Charcoal HQ

It's hard for a duck to type, with those webbed feet and broad bill. Eagles are more dexterous, although they usually avoid capital letters, and most punctuation. hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/…

MS was supposed to restart every 6 hours, however it's been unwell for longer than that. For the last 9-10 it's been basically unusable: I mostly get the "This website is under heavy load (queue full)" message or if I don't, it still loads for several minutes. Can anything be done @ThomasWard ?

They can ba-a-a-an spammers.

"9 out of 10 neurosurgeons recommend this bedding"

Ah OK. I see you've been pointing that out in the Lobby. I think it's better to keep messages about the Charcoal things (SmokeDetector, Metasmoke, etc) here in this room. Most people in the Lobby probably don't know much about them, and they really don't need to, either. They can come look in this room if they're interested.

2026

@ThomasWard ^

Merry Christmas!

is it me or has MS been extremely uncooperative today?

Merry Christmas to everyone... except the spammers

The answer is often in our Makyen-pedia :)

Charcoal has now ascended beyond making diamonds. We now have someone on the inside. Congrats @Spevacus

@lyxal Congrats on the election!

neurosurgeryinindia.com doesn't seem to exist. But it's also a weird domain for the comforters.

@cyan please make sure you read the Comments on reported posts guidance

Spammers, beware: We've released our anti-spam measure network-wide

PR#15000 ("Snow: Watch sayyesbedding\.com") opened by SmokeDetector

welcome back Cerberus

Spam similarity's really tearing this up. Great to see.

If 💩 = naa, why not 🧻 = tp?

Metasmoke now reboots every 6 hours. This way the RAM and swap file remain clear and we don't get infinite out-of-memory kills on Ruby which interfere with Metasmoke activity. We know this issue has happened in the past but it looks like my scripts broke oops.

Congrats to @starball on winning the 2025 SO Mod election. Another Charcoal diamond!

*approves of Jeff*

!//approve Jeff

Like what? Recharge your lost crypto with crystals?

I'm now a moderator of Android.SE

Quarterly maintenance on my host node is underway. Reboots and system outages are expected.

I'll be doing another Regular System Clone of Metasmoke again shortly which will take, probably, Hours. Expect it to be somewhat FUBAR during this time.

I'm afraid I am genetically predisposed to electricity. My father leads the orchestra, and my mom checks the tickets in the bus. I am the progeny of two conductors.

@JohnB For future reference: any change to chat is going to break tools and userscripts that people rely on. Aside from the moving cheese issue, and people getting frustrated with reduced functionality or customization, given how much people depend on chat for various tasks, any change is going to break something. That doesn't mean don't touch chat, but it does mean you need to be very careful doing so, perhaps more than any other aspect of the network.

y'all, I see the 🔥 emoji outside of CHQ contexts and have to remind myself that clicking on it won't bring up a spam report

Congrats @CPlus and @Machavity on the mod elections!

@Makyen FYI: There's some recent GitHub Actions failures. I'm not able to look closely at it right now. That said, I suspect this may be part of the issue.

Well, spam was just banned.

The pool of people willing to shovel the garbage is shrinking. That needs to be acknowledged. Moderator elections across the network are going without nominees. I think WebApps is still without a nominee.

@DanGetz Spam is not much of a prominent problem for the sites, because of the vast amount of work that the people here do, routinely, every damn day. There are a lot of person-hours put into removing spam on a daily basis. That SE keeps making it easier for spammers and trolls, just tells us that they don't really give a shit about the time and effort that the community puts in cleaning up the sites, and that they feel that time and effort is, effectively, infinitely expandable, which it definitely is not.

@DanGetz No, let it burn. If it doesn't burn, then SE won't learn the lesson, again. They've been through this sort of thing multiple times before (e.g., Discussions, Chat lobbies with 1 rep requirement), yet still haven't learned the lesson that if there's a box that people can post in, then it's going to get both spam, R/A, and trolling. We keep explaining it to them prior to them implementing it, but they just won't learn. So, if they are insistent on burning the place down, let it burn. [Yes, I'm very frustrated with having spent lots of time trying to get them to understand, given platitudes, and sometimes some retrenchment, but then they bull ahead with something that's doing the same crap.]

Fast n' light, Slow n' Jeff

Metasmoke outage now :P

I will be taking a full backup copy of Metasmoke in the next 48 hours. For some time when that starts, Metasmoke will be down.

More flags are now available on SalesForce

They really should give ~100-200 flags for users that have good flagging history on other sites

@Mast we are looking to create a Chat API, specially one that Smokey can use so it no longer has to crawl HTML to function. We recently made a change to the landing page and unknowingly broke Smokey...that was scary. We would like it not to happen again and think an API would be useful for Charcoal as well as the community as a whole. I know @Makyen mentioned it would be helpful but would require some change on Charcoals end (we could help with this as well)

16 billion passwords have been leaked this includes services like Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google and others. This is your two-fold reminder: 1. Change your passwords 2. We live in a cyber dystopia.

Everyone is passionate on SE these days. I should put "bored and lazy" in my profile.