ZorbaTHut
7d ago
Alright that took longer than it should have, but it should be fixed now. Let me know if you have trouble!
ZorbaTHut
10d ago
Is this really where the bar of a slur is?
Yeah, frankly. We keep it pretty low.
Are you going to apply this level of sensitivity to everyone?
Yes. If you think someone's pushing the line, report it; if it gets approved and you disagree, you're welcome to ping modmail if you feel strongly about it.
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)
Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.
From the rules:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.
Don't do that, please.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
You're welcome to give it a shot!
Note that the "new comment" markers are entirely clientside via cookie, we're not storing those serverside. There may be performance issues with trying to make this all work - I don't want one SQL query per user when someone reads a page, for example. But I'm pretty sure this should be solvable, and it will of course be easier to solve with a working prototype.
ZorbaTHut
19d ago
They do, yeah - a character is a character, it doesn't do anything smarter than that.
That said, it looks like you're at 20k characters, which . . .
. . . okay, yeah, looking into it again, posts have a 20k limit and comments have a 500k limit.
Let me pester some mods and see if there's a reason we did it this way or if we should just go ahead and relax posts to also be 500k.
ZorbaTHut
19d ago
Alright, so it turns out that it won't let you change nothing :V
If you add a single letter do you still have the issue? I'm currently unable to reproduce this locally, unfortunately.
ZorbaTHut
21d ago
If you hit "edit" and just try to leave it as it is, do you still get the same error? It's possible editing is using the old wordcount limit, which should be fixed.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
repost because server wipe, if that’s cool with everyone
For what it's worth, I consider "the server got wiped so I'm reposting it" to be 100% justified.
. . . even if it makes naraburns's job a little harder from having duplicate copies of quality contributions.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Target was algorithmically detecting pregnancy over a decade ago.
If Facebook doesn't have data regarding these symptoms, it's either because they haven't bothered or because they actively are trying to avoid it.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
I'm not convinced the work is worth it, given the development effort of putting this all together, the fact that some information is still missing, and that it'll just fall into the mostly-unknown chasm soon anyway.
If someone else wants to do the development work I'd strongly consider running it, though.
Here's the dump from the Quality Contribution database, for anyone who had one of those.
Also, pewrqqrwe did some work extracting posts from archive.org and ended up with this list. (Edit: revised version with more posts.)
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Nah, this was honestly expected - the login system is based on user ID, and if the user IDs get reset and you get a token for a now-available user ID, that token is still valid once the site reboots. No particularly great mystery.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
I've tried that before and what inevitably happens is I just end up ignoring the success notices.
In this case, however, I'm using healthchecks.io to handle this; it'll start pinging me on its own if it doesn't get regular notifications of success. So unless that service goes down, we're good.
To be ever safer, the script that sends the success notification should pull some independent confirmation the backup actually occurred, like the output of ls -l on the directory the database dumps are going to, and should include this in the notification text. Without this, a 'success' email only technically means that a particular point in a script was reached, not that a backup happened.
Ideally, yeah. In this case it's worth noting that it's taking full drive images, so it's, uh, kind of hard to do an ls. I guess I could run it as root and do a whole loopback thing to mount the image but I don't think that's likely to be necessary.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Yeah, it's a little weird because this implies that @loper happened to be the one who made the admin account, and I'm not convinced they're the one who made the admin account because I think they would have mentioned it.
(loper are you the one who made the admin account when the database melted a bunch of hours? if so, that answers that question, I guess)
(also, if so, I'm so curious what you thought was happening)
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
There's a few people on the dev discord talking about it, and it appears to be Actually Kind Of Difficult. Honestly, copy-pasting those posts out would be the easiest solution.
I am desperately in need of sleep and will be tackling the AAQC recovery tomorrow.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Nah, that's exactly the expected consequence of the database vanishing - the site resets to Empty, and the first person who makes an account becomes admin.
Which doesn't mean there wasn't a hacker, just that it isn't evidence of there being a hacker.
Also, it means some poor guy picked exactly the wrong moment to make an account and accidentally discovered that they were now the admin of an empty site.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
I can think of a few ways the site could go kind of weird with regards to login tokens during an incident like that. Easiest way to solve it is just to reset the login signature code.
Now everyone gets to log in again also, which inevitably means I'll get like six emails from people who entered a random password and didn't bother to save it and also didn't set their email so they could recover it.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Oy. That doesn't surprise me, honestly, I should probably clear logins just in case weird stuff happened.
Offline again, back in a few :V
I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
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