Timeline for Some issues with a recent action that was taken regarding the Root Access chat bot
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
36 events
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| Mar 20, 2017 at 10:32 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://meta.stackexchange.com/ with https://meta.stackexchange.com/
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| Mar 20, 2017 at 9:16 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/
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| Apr 23, 2014 at 13:35 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Fixup of bad MSO links to MSE links migration
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| Apr 23, 2014 at 9:11 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Migration of MSO links to MSE links
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| Nov 17, 2013 at 1:11 | comment | added | iConnor |
Sorry, I had to stop half way through. Are you seriously saying that the welcome message is worse than the /fuckable command? I don't believe what I'm reading here... That is far more inappropriate in any chat room on any website in any world than a welcome message is.
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| Nov 15, 2013 at 22:10 | comment | added | allquixotic | Last thing: SE has never been a democracy, as clearly exemplified by this situation, where a single individual was able to demand that bot owners either take a specific action, or have their bot's user account indefinitely rendered unable to participate in chat. If it's not a democracy in that regard, then it isn't a democracy with regards to voting or polling the approval/disapproval of these features with the userbase, either. Cynically, it all comes down to whether or not you're able to be persuasive enough to convince those who ultimately have decision-making power. I'm apparently not. | |
| Nov 15, 2013 at 22:05 | comment | added | allquixotic | However, since no one that I know of is psychic, it is just as invalid to claim that you know with any authority that a typical user disapproves of the feature (and, let's face it, the typical user doesn't participate actively in the chat, in any room, bot or no; there are far more lurkers than participants, network-wide.) We can only objectively summarize the opinions of those who choose to participate. Anything else is empty, unsubstantiated rhetoric. I can say with some considerable authority that those who have chosen to participate have overwhelmingly approved of it. | |
| Nov 15, 2013 at 22:03 | comment | added | allquixotic | @Enigma You are missing or misinterpreting a critical word in the sentence you quoted from me. Regular. I was using that word in the sense of, "people who frequently visit the room", not in the sense of, "ordinary" or "typical". Due to my high level of activity in the room, and having heard this issue discussed to death over the past few days, I think I have a pretty comprehensive idea of what constitutes the overall opinion of the room's regular (as in reoccurring) participants. I have no way of knowing whether people who never participate find this a good or bad thing. | |
| Nov 15, 2013 at 20:25 | comment | added | Status3543 | @allquixotic - "and almost all regular users are universally in favor of it" - You can only compare those who have expressly said they dislike it to those who have expressly said they like it. For the vast majority who have probably said nothing they can be considered Schrodinger's cats; silence does not equate to approval. I would wager that more people have openly expressed disapproval but even that doesn't mean more people disapprove of it. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 23:48 | comment | added | rlemon | That beginning sounded worse that I meant it. I meant that since you were not a regular in the room before the system went into place you cannot understand the frustration levels of the owners / regulars and therefore the message might seem trivial to you and others in your position. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 23:41 | comment | added | rlemon | @MadScientist well, as you clearly cannot understand our frustration leading into the system that greets users it will be hard for you to understand why it is actually a good thing in certain rooms. In the JavaScript room this message is getting a clear message a crossed that for some reason the pinned stars in all caps and bolded as well as the room description was not. Which is: "do not ask to ask, just ask your question.". Honestly, it may sound silly but after being asked a couple hundred times "can I ask a q?" you just get annoyed and never help those users. so I guess it helps both sides | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:24 | comment | added | Benjamin Gruenbaum | @random We haven't had any user complain about it in the past few months since it was implemented. Some users however, were happy about that interaction and said so. So in the test of time - anyone who said anything about it said nothing but positive things. We've never had any user complain about the ping. A simple canned welcome message once when the user is new and if the user has enough rep to engage to get users to play nice works well in practice. Honestly, a single complaint from a room user who did not enjoy that interaction would convince me a lot better. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:21 | comment | added | Naftali |
@random It is the same as if you join the room and everyone goes hey @bob!
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| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:20 | comment | added | random Mod | There is no way joining a room means accepting the presence or interaction of a bot you didn't know was there in the first place. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:15 | comment | added | Benjamin Gruenbaum | @MadScientist As for welcome message, in the JS room many new users: a) ask to ask questions or b)ask irrelevant stuff that violates the rules or c) interact with us poorly. It solves that by (a) Telling users their coding questions are welcome (unlike other rooms like C++) and their interactions are appreciated (b) prompt them with the room rules so they can see what we consider an OK topic and c) Link them to the room rules so they get a sense of the etiquette. (along the way, we also don't have multiple people greeting someone at the same time). We find it useful and it works well for us. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:15 | comment | added | Mad Scientist | @BenjaminGruenbaum I don't object to any optional behaviour of the bot or the bot itself. But I strongly disagree with any interaction the bot takes up itself, any interaction with the bot should be initiated by a user. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:12 | comment | added | Benjamin Gruenbaum | @MadScientist I'm not sure in SuperUser and I have no opinion on your chat or the bot there. In the JS room in SO it's very useful. It let's us easily bookmark topics, it runs eval so we can execute commands and discuss coding behavior (JS and CoffeeScript), it links easily to the docs which is nice to show newbies. It lets us leave messages when we're away. It lets us do plenty of cool, useful every day stuff. It's just full of useful things that make life easier. It's very useful and I think you'd probably agree if you were a room regular in the SO JS chat too (always welcome to join!). | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:08 | comment | added | Mad Scientist | @rlemon There's a difference between interacting with another human and interacting with a bot. You'll have to do far better to actually explain the value of that bot, I just don't see why this bot is useful. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 22:04 | comment | added | rlemon | @MadScientist you voluntarily accepted chat interaction by joining the chat. sorry. As for the questionable command that can be and will be removed. like I mentioned these are all plugins and each bot running said command took it willingly (or just didn't look). So it will have to be removed from each fork of the bot if we want it gone for good. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 21:51 | comment | added | Mad Scientist |
@SomeKittens Balpha never brought any legal aspects into this, you're arguing against a straw man argument. There are perfectly valid reasons to oppose the chat bot in this particular form, the auto-greeter is certainly controversial and the /fuckable command is at least in bad taste, if not worse. My main argument would be that interaction with a bot should be voluntary, and the auto-greeter violates that rule.
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| Nov 12, 2013 at 21:41 | comment | added | rlemon | @FlorianMargaine I appreciate the suggestion, however I do think that if this is going to be open for discussion that more than one party from either end should be involved. To keep focused on constructive conversation said parties should probably be chosen carefully. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 21:10 | comment | added | Florian Margaine | I think having a conversation with a "representative" of the js room would satisfy you, @balpha? @rlemon is a good candidate in case you consider this option, knowing his history with the room and his open attitude. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 19:24 | comment | added | rlemon | ) I whole-heartedly agree here. (and I like closing braces). The discussion in the JS chat room was a little hard to follow with all of the flying inputs. However we are very interested in being part of this discussion as most of the room owners in Javascript use the chat frequently ( I will point to my own usage logs for this ). | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 19:21 | comment | added | Benjamin Gruenbaum | @balpha all that was claimed is that you won't do things. We were trying to have discussion. Let's have discussion on constructive grounds. We have a lot of input to give on how the chat works right now and what problems we face and we feel like we've been pretty much ignored (like in SomeKittens' example). We'd love discussion, honest. ( | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 19:20 | comment | added | SomeKittens | From the limited responses we in the JS room have seen, you're not interested in having a discussion at all. Care to join us and engage in community-driven debate? | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 19:15 | comment | added | balpha StaffMod | @SomeKittens When did lawyers come into this? That kind of attitude is really what made it so hard to discuss things earlier in the JavaScript room: Lots (not all!) of people making up things that we supposedly said/claimed/demanded, and making that strawman the basis of all outrage. I have no interest in having a discussion on that grounds. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 19:00 | comment | added | SomeKittens | Wasn't StackOverflow built for hackers? Y'know, those who like free speech, breaking things and neat technical solutions to problems caused by a overly-bureaucratic system? Now we're stuck with a closed-source system administrated by people who just plain ignore problems and ban 'objectionable' content so the lawyers are happy. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:43 | comment | added | Benjamin Gruenbaum | @allquixotic I'm not talking about your bot in Superuser. I'm talking about ours in JavaScript. My whole point is that you should get to decide (as a community) on the etiquette in the room. If not all members agreed on the greeting we'd never add it in JavaScript. In short - I agree with your point and position. I think most of the people in JS room do. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:36 | comment | added | allquixotic | @BenjaminGruenbaum Interesting that the "room's community" had absolutely no say in this decision, right? To be fair, we have had one SU diamond moderator express the viewpoint of not wanting the bot at all, but other mods are either neutral to it or supportive of it, and almost all regular users are universally in favor of it (as well as the auto-greeter). It doesn't matter, though, if SE wants it gone... I guess that's true of anything on the site. Seriously considering moving on to other communities whose owners haven't started letting absolute power corrupt them absolutely. :) | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:29 | comment | added | Benjamin Gruenbaum |
I honestly believe that the people deciding on the bot or not are the community of the room. Stack Overflow has always worked on community decisions. This has been working really well for us in JavaScript and we find the bot extremely useful. Other rooms who fork the bot need to reason about it and decide on what they like and what they don't. The room's community should be capable of handling that and deciding on usefulness pretty well. I think your course of action is correct. (Oh and btw !!/die stops the bot if it's annoying, no need to disable the user)
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| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:25 | comment | added | balpha StaffMod | @allquixotic I know JavaScript, thank you. It's kinda my job. I have unsuspended the bot. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:25 | comment | added | rlemon | The objectionable command: ok well I can see how some people wouldn't want this. However the fact that it exists in other rooms is because said rooms chose to include the plugin (most commands are available as plugins when you build the bot), but if the profanity is an issue then ok (however I argue that profanity exists all over the site). As far as the greeting message goes, I still don't understand why this would be a system wide rule and not just imposed on the rooms bots that don't want it. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:20 | vote | accept | allquixotic | ||
| Nov 13, 2013 at 16:36 | |||||
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:18 | comment | added | allquixotic | I should also note out of fairness that I linked to that answer regarding your general stand on chat bots in my original question... | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 16:17 | comment | added | allquixotic | Please see this commit and this one. If you don't understand JavaScript, the summary is: removed that objectionable command and removed the auto-greeter. I can attest in good faith that the next time ChatBot John Cavil appears in SuperUser chat, these commits will be applied to its code. I have killed the bot from the server side, so it will not appear again until I pull these changes. | |
| Nov 12, 2013 at 15:55 | history | answered | balphaStaffMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |