Fall 2018 General Meeting

Took place on 2018-08-21 16:00

For more information, see agenda at https://sopython.com/wiki/2018_Q3_General_Meeting.

Hello and welcome to the third quarter General Room Meeting. In lieu of someone actually qualified, I'll be your chairman for this event.
Let's all remember to be excellent to each other, and hopefully most of us will survive through to the end.
Now the starring fest begins.
No starring fest
Let's jump right in. Item #1 on the Agenda is "review of previous meeting". I've got a rough summary of the main points here...
(I just starred that for a bit of visibility)
Previous meeting item #1: "let's try to have room meetings more often". Well... That didn't go so great. We forgot to have the second quarter meeting. Let's try extra hard to do better in Q4.
To that end, I have already established a tentative date for the next meeting: November 19. Now that we've got a target, it will be harder to let it slip by
Previous meeting item #2: "the room is a bit cliquey, can we do something about that?". Status: indeterminate. The user makeup is about the same as it was before. We're still trying to be welcoming to newcomers. This is both difficult to measure, and to come up with actionable solutions for.
Item #3. "Could there be a lower proportion of gold-badge users in this room than in other rooms. Is this the case, and how do we fix it?". No action taken yet. Another hard-to-measure metric. If anyone wants to volunteer to throw some data analysis elbow grease at this, I'm all ears.
Also, 20k+ users...
I'd also add "does it really need fixing?"
(i.e. is this something intrinsic to the gold badgers that are lacking, a statistical fluke, or something we should be doing differently)
Item #4. "'Trash' is kind of a blunt name for the room we send trashed messages to. Can we change that?" Status: yep. Since naming it the "Python Ouroboros", I haven't heard any complaints. Perhaps in lieu of getting mad, users are just baffled? I consider this an improvement.
It's actually a fairly interesting use of scraping and time series analysis, so if you're looking for something to do there's an idea.
Cant force people to stay. People who comes in to ask their question, ends up leaving since their question got answered (until the next time they have another question). Only a hand full actually decided they wanted to stick around.
There are several very talented/knowledgable people in this room whose talent is not proportional to there rep or gold badge status. I think that is a reflection of the quality of this community and the python community at large. Meaning, many here don't care about rep as much as contributing to a fruitful community.
Also, there are many gold badgers I'd rather not be hanging out here
This is a topic we should definitely revisit if/when we receive some concrete data.
I know of at least one prominent gold badger (Jean-François Fabre) who cannot access Chat on their work computer. I assume he's not the only one. But I also get the impression that he's not that interested in being a regular visitor of this room anyway
@Kevin agreed
hmm, not sure about that - JFF is active in other chat rooms
I think it's also harder to earn rep these days in terms of quality of question. Also attracting high rep / gold badges seems kinda irrelevant, why did we wan't to be focused on their reps in the first place (the answer I might have missed in last meeting).
Maybe not during work hours. I'm just going off a comment he made to me a while back when he needed re-tagging to hammer a dupe.
@MooingRawr search here for "gold badger", wim at 16:39
(before and after 10 minutes or something)
I think the idea was "having lots of gold badgers isn't an objective good in itself, but it is possibly indicative of the general quality of the room"
@AndrasDeak interesting, I will put it on my queue to be read after this meeting. (thanks)
@AndrasDeak It depends if you like the cliqueyness or not. Python certainly growing in popularity but this rm is not.
the JS room does/did but I'd rather not trade us for them
@wim does there exist other chat options that are more popular? IRC?
I agree with Andras, in that most of the flagged chat messages usually always come from the JS room.
Python is such an intuitive dream that tech support only needs to grow by 10% when the user base grows by 1000% ;-)
Oft I get the impression room 6 is like python's watercooler
@Drew Hey! We are in the middle of our general assembly. So we are not going to be discussing Python problems at the moment
oops
no worries
Thanks, Drew. If it's not a huge problem please bring it up again in an hour or so (whenever the meeting is over) :)
We started a few minutes ago
@Drew yes. In about an hour feel free to come back and post that question again
Thanks!
np
Previous Meeting Item #5. "What can we do to make trashing gentler?". I think we've made some progress on this. We try to give correctional tips to the recipient, and make them understand how the room is improved when they try a little harder to format their messages properly. I can recall two or three instances where the user even asked for the messages to be trashed before we took action. That's a great sign of not having any hard feelings.
Switching from "move the messages, then explain the problem" to "explain the problem, then move the messages" seems to have been an important change
Yes, that is a big improvement
Agreed. Good improvement
addressing the point where Wim said that python's user base has been growing but this room's population hasn't been; I wonder if it's because Python's resources for beginners and medium level of users are that great that most newcomer don't need to seek out extra help (ie come to our chat room)
also being a help desk and being good substrate for high-rep users to stick around are two different (and somewhat conflicting) aspects
but let's not jump back to earlier items :)
Also there's probably some critical mass where chat becomes less useful the more people are in it, and maybe we're at some local stable point. Who knows? We're not sociologists.
Whoops, sorry, keep on with #5+
Previous Meeting Item #6. "Is inlined image uploading getting out of hand?" We adopted a "wait and see" approach to this one. I don't think there were any particularly disruptive events between then and now. (I've personally been hyperlinking my own gifs since then, which probably accounted for 90% of them :-P)
are we moving a bit slow with this discussion? Or is this normal?
we are at item #6 now
(of the previous meeting)
I think it's about the same speed, but last meeting we had way more people, which made the chat fly faster.
ah that's why
@coldspeed these are parts of a broader current item #1: earlier orders of business. Kevin's leaving some time to discuss. Still we see late remarks :P
I've been a bit less present since the last meeting, but the times I was here I did not notice any image link abuse
We only have two Previous Meeting items after this, and then four-ish New Items, so we're about halfway done by that measure
@idjaw Me neither. I find a few things annoying but that's mostly due to my pickiness
I haven't seen as many gifs so I haven't had to hide the page on my work desktop until it pass, which is nice. I still enjoy the cute pictures though so I think we are heading in the correct direction.
Same, I've been super busy so haven't been in the room much, but I've noticed fewer things that need to be cleaned up. I think this is typical of Summer though, there's usually an uptick of lower quality posts around this or next month.
Can we revisit some of these topics again in the next GM? I think davidism brings a fair point about the summer and the reduced activity.
It would be appreciated if those sharing music videos could inline link them instead of one-boxed.
I don't mind either way. Though it's rare that I click on a youtube onebox, personally
I think just adding any extra text in the message prevents them from being one-boxed, doesn't it?
@coldspeed Ok, sounds good. So we'll continue to Wait and See and talk about it in Q4.
@wim yup, except directed reply IDs
Isn't music sharing less frequent than image sharing?
@idjaw it is; happens pretty rarely
Sorry I'm late :/
no worries, welcome :)
better late than never :D
I'm just trying to understand what is it about a one box youtube link that is worse than a one box image?
considering that we are concluding it is not being abused?
one box image you know what image is, one box video you might not know what the picture might be? is my guess..
I post a few music links, but almost always as text links, not one-boxes. And I hate anonymous links without some kind of explanation...
The problem was not that we were linking images, it was that there were particularly large ones or animated ones. Small images are fine (content matters though), and youtube thumbnails are about the same size.
I think one boxing yt links is okay as long as it is relevant to the room.
I went in to this at the time, but music videos often have a thumbnail that says "this is obviously not work related"
I take it wim finds them more annoying. One advantage of youtube oneboxes is that you see the title and the performer, which is additional info
Mar 12 at 23:33, by wim
I read/participate in the Python SO chat at work, which is acceptable (programming related), but the thumbnails of these music videos make it look like I'm in some kind of an anime chat room. It's not a good look for me or, presumably, others that use SO at work.
A couple regulars do occasionally post their music selection. At the very least, we can make it known to them that some have expressed a preference for hyperlinks. Even if we don't resolve to make it an official policy.
I'm impartial to any of the one-boxing, text thingie. It's not an issue at my place of employment and the personally I like the context.
But let the democracy decide this one
There's all sorts of content that can be posted, so singling out youtube seems odd. If you're concerned with images or oneboxed content in general, adblock can block those divs fairly easily and is probably a safer bet overall.
FWIW most of the youtube oneboxen don't look like music chat.stackoverflow.com/search?room=6&q=youtube
I also don't understand the difference between music link being worse than image link in terms of grading non-work related shenanigans
use common sense / discretion
I think it's the default
anime has too strong association with body pillows etc
I think that is collectively what we are concluding is that in general we have agreed that there hasn't been any abuse of one-boxing so we don't need to hammer anything down right now.
Also, I think the last time I was involved in people sharing NSFWish anime type pictures we squashed that down quickly and I never saw it again
if it's a youtube of a pycon talk I have zero issue with that
4 mins ago, by coldspeed
I think one boxing yt links is okay as long as it is relevant to the room.
if this is about the few anime-related-looking links that davidism and others posted in March: nothing of sorts has happened since
great
But at the time, I was kicked out of the room for asking about it.
Hopefully no one creates an anime based python talk >.<
I'm glad it's settled then.
Yes let's move on.
Previous Meeting Item #7. "Let's write up a summary of what was discussed during the Q2 meeting, and add it to the transcript page on the sopython.com site." We didn't get around to this. I'm reading from a rough summary that was prepared a couple of days ago, but it's not publicly available anywhere. I'm hoping we'll do better for this meeting, since it's been less of a dog & pony show so far :-)
hold my beer
@piRSquared I'd lowkey toy with the idea of checking one of those out
I don't think this is a huge issue, since the transcript is still publicly available. All the information is there for anyone to peruse. It's just unfiltered.
/takes @AndrasDeak's beer and gets out the popcorn
And we're also reviewing it now. But at least a brief outline in the transcript summary would be nice, for nothing else but to make our "previous business" next meeting easier.
/takes @AndrasDeak beer from @Code-Apprentice and drinks it 😛
"thanks for offering, but I have my own"?
Final Previous Meeting Item: "We'll open up the agenda for the next meeting, which as always can be edited by any user with >= 100 rep". Status: partial success. We did open the agenda, but only one week ago. Ideally, everyone would have an entire quarter to propose topics.
I intend to put up a stub page for the Q4 meeting immediately after this meeting concludes.
Good to put the page up and make it editable immediately
Sure, as long as users can restrain themselves from adding topics in the heat of the moment after disputes with ROs or other users
@wim I think that was the plan after last time already, it was just forgotten
@coldspeed Not necessarily a bad thing
can always edit again and remove after your head cools down
@Kevin I know very little about Python, but you're saying I am able to edit the agenda for the next meeting?
Navigating to the wiki from the chat room is arduous enough that you probably won't be at the peak of your rage when you finally get to the edit panel ;-)
yes, that's exactly it.
The meetings aren't about python, they're about this chat room.
@JennaSloan Yep, any Stack Overflow user with 100 reputation or more has the right to edit sopython.com/wiki/2018_Q3_General_Meeting
No Python knowledge required.
Of course I'd hazard the statement that room owners are allowed to revise topics added by others and modify them if necessary.
if someone has less than 100 rep, they can talk to anyone in this room and we can add it for them. (if it's valid I guess).
OTOH, I think we do need some mechanism to handle situations when room visitors (whether casuals or regulars) have a serious grievance relating to the room. We don't want to create a Situation in the room itself, but we still need a way to deal with that sort of feedback fairly and swiftly.
if nobody posts "free banana suits for all!" as a topic, this should stay on the level of typo fixes
@PM2Ring Are you suggesting some form of a more private channel to provide criticism to ROs?
@idjaw Something like that. But I don't know how we could implement it easily, since SO doesn't have PMs.
@PM2Ring Isn't this room the best place for that kind of thing though? Serious grievances usually affect the entire room, not just the person who's making the complaint.
We used to have an email, but no one ever used it and I couldn't maintain it when moving servers. I can add a GitHub issue to add a private feedback section to the website.
@PM2Ring We could try to make it a bit more obvious to the people here on how to get to that
@Aran-Fey Fair point And that can work if people keep civil. But that's not always easy when emotions are running high. And some people can discuss stuff easier when there's a degree of privacy.
I think just directly in room is best. If someone is obviously in a rage they can be booted.
Could make a contact form that saves to DB or flatfile <- rather than email
@wim it usually gets worse from there, as you know
@wim True, however, in the event that someone is not comfortable being public about their grievance, it might be nice to provide that channel.
hmm, good point.
We can provide it as a form on sopython.com, and have it posted somewhere else that is not email based which might make life easier for the managing part @davidism
@vaultah Does it? I've been visiting this room for a year, and I know nothing of the sort
@wim to a point I'd agree, but after a level of escalation it's often better to occupy oneself with something else. When either or both parties are agitated there's not much room for an objective discussion
I wouldn't want ongoing arguments in the room that lead nowhere
which is also why we often freeze the room for half a minute or so when we assess that continuing the discussion would make it even worse
s/often/occasionally/, really
I feel like we're dipping a little bit into New Item #3, "Disputes with an RO and how to resolve them constructively." I guess it's fine to go through the Items out of order as long as we hit them all at some point.
A private channel like that is a bit like a fire extinguisher. You don't expect it to get used very often, but you're glad it's there when you need it. :)
I would like to see a conflict resolution step between "bring up your grievance with the RO who you think is doing wrong, right then and there" and "wait to raise your grievance at the room meeting"
so <-> meta so
rm6 <-> meta rm6 ??
does this mean we will have our meeting in meta rm6?
would make sense
I mean meta SO is where people go to fight and disagree without making a big mess on SO, there is nothing equivalent for chat
Hypothetically, what if we also used meta SO to fight and argue?
That would avoid the scenario of someone coming into this room looking for help but received a "come back later message", not that it's a big issue
@Kevin historically, that just gets SE annoyed at chatrooms again and usually degrades from there
the same room could be used for the meetings, might make keeping the minutes unnecessary
@wim Does making a new chatroom for that not work?
I suppose we could have a meta room. But we would need to keep it active so that it doesn't get frozen and deleted.
Let's clarify. Are we talking about "private channel to protect someone with a grievance", or "separate channel to protect the main room from meta-discussions and heated arguments"?
because these are very different suggestions
^^ good point
A meta room would not be private, so that doesn't really work for stuff that needs privacy.
Which now raises the question on whether we care about the privacy at the moment. It can be a version 1?
and we can improve from there if we see there are private issues that come up?
^ +1
I wouldn't think privacy is a real issue. We don't have abuse or put-down of users that would merit such measures.
I think transparency is pretty nice to keep people in the loop kind of thing. If they want privacy could they not create a new account just to raise their concern?
Perhaps. But I suspect that 99% of the time stuff that doesn't need privacy can easily be done in room 6 itself. So there isn't a lot of point in having a non-private meta room.
@PM2Ring I disagree. There were a lot of times where arguments became too heated, and it was bad for the room and bad for those involved
A meta room is going to get frozen for inactivity.
If we don't get a meta room 6, then we must be allowed to have discussions here in this room. If there's no place where having discussions about this room is acceptable, then something's wrong.
long arguments (unrelated to PEP 572) shouldn't be kept here
lol
Oh, ok. But would a meta room reduce the heatedness, or just move it somewhere less obvious to the casual vistor?
I imagine that it would both take it elsewhere and elsewhen
would it be feasible to have an irc hooked into SOPython's site? (to get around a room being frozen)
Yes, I think in general it removes the tension from people who don't want to be involved, keeps room6 on topic and the one on one conversation can be resolved quicker without distraction
If it's heated, give some time to the involved parties and talk about it later. If it's something general, talk about it elsewhere at the time
How long does it take for a room to get frozen
but details like a room getting frozen and whatnot make this too a non-trivial scenario
Would a bot posting a message in it once every 4 weeks prevent that?
Maybe. Would the mod team get mad at us for doing that, though?
The issue isn't having a meta discussion in here. It's having one that's out of proporttion in terms of reaction and time taken compared to the action taken. It's ok to ask an RO why an action was taken. Get a response and move on, bring it up at a meeting if you feel it's problematic. It's not ok to do that every time you see an RO take an action, or to ignore feedback you got in the past when bringing it up.
I wonder how the mods would feel about a "dead" room being kept alive by a bot?
#1 item of how to contribute to room 6 - tell terry to say hi in r6meta every other day
@wim IIRC, rooms get frozen quicker than that. But a post every week should keep it alive.
I have to leave so will not be here when we get to New item #1 (new contributors) - can I just add to the record "Include a link to github/issues on sopython.com (either wiki or main page)" and "create a pdf/visual guide to contributing to room 6 <- I'm going to try and work this up by completing one of the small issues this weekend" as not everyone is familiar with the framework
@davidism I'd love to get a response and move on. The only response I've received so far is "this is an old discussion (that I had with someone else, not you)".
@JGreenwell thanks, sorry you have to go
@davidism It goes both ways. What about feedback for the RO, and an RO ignoring feedback they got in the past about their actions?
I have others but I'll bring them up later if they're not covered here
@JGreenwell Noted. I also note that this is a good reason not to do the Items out of order. I have learned an important Chairman Lesson today.
I think we've been on this topic for a while.
Is it safe to conclude that we agree on having a separate grievance room, and we just need to keep it alive for now?
we can add it to the To Do and move on
What about the feedback through sopython?
I like that too
we probably don't agree about the details, but some kind of feedback channel, yes
why not both
Anonymous feedback please.
out of curiosity how many more items is on the list, Kevin ?
@idjaw Not really, it was just an idea I threw out there (and not necessarily a good idea)
@MooingRawr sopython.com/wiki/2018_Q3_General_Meeting
@wim I disagree, I don't think it's a bad idea.
We've got three Items after this, although I expect the final one will take fifteen seconds
@AndrasDeak does not line up but okie :\
I'd rather get a feedback form on sopython, if that's acceptable to people as a start. With the understanding that an ocassional question in here is perfectly fine, but continued disruption is not and should be taken to feedback.
I think that's a great start.
OK
Version 1 - sopython feedback form.
so say we all
let's move on
Yes, and I think it would be good to 1) make it anonymous, or give the user the option to disclose their identity, and 2) have it viewable for all ROs, and not just the one who handles it
I've still got a few things to say on this topic.
Not only are we not seeing many of the members that are very active in python on main, we are actually losing members that were good contributors - look what happened with @Aran-Fey recently
(The good news is that I'll be coming back now that we've decided on a way to provide feedback)
This was, as I could see, a direct consequence of one RO inability to handle criticism
@wim I disagree with that assessment
Yes, a feedback form on sopython sounds excellent. Let's see how that goes. If it works well we probably won't need to bother with a separate grievance room.
Let's stay on topic
@Aran-Fey Yay!
Yes. Please. @wim Not to take away from your concerns here, but I think we just agreed on putting something in place to help provide feedback directly to ROs to act faster on valid concerns
@Rawing awesome!
Is there anything explicit you want to suggest/improve on this topic?
Beyond setting in place this new mechanism, I don't see what else we need to discuss at this point.
Would it be possible for the feedback to be made view able to the public, so we can direct others if there's a reoccurring issue?
I put forth two points regarding the implementation detail. I'd like to know if those are appropriate... or perhaps now is not a good time to discuss specifics?
but I guess these are details to system that we can hash out later
@coldspeed it probably isn't
Okay then, moving on
your suggestion will be in the transcript and noted by whomever tackles the feature
Perhaps a "private? y/n" checkbox during submission... But we can hammer that out during implementation
@coldspeed Let's keep your improvements in mind. I think we've been on this one for a while and don't want to take away from your suggestions.
@MooingRawr And also not immediately trashed / stars cleared by those concerned
sounds good :)
@wim I guarantee that anything ad hominem will be unstarred, irrespective of target
We need an understanding that whatever feedback does happen, both parties need to accept it. If you provide feedback, get a response from other ROs, then ignore that response, that's not acceptable.
@AndrasDeak Why? If it not abusive, is that really necessary?
oddly nobody protests when I unstar things that is directed at non-RO regulars
@wim yes
Let's move on, please. We have a lot to discuss regarding moderation practices in this room, but not now.
in line with the new Code of Conduct, and Be Nice before that.
If you think there's an issue, but the general consensus is that it isn't an issue, then you'll need to escalate in some other way than disrupting the room.
It's not "not nice" to provide a constructive criticism. RO are not infallible.
I second Aran, would like to finish this meeting so lunch time can roll around.
Ok, since we're talking about niceness, let's go to Item 2, "The welcoming and what it means for moderation of chat"
@wim "I don't believe you should have <taken action> because <objective reason>" is not ad hominem and will not be hurt. "Are you completely crazy?" is.
Which I interpret to mean "how does the new Code of Conduct affect the moderation of the room?"
Thanks Kevin.
Let us please stay constructively on track
the way the discussion is going is moving more towards how this new moderation channel will "work" or what it will help alleviate
looks like we need it.
So please, let's just move on and stop.
I thought ad hominem means "relating to or associated with a particular person" but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
The mods have more or less said that the Code of Conduct doesn't/shouldn't really affect day-to-day moderation. It's just a more stringent codification of the values that the site has had all along.
@wim In football, it's the rule of "play the ball, not the man".
@wim ad hominem is about criticizing the person rather than the action. But we digress.
I would prefer if users would get a warning before being booted.
@Kevin I concur, handling problematic users is not in any way against the new CoC or old Be Nice
@Aran-Fey I agree and I'm pretty sure we do that unless someone is very disruptive (flat-out troll)
and if we don't do that, then this is again a perfect avenue for sending that criticism through the web form that will be open
We've got agenda items that predate the new CoC by half a year that indicate we've been trying to move in that same direction since forever
I agree that proper legitimate warning is required and failure to do so should be brought up so we can all reflect on why this happened and see what should have been done instead
@idjaw Agreed
But I refuse to accept any allegations that we should tolerate disruptive users on account of being nice. The JS room has been highly tolerant with trolls for fear of seeming unwelcoming, and it looks awful.
this is a hill I'm ready to die on
@AndrasDeak There have been times where a new users was having a conversation with a RO and then got booted out of the blue because they were slow to understand something or didn't do enough research before asking their question, and the RO in question lost patience
The Meta.SE guide to moderating chat hasn't changed. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271267/… We're still going to moderate the room to keep it on track. We're also trying to ensure a user has been communicated at before taking action rather than after.
by the way that became an official FAQ a few days ago
Guess it has changed. :-|
@Aran-Fey that has been discussed in private days before the meeting
@Aran-Fey it probably has, and it's not something we wish to make a habit out of.
Re: warning before kicking, I agree, with the caveat that particularly egregious offenders aren't going to read our cajoling anyway, since they didn't the previous ten times.
though it's not always evident to non-ROs when someone was kicked and when they weren't
e.g. that guy that spammed gibberish in the room every day for a week
@Aran-Fey to add to this, the user would post and post almost allocating the whole page for their question. Not saying who is right or wrong, just something I've noticed. Also when someone tries to have a separate conversation then it might become difficult; or others don't want to start something during a "massive" convo. (just observation).
@Aran-Fey This is exactly what the topic about opening a communication channel was about and we are implementing that to help resolve/clarify these issues.
@Aran-Fey What Kevin said. The only time I've seen that happen is with repeat offenders. It may not not be apparent to bystanders that an irregular visitor has a bad track record, so it may seem like a kick without warning.
3 mins ago, by Andras Deak
But I refuse to accept any allegations that we should tolerate disruptive users on account of being nice. The JS room has been highly tolerant with trolls for fear of seeming unwelcoming, and it looks awful.
^^ I agree with this wholeheartedly
Try not to assume the worst when you see moderation either. There are a lot of users, some years old, who we have notes on, but to you might look like an arbitrary kick or trash. When in doubt, don't assume malice.
@idjaw Yeah, sorry, I got sidetracked. My bad.
There are also chronic problem users who get very little leeway considering their history. I don't want to name a few out of niceness, but regulars shouldn't instantly shout dictatorship when a long-time vampire gets moderated very fast. Users with long history will also be moderated based on their history, not just the specific new messages alone.
I think collectively in this room, I hope we can agree that to a certain degree we want to help control the behaviour in a way that doesn't cause the room to accept trolling.
I think it comes down to having good faith in the RO, and trust they aren't power thirsty individuals.
I for one guarantee that I won't tolerate trolling at all.
@AndrasDeak that doesn't leave a lot of room for them to adjust their behaviour
What I've heard from site mods is that we have a reputation as a very well moderated room. We have a list of rules, they're hopefully pretty quick and clear, and we'll continue to enforce those rules.
give them the benefit of the doubt, and moderate based on the current actions alone not on the history, imo
Nobody gets kicked on sight.
a "long-time vampire" is perhaps better use for using ignore list than kick, provided they not breaking stack exchange rules
The thing is, I know a few recurring vampires and it's actually pretty rare for them to be booted wordlessly. So I have trouble understanding what's going on when a user I've never seen before gets the boot out of nowhere.
I see nothing wrong with kicking a troll after telling them to stop when they won't yield.
@wim But when a vampire comes back with a few years of history and starts yet another incoherent mess of messages, we won't wait until we make sure that they still can't put a coherent question together.
When a chronic problem user turns up we like to give them the opportunity to demonstrate that they've changed their ways. But they need to know that we won't indulge them just out of sheer niceness. If they behave well, great. If not, then we have no option but to assume that they're just going to do the same old stuff. Again.
@Aran-Fey I think that comes back to having faith in the RO, maybe they've seen them before but you haven't?
@wim we prefer not to ignore users, because we lose the ability to moderate what we don't see. Being disruptive by being a horrible vampire is almost as bad as being a flat-out troll.
why do you want to moderate something that is just "slightly annoying" but not breaking any rules in the first place?
can't you just allow members to use their ignore lists, if they choose to do so?
Because if we tolerate slightly annoying, users will go away. The opposite of what you want. We wish to nurture the existing culture of sanity and trolllessness
@MooingRawr Yeah, possible.
We do allow members to use their ignore lists, but this still means we uphold a level of contibution we expect from the people here. Nothin more than being a minimally useful part of society.
@AndrasDeak A fair point, but it's a grey line imo
ignore lists are a non-feature, if you ask me, since ignoring a user just means that you'll see one half of an irritating conversation instead of the whole thing
of course "we" is mostly "I" because I don't know what the others exactly think
Chat is supposed to be a casual place, less strict than main site. It feels more strict than main in here, on occasion.
@wim indeed. The more casual it is, the more trolling and flags there are. I don't want to sound like a broken record but think JS room or Lounge
The very hard pushback against trolling goes hand in hand with perceived oppression of liberal rights.
all in all, I'd rather have a well-moderated island of sanity than a madhouse where monkeys roam free
@Aran-Fey and any others interested I suggest reading eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality, as well as the other article linked at the top, for some insight into moderation. I think it's worded better than what I can say.
I can't find it now but Kevin or someone had a MSO answer about moderation in chat
@AndrasDeak lmao so true
I think it could definitely frame further discussion about this if we need to discuss it more in the future.
I remember writing an answer about chat on Meta, although I forget the particulars
we've spent some time here...is there anything of substance we can say?
On that note, I was somewhat surprised recently to discover that one of our semi-regular HVs is actually quite well-behaved on another SE site. In here, he's a classic HV: he ignores half of the info we try to impart, almost always forgets to format his code, asks marginally on-topic stuff. And gets all offended when we try to explain what's wrong with his behaviour. Etc.
But on that other site he has 20K+ and uses his powers properly. The moral is: if you let a HV get away with it, they'll take advantage of your kindness, mistaking it for softness.
@Kevin can't even find your meta stack overflow profile now
("meta user" link on top right of profile, or just edit meta. into the url)
are we at the point to move onto the next topic ?
but there comment was responding to "what is the point of chat" or somesuch, and it was something like "a fun place to hang out and chat, less strict than the main site"
@davidism Thanks, I'll check it out later
I think everyone's had a fair amount of time on the soapbox for this topic. Let's finally get to Topic #1: "How can newcomers to SOPython contribute?"
@wim With how things are unfurling on main it might as well be that we're stricter :P
@AndrasDeak Yes!
Reposting for visibility,
35 mins ago, by JGreenwell
I have to leave so will not be here when we get to New item #1 (new contributors) - can I just add to the record "Include a link to github/issues on sopython.com (either wiki or main page)" and "create a pdf/visual guide to contributing to room 6 <- I'm going to try and work this up by completing one of the small issues this weekend" as not everyone is familiar with the framework
thanks, Kevin, on his behalf
I lost the link to the github page so I do like his first point.
@wim "a place for regulars to hang out that is less strict than the main site"
Yep, let's definitely add a link. I declare it with the power imparted upon me by the Chairman gavel
Not sure what he means about ""create a pdf/visual guide to contributing to room 6", does this mean a guide to how SOPython is structured or does this mean something else ?
yeah I don't understand it either
does it mean "how to chat in rm 6"?
misplaced ending quotes
pretty self explanatory isn't it?
> and "create a pdf/visual guide to contributing to room 6" <- I'm going to try and work this up by completing one of the small issues this weekend as not everyone is familiar with the framework
perhaps it's clearer that way ^
this is not to say I understand ;)
I imagine some mix of "which SOPython repositories would be receptive to submissions" and "interesting SOPython wiki pages could be expanded"
We can always use additional entries to the canonical questions, that's a big one. Then there's user scripts and tutorials... Stuff like that.
so not "contributing to room 6" but "contributing to SOPython"?
wait I didn't misplace the end quote, it's the same spot as yours, i think we both miss placed it but I left the things after the <- because I felt it's a comment of his
@wim Yeah, that's the impression I got.
@MooingRawr my point is JG misplaced his end quote, I believe
Oh I miss understood your point, but yeah oops sorry
note to transcript: ignore Moo and me in this item :P
:D
Alright. So where are we at
So I guess the actionable items here are:
1. Make it obvious that these opportunities to contribute exist
2. Make it clearer how those contributions are actually made
good enough, next point ?
Not too controversial there, I expect, so now we can go to the final item: when's our next meeting?
Oh a minor point to this topic, can we move all the transcript from the wiki tab into it's own little sub page ?
November 19
I arbitrarily picked November 19. Mondays usually work better for me than Tuesdays.
@wim That's correct, from the stuff he's said on this topic in the past.
perhaps a few hours later?
I find it weird that Winter's transcript is at the bottom and Q3 is at the top, and would like them all neatly in the same place if possible.
it's like 3 am for the australians
@MooingRawr At the very least, going forward we ought to name then "{year} q{number}" so they sort properly
Our resident Aussie has shown no signs that they ever sleep, wim. :P
another point is so we don't spam up the wiki links
Unless they can confirm they do in fact sleep
Resident Aussie, speak now.
I've never seen PM not here for EST time :D
@MooingRawr they have a separate tab, top-level menu on sopython.com
there's an old link in the wiki, and just the agenda item for today. The transcripts otherwise live in the separate top menu as far as I can tell
such removal.
we could keep the Q4 date tentative until further notice (whether shifted or not)
I don't oppose moving the time, since the way it is us EST guys will get distracted by the promise of lunch on the horizon
Hmm could we move this meeting to another time, It's 2 hours over due for my lunch time, and my cafe runs out of food around this time.
no complaints from PST timezone
@Wim JGreenwell can sometimes have minor communication difficulties, due to a little brain damage he picked up from a bomb blast in Iraq. See chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/31874339#31874339 and the following message.
frankly quite a few ROs are absent, so we should allow feedback at later times regarding the exact time
@MooingRawr I must admit I'm getting sleepy. :)
@AndrasDeak Yeah. I intend to write down 18:00:00 UTC in the next agenda, but I am entirely receptive to changing it.
:O this isn't my PM I fell in love with! /jking
we could pin a message for a few days asking for feedback while it's fresh, and still keep it tentative until later
Ok, that's all the official agenda items. With the power vested in me, I declare that any discussion that occurs after this message is just regular complaining.
@Kevin I would prefer something a little earlier than that, which is 4AM in my timezone, or 5AM in Daylight Saving.
wooo lunch time. thanks for the meeting guys and girls, and kevins (for hosting too).
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