[Discussion] WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History)
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This topic is the discussion for the upcoming quawki; a new post will be created and locked. Rough contents are below
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WTDWTF is one of the oldest software engineering communities on the Internet. We formed around The Daily WTF (ak.a. "the Front Page"), and discuss all sorts of things, most of which relate to software/technology.
This topic is a quawki, which means if you reply with instructions on what to edit, then a curator will edit the post and delete your reply.
Getting Started with WTDWTF
What would we want to say to new members who just joined?
Perhaps a sentence about the very long history, including the journey from Community Server to today.
Tour of the public-access areas of the forums.
How to lurk, what content/topic/reply to post first?
We probably don't need help/tutorials anymore for NodeBB, since the software is intuitive enough (especially now that everyone knows Markdown).... or at least slightly less confusing that the rest of the community.
Community Guidelines
We're a volunteer-run community with members that strive for self-moderation for the benefit of all members.
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We are a technology community, formed around software development. That’s not to say other topics are forbidden; in fact, they're encouraged in certain certain categories. Generally speaking, they certainly can’t drown out the discussion on software development.
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We encourage diversity. Many communities think of diversity in terms of ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion, and age. Those are important, but we will strive to inclusive of nearly everyone, which means being tolerant of different personalities, opinions, skillsets, experiences, and communications styles. There are limits to this tolerance, and these will be expressed in the transparent community policies that are maintained by the administrators.
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Members need to act appropriately, guided by our community policies. This is not a problem for most adults most of the time (this is self-moderation), but for the exceptions, the moderators and administrators will help clarify these policies with the member or take other actions as appropriate.
And lastly, if these light guidelines breakdown, anyone (members, administrators) should feel free to contact me (Alex) off-forums. Email, whatever; I'm easy to get in touch with if it's important.
Getting to Know the Community
Reinforce the history, and that it can be a lot to take in, no one really knows it all, and everyone is pretty friendly. Some pointers to help you navigate.- Limited-access categories and how to join, or links to the topics about them
- The staff, and who to ask for help (staff, moderators of categories?)
- Description and link to Teh Official Discopædia
- ???
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@PaulaBean said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
especially now that everyone knows Markdown
So what's the deal with all the strikethrough?
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@boomzilla said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
@PaulaBean said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
especially now that everyone knows Markdown
So what's the deal with all the strikethrough?
See above
Memes that have been struck have faded and will be archived.
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Nothing about The Lifestyle Thread is
?
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I don't see TDMSYR fading anytime soon.
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@MrL said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
I don't see TDMSYR fading anytime soon.
Especially with the loss of the ability to downvote in some categories. TDEMSYR is the only other possible response to some posts.
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Much of the meme info is covered in other, special subject threads, like the discopaedia, unless I'm very much mistaken.
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I'd move TRWTF is PHP down a definition. And clarify that sometimes (often?) the hate comes from people who do know the shortcomings of the language well.
E: What later posts said.
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@abarker said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Much of the meme info is covered in other, special subject threads, like the discopaedia, unless I'm very much mistaken.
The Discopaedia receiving a mystery update from Our Lord And Dictactor himself in the process.
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Most of the meme section is really a throwback to classics, some faded some still alive, but doesn’t reflect the modern memes from the age of
infiniscroll flat-designinternet-of-
Which is fine, I guess. Can’t list everything and things evolve.Makes me wonder if I should roll back my avatar several iterations from the original mock-CS one, though.
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So … are we meant to suggest memes that aren’t on the list yet? Like
or or YMBNH?
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@PaulaBean said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Why can't I talk about B•••••m?
It was discovered that Discourse had introduced a word filter into the core software (as opposed to an addon). It was shiny! It had to be tested!Around the same time we were talking about H2G2's censorship in the States, whereby the word fuck in the Rory Award for "The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word 'Fuck' in a Serious Screenplay." was replaced with B•••••m.
So when suggestions were offered as to what to stick into the filter for such testing, naturally it was a B•••••n who suggested B•••••m. elgiu and b.....m were also added to see if sub-words could be blocked or if there was a regex hiding behind the scenes.
They remain there as a legacy, and as a source of amusement and puzzlement.
Well, this is not entirely faded, it's just that nodebb no longer has the auto-replacement so we need to manually write it as "B•••••m" to keep things polite.
Maybe it should be replaced by a slightly rewritten blurb?
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Needs more jellypotato.
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502 OK
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@PaulaBean said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
[X] is a barrier to reading
Snarky response to any disliked Discourse feature or misfeature, real or imagined. E.g. "next page buttons are a barrier to reading".Often interpreted via autocompletefailemojis as
or similar (somehow :readinggot:breast-feeding:which is actually honestly a new level of fail)@PaulaBean said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Filed under
This is a reference to Community Server forum tags. No one takes the CS tags seriously. Popular tags, at least at one point in time, were:Often found in the wild with incomplete
<a>tags, which due to
and our custom html sanitizer causes quote posts to become quite fuckedFiled Under: The more you know
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@Gurth said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
So … are we meant to suggest memes that aren’t on the list yet?
I can't be bothered to suggest
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I've got an edit request for "TRWTF is PHP":
This is brought on by haters who don't know the language well enough.
This is brought on by haters who don't know the language well enough, as well as haters who know the language too well.Edit: actually, use the suggestion from the post below this one
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@blek said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
This is brought on by haters who don't know the language well enough, as well as haters who know the language
toowell enough.Edit for extra comedy value.
Filed under: In b4 someone says 'In your opinion that is, humo(u)r is subjective'
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@No_1 said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
@Gurth said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
So … are we meant to suggest memes that aren’t on the list yet?
I can't be bothered to suggest
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@abarker said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Much of the meme info is covered in other, special subject threads, like the discopaedia, unless I'm very much mistaken.I unpinned a couple topics and archived a lot of the FAQ threads that @PJH wrote (they're still around, just in a disabled category) b/c they were incredibly outdated and related to quirks in CS and NodeBB.
I really like the Discopaedia; should we just move all the memes there, and keep this as sort of a light-weight "best of" or something?
I had edited the title and body a bit to jump straight to the definitions, and b/c it wasn't so clear waht the post was. But now I wonder if editing it cause a notification for everyone
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@error said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Needs more jellypotato.
@error said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
502 OK @No_1 said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
I can't be bothered to suggest
I.... have.... no idea what any of these mean....
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@apapadimoulis jellypotato is the technical term for when the page jumps around without you doing anything. Generally best discovered when you're about to click on something....
502 OK is a variation on the Discourse meme
means laziness, for some reason...
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@apapadimoulis said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
@No_1 said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
I can't be bothered to suggest
I.... have.... no idea what any of these mean....
I could tell you but
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A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors. I feel like I just read something about cricket.
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@apapadimoulis said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
But now I wonder if editing it cause a notification for everyone
Wonder no more.
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@PaulaBean said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Community Guidelines
[...]
- We are a technology community , [...] That’s not to say other topics are forbidden; in fact, they're encouraged in certain certain categories.
Something about that last last sentence fragment is bothering bothering me, but I can't quite quite put my finger on it.
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@Zecc Are you certain certain?
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True, False, or
FILE_NOT_FOUNDFront page article IIRC.
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‍ - zero width joiner - indicates two or more symbols (emojis, usually) should be combined or considered as one.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Especially with the loss of the ability to downvote in some categories.
You know, I haven't actually noticed.
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I'm not a great fan of any list of memes or other "unspoken customs" of a group, I think they should be avoided.
For one thing, they go stale quicker than the list is updated (or, they only stay relevant as long as someone is committed to updating them very regularly), which IME doesn't last very long in most communities. To me, at least half of the current list seems totally irrelevant to today's TDWTF (TRWTF is PHP has transcendanted its original meaning as described, Paula Bean still surfaces from time to time but it's more history than meme at this point, Mandatory Fun Day is never referenced anymore, same for Proven Fix, Embedded System and many others -- and they're all way older than TDEMSYR or Bitch-complain, that are both marked as obsolete despite being IMO still used!)
A related issue is that the list will be biased towards the memes of the main maintainer (and don't give me any "community participation" bullshit, there are always at most 2-3 persons that do the bulk of the work). A community has some very widespread memes, but also more local ones that are used in one thread, or a running gag between a few posters only, and it's very hard to properly both identify those, and keep them up-to-date.
Similarly, the meaning a meme evolves, or is slightly different from person to person, and trying to write a definition will just try to freeze things in a unique state that may have never existed anywhere than in the mind of the writer.
There is a ad hominem / personal attack risk as well. There are quite a few posters that have become memes by themselves. Usually users that left (Blakeyrat, Fox, levicki...) but not always (mostly, any regular is known for some of their quirks). Properly if you want to list the communities' memes they should be listed, but OTOH there is an obvious element of libelling them (and I'm not talking about the legal risk, although it could exist, but more the moral one). Some won't complain (saying that everyone is a boomzilla's alt is a harmless joke) but even some that may seem harmless now could change in the future (there is a difference between regulars joking that boomzilla doesn't do any work, and new-comers taking it at heart and bashing him with what might becomes repeated insults -- knowing him he would probably not mind that much, but still, not all cases can be predicted). The only sane thing to do is to not list them, but then the list will have glaring holes -- for current users you might argue that new posters would get to know them as they post (which applies to other memes as well and is exactly my next point!), but for past users that's obviously not the case.
Finally, to me being part of any community means progressively learning its rules (and memes) and a list like this kind of gives away all the "secrets" (not that they are secrets or that we want to keep them this way, but learning by practice is not the same as reading about them) and incites people to just use them anyway they think fits what becomes a de facto "authoritative definition" and this often sounds slightly off to regulars. Not that it's a bad thing to have new people jumping in (nor that memes' meanings evolve slightly with time), and I understand that this is exactly what you are trying to do, but there is a difference between welcoming new people and making them believe they can immediately become regulars, the latter being impossible IMO. I think in this crusade to get the forum more welcoming you have to admit that becoming a regular still takes time and commitment. Admittedly that last point isn't a very strong point, but still.
So I think this list should be dramatically pared down to a couple of really key things that really make reading the forum very hard -- something closer to the rules governing the categories and not much more. That doesn't mean we can't have a thread (like the discopaedia!) where we list/discuss all our memes, but it shouldn't have a specific position in the forum.
Note that an history of the forum is a slightly different thing, I think it would be interesting and useful, and could be used as a support to mention a few long-running or old memes. But it wouldn't be an "authoritative" history, just one meta post about it. And it would have to stop well before present (e.g. at the switch to NodeBB, or at an event that's at least a couple of years in the past), otherwise history just becomes current events.
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@remi I agree to an extent, and I like how the Discopedia solves it. The memes list I found (and copied here) was already old and felt outdated, but the Discopedia is maybe historic and feels different? Perhaps all of these should just be moved to there, and the Introduction post just notes that the Discopedia exists.
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@apapadimoulis See, that's kind of what I was saying, the list you found is clearly not up-to-date, and trying to actually maintain it in some sort of authoritative post is too much work.
I would suggest directly linking to the Discopeaedia thread (or some similar thread that would replace it, maybe pre-populated with stuff copied from there). Something like "the community has tons of memes, you'll learn them as you go but that thread [link] may contain some helpful hints to help understand them."
A couple of the memes could pop up in some sort of FAQ as well. Like, "what does WTF / TRWTF mean?" or "who is Paula Bean and why does she seems to post automatic/admin stuff?" or "why do I see a lot of reference to disc-horses and other variations?" But again here I would limit it to those that really matter to participating (so probably not the last one...).
It's probably more useful to describe memes-on-how-to-contribute, for example the fact we do a lot of puns based on emojis (disc-horse) or on the way they get completed (all the tr--- stuff), than individual memes (disc-horse itself).
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@apapadimoulis said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
@remi I agree to an extent, and I like how the Discopedia solves it. The memes list I found (and copied here) was already old and felt outdated, but the Discopedia is maybe historic and feels different? Perhaps all of these should just be moved to there, and the Introduction post just notes that the Discopedia exists.
The problem, now, is that the Pædia is no longer a wikipost and isn't as easy to update for everyone
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@sloosecannon it's a quaki! Maybe someone can figure out how to get a Wiki post or something. I don't think there's ways to set permissions on an individual post, but I didn't look too deeply
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@apapadimoulis said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
@sloosecannon it's a quaki! Maybe someone can figure out how to get a Wiki post or something. I don't think there's ways to set permissions on an individual post, but I didn't look too deeply
There was in Discourse, but I don't believe there's a feature for that in NodeBB...
Aside from, I suppose, creating a specific category and giving everyone moderator for it
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@sloosecannon said in WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
Aside from, I suppose, creating a specific category and giving everyone moderator for it
There is no way that can possibly go wrong.
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Thanks everyone for feedback, very helpful.
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I edited the Official Discopædia to make it easier to read/follow, including editing out all the @-mentions, as editing will cause mass notifications; I guess all the links are broken, but we can always hire someone at like Fiverr or Mechanical Turk to manually fix them for a few bucks
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I proposed a bunch of new entries based on the stuff in this post (From the original memes), and @abarker (or whoever is a qualified curator) should review and edit my post to include appropriate entries, and if they want, edit the Index. But the index is quite outdated anyways, and that contractor can always update it for us
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Maybe some "Best of" definitions might be okay, but the ones that aren't self-explanatory enough (like some of the ones that @error mentioned) don't distract too much from context of discussions if you don't know what they truly mean Just knowing the Discopædia exists is most important takeaway, I think.
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I edited this post and made it the discussion thread. Please, more feedback and suggested edits for some of the sections
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@apapadimoulis I wouldn't have joined the two dictionaries. The Discopædia is a collection of memes related to Discourse, but we're no longer using that software nor frequently discussing it's problems...
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@JBert that's exactly what I thought at first, which is why I had totally ignored it. But really, it's "only" 80% Discourse-related, and I don't see the Legend of Discourse ever really dying.... so maybe there's something fun about having the dictionary be named after it? Anyways, my post are just proposed entries to a book I dusted off and thought would be really useful for new members who want to learn more
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@apapadimoulis said in [Discussion] WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
@sloosecannon it's a quaki! Maybe someone can figure out how to get a Wiki post or something. I don't think there's ways to set permissions on an individual post, but I didn't look too deeply
you could link a wiki hosted on something else
maybe SharePoint
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@apapadimoulis said in [Discussion] WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
editing will cause mass notifications
Only once.. I believe. The reason we all got pings was because we haven't been mentioned in that post since the transition to NodeBB
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@sockpuppet7 said in [Discussion] WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
a wiki hosted on something else
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@apapadimoulis said in [Discussion] WTF is WTDWTF (Getting Started, FAQ, History):
- I proposed a bunch of new entries based on the stuff in this post (From the original memes), and @abarker (or whoever is a qualified curator) should review and edit my post to include appropriate entries, and if they want, edit the Index. But the index is quite outdated anyways, and that contractor can always update it for us
It's primarily community curated. Back when we were using
, anyone in the TL_4 group could help curate. With , I believe that only admins and maybe mods can curate these days. If there are concerns about entries, they are supposed to be discussed in the related meta thread.Basically, I do not have sufficient permissions to do Discopædia curation these days.
