableName well, you can't touch them or burn them. ;)
 
From when will the auto downvote for VLQ flags will be removed?
 
@NogShine this? Probably 6-8 months.
 
7:31 AM
;p
That's a safe bet
 
Optimistic, to be honest. ;)
 
7:52 AM
morning
- funny, seems the winterbash api are still active
 
Yo derpy
 
 
lol
What about the hat? ;)
ahhh
odd
 
I think that you could technically still switch them? Didn't try.
But re-enabling the Hat GUI on the main site is pretty trivial
Doing that on the chat site is a little more complicated it appears.
@JourneymanGeek atlas, not odd at all. The usually shut down the old api just a feew weeks before the new event.
Which again, technically means you could use the hat all year long
but I really wouldn't want to put some more stress on the servers.
 
which probably isn't very much
 
8:31 AM
10 messages moved to Chimney
 
→ 10 messages moved to Chimney
 
8:53 AM
→ 10 Chimneys moved to Shadow Wizard
 
the doomsday clock is ticking...
 
tick tock
 
Actually, it's an atomic clock. These don't tick.
 
They decay?
 
9:11 AM
Is that ... hours left?
 
yup
tick tock
 
panics
 
stealing @rene's towel
 
*trowel
 
9:17 AM
@JohnDvorak I don't dig
@rene already did it long ago when OP posted it
Can one insta-delete their account after asking a question?
 
@ShadowWizard sure, be ready for delete votes then ...
 
ready when you are
 
@ShadowWizard obviously ..
 
so easy to abuse then
 
Users coordinating their moderation activities in a publicly auditable location? How horrible, this needs to end!
 
9:22 AM
ending
 
@ShadowWizard ready
 
deleted by the Patrick
 
9:39 AM
Done!!!!!!!
^ can you guess what the last button does, @JourneymanGeek?
𝔬𝔯 𝔡𝔬 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔫𝔢𝔢𝔡 𝔞 𝔩𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔩𝔢 𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔱?
 
shortcut for uncouth?
 
... Oh, you monster.
 
Easy, it activates hat API
 
I wasn't joking when I said that's painful for me to read :(
 
9:43 AM
don't worry. I won't use it



.... too much.
 
YOU'RE SO .....!!!
 
vain you probably
 
wait, what's this icon? HouseCall something something
 
Just @Some icon.
 
@SomewhatMemorableName ? who? me? I was just trying to make @Journeyman happy!
 
9:56 AM
hah
 
10:46 AM
Yeah, I had a dream where future Unicode contains some of popular typefaces so we only need 1 web-compatible font...
 
11:39 AM
Does anyone know why I can edit the "-> moved xx messages to {room}" chat messages? I can't delete them because "You can't delete audit messages" but every role that can read chat message histories (room owners, moderators) can also read deleted chat messages. Seems like an oversight?
 
@SomewhatMemorableName ..and needs 37 bytes of utf-8 for a comma.
 
Yeah, seems like an oversight to me.
 
@Magisch anyone can read chat message history
anyway...
34
Q: Remove the ability to edit audit messages

R. Martinho FernandesI can't think of a decent reason to allow editing audit messages (like 'n messages moved to room' or topic changes). I have abused it for fun before but it really has no purpose other than joking or obfuscating your actions. For that I think that such messages should be untouchable. Please make t...

@Magi ^
 
hmmz
 
hummz
 
11:44 AM
hm m z?
 
sss
 
then I have to say bbb
 
sigh
 
11:47 AM
om nom nom
 
food!
 
mood!
 
I'm hungry, but it's hot and humid. Sweat or starvation? I'll go buy ice cream:)
 
12:03 PM
have fried ice creams :)
 
12:20 PM
@SomewhatMemorableName nice cherry
 
12:56 PM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Username similar to website in answer: "Track changes" in LaTeX by Bridger Jones on tex.SE
 
@SmokeDetector k
 
 
2 hours later…
3:07 PM
@πάνταῥεῖ we need your comment here: meta.stackexchange.com/q/311123/158100
 
3:49 PM
Is a question like " How is a site influencing people, political parties ? I don't hear much. Is there an influence?" allowed on per site meta?
Or here on MSE?
 
eh, either i'd think, but "allowed" is a far different question than whether or not it will be well received. and you'd have to be pretty specific as far as what you mean by "site".
the site's community? the rules it has? the way it is moderated? the kinds of questions allowed (or disallowed?) the moderation for said site? the company behind it? "site" is ambiguous
 
Site= SE community
How is SO( not the company I mean Q&A site) influencing programmers and software companies?
 
4:05 PM
I cheated and checked the meta post...
 
I think we can't answer those questions because it's not a community building post like asking users. We have " What brought you here" types. This isn't like that. It's asking other's opinions which we can't know.
@SomewhatMemorableName lol. Did you read comments as well?
 
@NogShine certainly
 
Beating own drums. :P
 
How would we measure whether or not there was any influence?
 
My question too. It's not possible for us.
 
4:14 PM
I think SO is very apolitical
which I believe partly because of the insane backlash any insertion of anything political recieves
This also leads me to believe that a sizeable audience of SO are not as liberal as the company is
 
^
 
@ThomasWard ... did I miss something?
 
!!/gone
 
@ThomasWard No such command 'gone'.
 
blah. forgot that doesn't work here. Ignore me :)
 
4:17 PM
"liberal" is kinda ill-defined in the context of a global audience
 
Mostly technical SE sites are mentioned/shared to external discussion sites (Hacker News, Reddit) and might "influence" others (or just trash talking...). Not sure for other sites (especially, religion SE sites)
 
So far every political "movement" pushed to SO via blog posts or bars etc have been met with a large amount of both negative backlash and positive reinforcement. The company has its own biases, but they don't speak for the entirety of the community.
 
Politically speaking I disagree with a lot of what SO supports 🤷‍♀️
 
I don't think a question along those lines would be very useful.
it's impossible without a site-wide survey to determine the political leanings of the the community, and even then that wouldn't really help determine how the community influences other people's opinions/political leanings.
 
4:21 PM
@Magisch I wouldn't say there aren't politics on SO... PHP is usually looked down on
 
but really... "political party"? I applauded for the big ambition on that meta post...
 
Hehehe
According to site faq ( which no one reads) politics is off-topic .
 
@Shog9 It always amused me that during the cold war the right and left wings in the US and USSR were reversed.
 
@Magisch I thought all sites except Politics are apolitical.
 
@SterlingArcher You believe in a "Be mean" Policy?
 
4:26 PM
Be mean...ingful
 
In a manner of speaking yes. I have a firm believe people are too sensitive, and catering to a crowd of sensitivity only slows down our advancements
That being said, you don't have to be mean to achieve the same results. But I refuse to spend effort changing myself to accommodate somebody else's feelings on the internet, especially when I'm not a mean person.
 
We're not a scientific organization working towards making major breakthroughs, though... we're a Q&A site where questions from all experience levels are welcome.
 
@SterlingArcher There will always be the crowd of people that get annoyed on other people's behalf unfortunately
 
@Mgetz exactly my point. it's wasting effort and resources to continuously please everybody
@Catija I believe it applies to every aspect of life
Now, after binge watching 4 seasons of the Flash I do realize this is the same mindset as a sociopathic super villain, but I take that with a grain of salt
 
@SterlingArcher Trust me... I'm trying very carefully to word my responses, this is a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't necessarily disagree with you, there is a difference between reasonable accommodation and pleasing everybody unfortunately it's a very fuzzy line.
 
4:31 PM
:/ :backs away slowly:
 
I feel we have a lot of room for improvement without compromising the core Q/A goals
 
@Mgetz if it makes you feel better you don't have to worry about offending me
 
or even while serving them
 
@SterlingArcher I'm not worried about you
 
You should be, I'm not the brightest lightbulb on the ceiling :P
But dammit I light the room up just enough
 
4:34 PM
So... here's my question... no one is forcing anyone to pander towards the sensitive people or to please everybody. What we are asking is that people avoid making comments that can be interpreted as rude or unwelcoming... if you don't think you can interact in a welcoming, helpful way with people who are too sensitive... then don't... right? There are thousands of users on SO all the time. No one person has to do it all.
 
But by forcing everyone to be less sensitive or else leave, we're potentially excluding very valuable contributors by assuming that these first timers who don't necessarily ask the best questions straight out of the gate will never be able to participate usefully... which is detrimental to the ecosystem.
 
@Catija It's a weighing process. Some people might come down on the side that losing a bunch of contributors is worth it if it also removes more people who don't contribute anything useful
 
This is where the whole "false dichotomy" thing comes in: if you define anything that makes someone feel bad as rude, then yes - it's impossible to have both quality and a welcoming attitude; no one is going to feel good about being told they're wrong.
 
If they're not contributing anything useful, they'll hit the question/answer blocks pretty soon.
 
4:41 PM
But... That shouldn't be the definition.
 
@Catija That's where people's fears come in. They think welcoming culture will extend to prohibit downvoting on newbies
Which is not far fetched considering moderators (!) of certain sites have publicly announced that their users should not downvote any new askers, regardless of question quality
 
I think the entire system would break if they got rid of downvotes.
@Magisch Where was that... Travel? Ugh.
 
@Catija it would, but that hasn't stopped many, many, many, many people from proposing exactly that over the years.
 
If you view that site's actions as a template for what could be to come, then suddenly the fears of quality going down the drain make sense
 
@Shog9 And getting downvoted for it...
 
4:43 PM
Unless we stick to using the tools as intended (including down and close votes), none of the automated quality control mechanics work
 
irony is good for the blood
 
We can't spare everyone's feelings. Many people get hurt just by being told that their question isn't allowed for a legitimate reason... that doesn't mean we can smash their face in with "you're an idiot, how could you dare ever do this here" when we let them know that their question is a bad fit for the site.
 
Right. We need to separate those two reactions
 
@Shog9 I am starting to think that I am really your good friend" because I don't know why but we think in some matters likewise and I agree with you most of the times :D Many Sa that it's argument and rude when I point out mistakes.
 
ELL has done what I think is actually a quite exemplary job of restricting question scope while helping users improve their questions. I'm always impressed with the users willing to reframe off topic questions or guide those users to improve them themselves so that the question can be answered for them.
 
4:45 PM
So when stuff like this comes down as official moderator guidance: travel.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4679/…
People are kind of justified in being very afraid and circling the wagons
 
There's no such thing as "official" moderator guidance... heck, I'm not even sure there's such a thing as "official" CM guidance...
 
It's not a huge stretch to read that and go "huh, I guess I can get banned for downvoting bad content on this site"
It reads that way too
A side effect of having that diamond next to your name is that people start to care when you speak
Like, care a lot more then as a user
 
-66
Q: Should we have a policy about "too much downvoting"?

Jeff AtwoodWe've never had an explicit policy around downvoting -- users are free to, if they like, cast all their votes as downvotes. Whether this behavior is desirable or not is another matter. Now, we do discourage downvoting by making downvotes cost -1 rep to the casting voter. But, there's nothing in...

 
That's sort of a bit of a stretch to call it "official", though... I mean, the first sentence starts with "Some guidelines I'd love to see follow below."
 
I can spout off as much as I want on ips meta and people will weigh it based on merit. If you do that then a lot of people will take it on deference
Or at least find it hard to disagree
 
4:47 PM
Apr 27 at 3:57, by hey
Sure, for new users, when getting downvoted to below 0, replace it with "Uh oh!" instead.
 
Eh, people DV my IPS answers all the time.
 
@Shog9 Pretty sure that caused a massive uproar back in its time, didn't it?
 
@Magisch read the comments...
 
@Shog9 I think I did at some point. During some very boring afternoons I read through the first ~30 pages of most downvoted posts on MSE
 
lmao. those comments
 
4:49 PM
Jeff was so convinced that folks were just downvoting for the lulz that he reset the score. Then the downvoting began in earnest
 
:/
 
Was that the one where he reset the score?
Talk about streisand effect :D
 
Apparently Adam was having difficulty deciding whether the question should even exist at all...
 
Back to the current events, I think it's important to recognize people's fears and take changes slowly and deliberately
We yet have a chance to make some positive changes without alienating key contributors
 
Though, considering the policy he suggests, I'd downvote it, too... I'm almost at that limit on IPS, actually... so I'd lose my ability to DV at all.
 
4:52 PM
IMHO, the elephant in the room here is that questions aren't getting answered as readily as they were in years past, at least on Stack Overflow. Which, as we've known pretty much forever, is THE thing most likely to drive new users away.
 
@Magisch I'm tempted to ask "is there any evidence that we haven't?"
 
You can blame it on downvotes or whatever, but... For most new users, what they actually encounter is... nothing. And that sucks.
 
That seems like a volume problem? Is there any indication of that?
 
@Shog9 Answering has lost some of its charms too because unless the question you're looking at is incredibly specific or complicated chances are it's a dupe and now you have the nagging feeling in the back of your head that you should be searching for the dupe rather then answering it
ironically early on when I was very new I was much more likely to answer stuff I came across that I found interesting or a worthy challenge
These days I almost know they're dupes so I rarely bother anymore
 
@Shog9 Well, how can you encounter something with investment of nothing? How should that be actually done?
 
4:54 PM
That argues for a better dupe locating system.
 
1st day on SO: Yay! New questions! *answered*
6-8 months later: I believe I have seen this question. Ugh, where's that dupe...
 
@Catija Absolutely agree
 
@Shog9 I rarely answer questions because there's rarely a question worth answering these days
 
Many new answerers aren't aware of what is or isn't a dupe in the same way many veterans are. So they'll answer a question, the question gets closed, they get downvoted, etc, and it's just a terrible outcome. They were just trying to help, and who knows, maybe they did look for a duplicate, but SO search isn't google, so it isn't always going to find what you're looking for.
 
You answer some easy but interesting question and maybe OP accepts and thanks you and it feels great because you helped someone
 
4:55 PM
Yeah, downvoting people for answering questions that happen to be dupes is... kinda weird to me.
 
Then a couple months down the line you're just searching for that dupe and think "eh, searching for that dupe is not as interesting as coming up with the solution myself, why bother"
 
I understand it... but I don't... understand it.
 
I used to do that a lot
In fact at some point I was so hostile towards people who answer dupes that shog had to chat ban me
 
@Magisch When a diamond posts, some people vote without reading at all. If a user posts, you are just a user like like me.. You're not a mod to know these things. Mod's comment or answer is taken as official thing in many places. At least the site I post frequently.
 
@NogShine I'm guilty (looking at Shog's meta posts...)
 
4:57 PM
@Magisch I had a phase where I commented "I didn't vote, but this question is a duplicate and may result in your answer being downvoted" etc etc
 
@Catija WOW! That's a new thing I'm hearing :P
 
It's a nice way of saying "you probably should rethink what you's doin"
 
At some point I realised that it's not actually helpful to go after well intentioned answerers that way
 
but... those users are the ones you want joining your team and finding duplicates
 
they're having fun ... enjoying helping people. If we ever want to solve dupes being answered that's more of a tooling problem then a behavioral problem
 
4:58 PM
I don't like when people downvote dupe questions... but I at least can understand that vote as a "no research" vote to some extent, regardless of how bad SE search is and that people don't think about using an external search engine... but answers, particularly from newer users, on dupe questions ... that's ... ugh. If someone votes to close as a dupe and then answers, that's one thing... but with millions of questions on SO, knowing there's a dupe is asking a lot.
 
We can hardly shame them into becoming as cynical as we are
 
I commented "the question is a dupe of (the linked question), please answer it there instead" instead...
 
they're the ones looking at the front page for questions to answer. and when they find a dupe, we want them to help us close them
downvoting them doesn't necessarily help, but commenting doesn't either... we're left with no action that really portrays what we want to accomplish
 
@Magisch It's also really confusing because the downvotes imply that the answers are wrong... which (I'm assuming) they're not.
 
and they get rewarded for it, so they think they're doing the right thing
there's so much rep to be gained in answering duplicate questions, even if you initially get a downvote
 
5:00 PM
from a human behavior perspective downvoting someone's answers when they're new doesn't make them introspect and change their behavior into a model stack citizen, it makes them leave
Also we end up with a bunch of actually correct answers with bad scores
Which is unhelpful for the purposes of what downvotes actually serve
 
on a bunch of questions that will never be seen again
 
There already was a number of proposals how duplicate closure should be encouraged.
 
This is the nth time this is been discussed, and it's always the same: we gotta wait for better tools
 
the rep incentive is SE's blessing and curse
 
welp, time to sleep~ (will I have 1000+ unread messages?)
 
5:01 PM
because people minmax it
@SterlingArcher That is because manually educating new users doesn't scale against a contrary incentive
 
If you give rep for successful dupe closure, more will occur... which is what we want. you'll of course increase the incorrect closures if you increase the closures at all.
Which i assume is why so many are against that
 
As mentioned, there were a number of proposals already.
 
 
finding duplicates is hard in the current system
 
The dupe hammer can be a curse too :3
 
5:03 PM
people are horrible at crafting titles for their questions because they don't understand the problem they have half the time
which makes closing as a duplicate both hard, and often times pointless
because the title of the dupe is so bad that it will virtually never be used to find the dupe target
 
Most (new) people don't understand duplicates without further explanation at all.
 
duplicates are actually a weird concept considering traditional Q/A sites
 
basically i don't think the "signpost" reasoning for duplicates makes a lot of sense past 3-4 duplicates
 
@Magisch Why really?
Did you mean forums?
 
like, there's certainly a few different ways a question can be asked, but past that... you end up with a bunch of titles asking for A when the real problem was B and it was closed as a dupe of B
 
5:06 PM
XY-problemz yes
 
like Why is my promise not waiting on the ajax request to complete? "because .apply needs two arguments"
 
@KevinB ..and the other half of the time, the OP's are good at crafting obfuscated titles for their questions so as to reduce the chances of ident as a dupe and increase the chances of a unique answer that no other student has copypasted into their submission.
 
meh, i rather not assume malice, but yea i can see that happening.
 
ok, I totally missed this last week, but... Most ill-advised burninate request ever made
 
Originally SO was created to be a FAQ like repo IIRC. Duplicates often are simply representing those frequent questions.
 
5:10 PM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad pattern in URL answer, blacklisted website in answer: How to enable back decrypt button on Nougat+ on adb? by quickbooks support on superuser.com
 
We just don't have a reasonable way of dealing with some types of questions
 
@Shog9 One of the mods finally delete it?
 
other than ignoring them and just answering them, repeatedly, forever
 
@SmokeDetector tpu-
 
the latter option of course results in happy askers and answers, even though it may irritate some more veteran users.
 
5:12 PM
@KevinB There are probably guidelines how to do that at Quora or Reddit :-D
 
@Catija no, 3 20K users
 
@Shog But back to downvotes, especially for 1st posts. What are your thoughts how that can be prevented?
 
why do you want to prevent it?
 
I thought you wanted to?
 
I don't really care. As far as I can tell, they don't have much effect
 
5:17 PM
I've got no problem with that, but new users would feel being pushed off/away.
@Shog9 You mean regarding (inappropriate) answers?
 
I mean that fixating on downvotes on new user posts is... One of those "color of the bikeshed" discussions.
CLEARLY green will bring peace and prosperity to our nuclear power plant
don't know why y'all don't just accept that
 
OK. I am fine with that.
One can color things in many ways, but these will stay essentially the same.
 
new askers want an answer to their question. If they get it, generally they're happy. If they don't, generally they're not. Downvotes have some small effect, but... It's probably about the same as the color of the bikeshed on the attentiveness of the safety monitoring team at the power plant.
if you got alarms going off and your team is looking all bored and distracted... Maybe don't make re-painting the bikeshed your first priority.
 
OK, then we'll turn back for duplicates discussion :3
 
Nicely said, Shogger
 
5:25 PM
Reminds me of the time when I moved to a new town and needed to cash a check.
Went down to the main bank, old ornate building with huge vaulted ceiling full of gilding and frescos
 
I haven't cashed a check since 2006
 
Yeah, this was... Probably 2004
 
And did they give you cash there?
 
I was 16 and I took my first paycheck from my first job and bought a gameboy advanced
 
Anyway, so I walk up to a teller and tell 'em... "I want to open an account here and cash this check"
And they hem and haw, and tell me I need to talk to a manager.
 
5:27 PM
Ah, I see ...
 
So they walk me to a manager's office, nice place with potted plants & heavy wooden door and a big picture window looking out onto downtown
And offer me a cup of coffee, which I accept, and tell me the manager'll be right there
So I sip my coffee, enjoy the view and ambiance, and the manager comes in & thanks me for my patronage or something...
...look, long story short: I waste about an hour and a half there, during which everyone was SUPER welcoming, but no one would actually cash the check. Which, was issued by the city government and drawn on that bank.
So finally I threw my coffee into one of the potted plants, walked across the street to a different, much less fancy bank, talked to a gal sitting in a crappy little cube in the basement, and within 15 minutes had a new account and a fist full of cash.
 
Many people waste their time just googling the wrong things at the interwebz though.
 
Welcoming is an awesome thing to be. To this day, I'm impressed by that first bank; I can close my eyes and picture it, smell it.
But... I will never visit it again because they couldn't do the one thing I needed them to do
 
Wait wait wait wait
@Shog9 fistful?
You literally closed your hand around money? Like a psychopath?
 
(These days I bank with a local credit union, which doesn't have coffee but is otherwise very welcoming and always, always gives me money when I need them to)
 
5:32 PM
Crumpling the bills?!
 
@Shog9 I well understand your points. But on the other hand, how can we ensure to have any quality at the repo, then?
 
Hey, I was broke, and on my way out of town for a trip of ~1K miles. I needed that money.
 
Why wouldn't they let you open an account?
 
I can't look at you the same anymore
 
@Catija because I needed to deposit money
and they wouldn't accept the check without a 14-day hold
 
5:33 PM
14 days?!
 
Yeah, it was complete BS
 
Good lord, what a terrible bank
 
From their own bank? WTF?
 
yep
 
One time somebody managed to deposit a check into a savings account I was preparing to close out, and the check bounced, so it overdrafted. tl;dr the bank froze all my assets for 9 days (I had literally no money to access for 9 days) because it was fraud based
Even better: day 8 of being in the bank, the bank gets robbed while I'm in there. All of a sudden I'm being interviewed by the FBI because I was involved in fraud and they wanted to make sure I wasn't invovled
Proof
 
5:36 PM
It's a bit of a catch22. Here we have a legal rule that banks must offer you an account.
No matter what.
 
Or if you're wells fargo, they have a legal rule to open up an account in your name against your will
 
oh yeah, Wells Fargo is just a terrible bank all around
I had a run-in with them once too
 
I mean, aside from the 9 figure legal fees they've been hit with I've had no issues with them
 
Again, someone gave me a check from their WF account and WF refused to cash it.
 
they're so accessible I can't leave
 
5:40 PM
OK, translated to SE accounts: Everyone can easily open a new account, but gaining credits or cash (answers) isn't guaranteed at all.
 
Heh... Now that I think about it... They did that to a friend last year too. His paycheck was printed slightly mis-aligned, so their machine couldn't read the account number. And, I guess, none of them can type.
 
@πάνταῥεῖ no the point was they were so nice, but couldn't answer his "question"
All that welcoming yielded no results
 
Sure, I got that.
 
Right. Ideally, you do both. But if you over-invest in the "experience" and under-invest in the "results" aspect, you accomplish nothing.
Folks don't go to banks for coffee & chit-chat.
Folks don't go to programming Q&A sites to be greeted warmly and not helped.
 
Is that a reason for _not being nice_? IMO no, but just telling straightforward what would work, and what won''t.
But people feel bad and obstructed by such behavior as well.
 
5:44 PM
Absolutely not. But that's where the whole "false dichotomy" thing comes in.
 
There's a difference between being nice and being welcoming though
I'm not advocating people going around saying "you suck at js" :P
 
The point of doing all of this is to have answered questions. We cannot lose sight of that; we can get better about doing it nicely, but we have to keep that core mission firmly in mind.
This is where we've gotten into the weeds in the past, with banners and warnings and increasingly-verbose messaging all aimed at sorta obscuring the fact that we're not going to be able to answer some things.
 
Then we should let go those unanswerable questions just in vain?
No votes, no closures, no comments?
 
This is why I just delete programming questions posted on meta. There's no avenue for redemption there; there's no way to soften the blow. You just prolong the pain.
 
Well, you're able to do that single handedly.
 
5:48 PM
Does it help anyone to see a programming question go from 0-score 0-answers to -5 closed 3 comments no answers? No. Not the asker, certainly not passers-by
 
The DV's and CV's might help getting a mod's attention and just do that removal.
I often see that pattern (and initiate it) at SE Code Review.
 
I'm not criticizing the DVs and CVs here. Or even the comments. I'm just saying that that they're irrelevant. The asker isn't going to get an answer. Ever. That's known from the start, and the fact that we have a long bureaucratic process for getting to the inevitable conclusion isn't benefiting anyone.
 
But again, not everything is worth an answer, or even answerable.
 
I was gonna leave unhappy from the minute I walked into that bank. The teller knew it, the manager knew it... Only I didn't know it. So instead of walking out unhappy in 90 seconds, I walked out unhappy in 90 minutes.
 
We need more mods :3
 
01:00 - 18:0018:00 - 00:00

« first day (2868 days earlier)      last day (466 days later) » 
https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/6/11
chat.meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-39
419352
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZSDNCY5CJ4F3IWCDGWWFVQZ63C55ERCX
<urn:uuid:e98e9738-6d38-46c0-aee0-4ceb230058c1>
2019-09-20T03:07:06Z
198.252.206.29
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:AMHG24REZGZXZCBAQXMWBCOHWT5QWKM3
<urn:uuid:49c68c33-5e8a-46eb-ad02-38ccb8ba93f7>
https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/6/11
response
<urn:uuid:48d9467f-7fe9-4a9e-bdfb-6e4f1c3fb588>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-51.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/