Import score from SE

[hsenag]

@MartijnWeterings

Because you were referring to GDPR I thought you meant something different than voting history, which is already available directly.

Only by some form of scraping, right?

@MartijnWeterings

The downside of GDPR is that such request might take up to 1 month. And possibly it might not be required in all countries.

In practice I think many requests go through automatically and are available quickly, but some require manual intervention and take a couple of weeks. At the moment StackExchange voluntarily make them available globally, but I could imagine that changing if they started losing significant users that way.

@MartijnWeterings

And, I don’t believe we should create a precedent that GDPR is being used for this ordinary purpose. (Although eventually it is gonna be that way anyway, companies creating fast and standard code to scrape all your personal data from their servers, and that might make them think about how much ‘private/personal’ information they actually store.)

Data portability is designed precisely for this purpose: moving the data you gave one site to another site. So it seems appropriate to me.

Anyway, just an idea for improving the transition model from S.E.

[cegfault]

I’m with @hsenag in that I think it’s appropriate logically but practically SE could/would interfere with the process.

More importantly is that votes, reputation, and privileges are going to be very different on Codidact than they were on SE. From the discussions around this I don’t see a practical way to use that information meaningfully inside Codidact, which is why I agree with @cellio on the “fresh start” idea.

IMO it seems the only value is using the votes and knowing who voted is to retain the score. But I’ll note that we’re talking with TopAnswers about having a full-fledged API between them and us. In other words, we may have posts in three places - SE, TA, and Codidact. Perhaps even more in the future.

Having a way to establish the scores from other platforms will likely serve us well in the future. I’m thinking how Plex Media Server shows the ratings from IMDB, Metacritic, and RottenTomatoes, as well as your personal star-rating on the server. Or heck, even how RottenTomatoes itself distinguishes between the “audience” score and the “critic” score.

So importing content but having a way to share what it’s value is elsewhere is beneficial - highlight the voting score on Codidact, but list nearby what it’s votes/stars are on TopAnswers and SE as well.

[cellio]

And since different systems will have different voting systems, this probably means we don’t try to model it but instead have a varchar for “useful info from source site” that we can display on our site. For SE that would be upvotes and downvotes; for TopAnswers that would be number of stars; for hypothetical other systems it might be something else.

[manassehkatz]

Basically yes. Except not a varchar - actually a set of data elements - e.g.:
{"source": "stackexchange.com", "sourceid": "8675309", "author": "User1234", "created": "2019-01-01 08:17:15", "updated": "2019-09-15 17:13:45", "upvotes": 3, "downvotes": 1, "HNQ-start": "2019-01-01", "HNQ-end": "2019-01-07"}
etc. with the details varying by source site and a blob of code in Codidact that extracts whatever we end up deciding is useful and displaying in an appropriate way. In other words, potentially a lot more than just votes/stars/etc. But all of which is “final implementation nitty gritty details” and not important right now. For now “blob of imported data” to be treated as “display only”.

[HeapUnderflow]

That would be a cinch to do in Cassandra 1.2. runs away screaming.

[cegfault]

Technical semantics set aside and TBD, it seems like we’re agreeing of “display only value imported from [X]” is the way to go.

[cellio]

Related proposal: Proposal: votes, scores, and answer order