FWIW, I agree about stats questions not belonging in chat. The chat rooms associated w/ other sites may have a policy that chat is "recommended as a place for asking a small question", but we do not have that policy.
The flagging thing seems unfortunate. I didn't know that either. Perhaps our mods will be notified & can step in.
@gung I think the main takeaway here is that other communities have other standards -- and I inadvertently drew them into a discussion about standards on our forum
At the same time, given how the chat flag mechanism works, it seems that I did not take the correct action either.
I don't think that a single "flag declined" action will harm me in a significant way, so ... I guess the system worked?
@gung I'd prefer to be the steward of Gondor, but I'll take what I can get.
I think it's actually up to chat rooms (or at least their owners) to decide for themselves what their scope is. I believe we are able to decide for ourselves whether a small question is okay in chat or off-topic (though we would need to establish it via meta). Happy to be proven wrong, but if it wasn't the case then a lot of rooms are doing it wrong.
However, even if we do establish that this really is our policy (and it seems to have been a de-facto policy so my guess is that's where the consensus will be), I don't think flagging is the right tool when people break it. That's for things like being abusive, posting inappropriate links (one-boxing is neat but dangerous in that sense) etc
Denethor's dad Ecthelion II seems to have died normally (presumably old age, given he was nearly 100) and his grandfather, Turgon similarly (the Stewardship being hereditary).
It may still have pulled in outside moderators, I am not sure.
And (re steward of CV) you always have the options of lighting yourself on fire and jumping from a height. If that's what appeals to you as steward. Probably not an everyday thing though, more for special occasions
Today at the office my boss was wearing a Gondor shirt and I was wearing an Amon Amarth shirt ... which summarizes fairly well the team and our structure
so, both of our shirts are references to locations in Middle Earth
he on the side of the Good and me on the side of Evil -- not that I think my work projects are evil, just that I need lots of computers for them (qua Sauron's quest for more forges and so on -- tearing down the Fangorn forest)
@gung if you do listen to them, I recommend starting with Twilight of the Thunder God.
From the Wikipedia page, it seems they changed their name to that from their original name, "Scum".
Probably for the best.
This is an actual quote:
> Amon Amarth, under its former name Scum, originally played grindcore. However, it then changed its name to Amon Amarth and adopted a death metal style, and the band is now usually considered melodic death metal.
I have absolutely no idea what any of that means. But it is amazing.
Oh, I actually had no idea -- I've been listening to Scum for years and never realized the connection
Must explain why I took to Amon Amarth so quickly..
The heavy metal subculture is very.... devoted.
and so there's lots of refinements on sub-genre which are basically inscrutable to outsiders. I know what grindcore sounds like but I can't describe it.
Although now that I go back to listen to Scum it seems that they have a remarkably different sound. There's also a UK punk band called Scum, but they haven't released any of the albums that I own.
This kind of marginal music is usually a bit of a riddle to sort out.
Oh, I just didn't do enough work. I have yet another Scum band, this one formed much later than the Amon Amarth predecessor.
@sycorax I wasn't on 10k when I congratulated you! Very oddly, the thing that tipped me over the line was a +5 upvote on a rather stale terminology question I'd asked ages ago, with only 2 prior upvotes, a very low number of views, and no answers, and which I'd completely forgotten about. Wasn't expecting that at all!
There's a couple of answers I've posted with 20-60 upvotes that provide me with a steady trickle of +10s long after the event, often in flurries (which I suspect are questions being closed as duplicates or at least getting linked to the thread with my answer in). Thought it would be one of those "interest-earning" posts.
The 10k thing confuses me. There's a number with an orange background, at the top of the screen and between my rep and the "review" button, that used to be the "suggested edit" count (the only part of the review queue that got trailed in that way)
Now that number seems much higher, but I can't relate it either to the review queue or to the shiny new "Tools" list. And doesn't seem to be explained in the help, unless I'm skipping over it somehow. Could anyone enlighten me?
@gung I presume the reason that flagging in chat summons people from all over the network (including in the moderator variant) is that chat often needs "live" curation, and a faster response than most site's own userbase could support. But given that different chat rooms seem to have different standards (even over things like tolerated offensiveness of language) I wonder how well it works.
@glen_b Thanks for the bounty (which almost took me over the 10k mark!). It's interesting how much the secondary effect of posting a bounty is, in terms of other upvotes brought in from new viewers.
@Silverfish I have also been annoyed by the orange button -- I believe it reflects pending edits which are no longer populated to your interface -- so you get to see the counter, but can't adjudicate them now that you have more than 10k rep. It's bizarre.
@Silverfish, @Sycorax, the number framed in orange at the top is the number of reviews that need attention. However, it isn't the number of reviews that need attention from you. You may have reviewed all threads, but there are suggested edits, low quality, close & reopen reviews that need actions from more users before they are complete.
I agree that it is very annoying.
@NickCox, no doubt because you'd win. It's not fair including the British in dry wit competitions.
I don't know where this reputation comes from. The British have produced a horribly large number of unsubtle comedians, some indeed of royal or ministerial rank.
I don't know how people have the time and energy to lurk around numerous chat rooms; one's enough for me. Please star this accordingly, so those people can explain. More seriously, our local policy of preferring that statistical questions be aired directly on the main site, CV strict sense, is (I suggest) partly because so many questions require some notation and/or graph(s) and/or some data listing, which can hardly be presented well in this format.
@Silv On the bounty -- I try to avoid taking people actually over a mark using a bounty nowadays, so I don't deprive them of the enjoyment of getting there with an upvote or an acceptance, so if I am giving a bounty to someone who is close to a major milestone I try to award it a bit earlier in the 7 day period so I don't push them over with it.
@Nick One thing people seem to be terrible at is judging whether a stats question is "minor"/"easy" etc. In fact my least favourite opening to a stats question in person is "Mind if I just ask you a quick question?" ... sure the question may be quick in the initial statement, but getting to the bottom of things and generating an answer is rarely as easy as they imagine. Dunning-Kruger and all that.
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There's also the important benefit of not answering essentially the same "small" questions a hundred times.
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If it's at all suitable for the main site, it should be there because that's what the site is for.
I don't care if it's a basic question, most of our readers have questions they think are basic.
@Glen_b The orange number is almost never that total for me. Most of the time it's much greater than the total but occasionally it's less than the total. It became inconsistent when the review queue mechanism was updated a couple years ago. I have supposed it might be including reviews I skipped, but that's not the full explanation.
@whuber it certainly includes reviews that are skipped -- it's the total outstanding not just what you can now see to review. If you open a review but don't complete it (say closing the tab or clicking off to somewhere else), it will normally register as skipped without you clicking skip.
If I keep careful track of the various ways I can skip it essentially always adds up for me
@Glen_b Yes, I have observed those things. But none of them can explain the (rare) instances when the putative total is less than the sum of the subtotals.
@Glen_b My #2 least favorite opening to a question is "So, ...". #1 doubleplus unfavorite is any question that starts with litter from a copy-paste operation, such as "5 votes 2 answers..." (on multiple lines, usually). Those enjoy only about a 10% chance of not being closed immediately.
@Glen_b I haven't bothered to find out what the explanation for the inconsistency is, because plainly it's worse than useless. Why should I--or anyone--care whether there are pending reviews that I cannot get access to?
I do wish the queues worked more like the mod queue; I'd rather not have to skip a review I'm not currently sure what to do about in order to review the next thing.
being able to deal with the flags that you can see what to do right away and then being able to take some time to think about what to do with the remainder is useful. I'd like to do that with reviews.
@whuber, @Glen_b, you can see the discussion of this issue here: Notification for reviews shows way too many. The SE development team thinks making personal counts is too heavy a lift.
@gung Thanks. I recall that discussion. They would be better off just implementing a binary flag: on if there's stuff in the queue you can respond to, off otherwise. The current system is useless.
I notice if the number goes up (which implies there is something new), so it's not necessarily useless. It could be a good deal more useful than it is, however.
@Glen_b (and any others). I have recently noticed an awful lot of questions are being flagged as off-topic when in fact they are not, but are framed using code examples. I suspect it might be the work of one new individual, but I have no idea who. It's getting to be a pain to process and I am concerned that others might automatically be approving those suggestions without doing the research to see that they're misguided.
I am also active on SO -- but much more selectively than here. The orange bar there said 1449 a moment ago. The psychology there is mixed. It may be intending to signal "lots of work to be done, so feel free to pitch in" but I tend to think "that queue is so long that it's futile even to try". Nice contrast with CV, admittedly a much smaller forum, but the queues of stuff to be processed by high-rep users here are always short.
@gung @whuber I've noticed the same. If a question seems to be marginal, I'll usually skip -- if it secretly seems to be a stats question framed aroudn code, I vote to keep open.
I've said this before but I think it bears repeating -- I think that we should be a little more forgiving when it comes to software questions because lots of modern statistics involves a computational component. I don't think we should answer questions which are essentially about how to write code or how to use R to do something
@Sycorax do you have an example of a question you think shouldn't have been closed/migrated? I can't remember the last time I saw an actual scientific/statistical computing question on here that wasn't just asking for R code help
@NickCox I'd add to this that stats questions tend not to have straightforward answers. many "basic" programming questions have similarly "basic" answers. i actually can't think of a single stats topic that's "basic" in the sense that it can be answered quickly in a chat format, except in a jargon-heavy discussion among people who are already experts
(I skipped only one: there was a question of whether a post was a duplicate.)
@gung I see only three reviews from you in the last three days in which you voted to leave open; all three posts are still open. Although sometimes yours might be the sole voice to keep a post open, evidently that hasn't occurred recently. I cannot speak for other mods, but I override your votes (which is rare) only after very careful consideration!
@whuber none of those close votes make any sense in the first place.
although only one of them seems to be an erroneous "this is a programming question" flag. one of them was "unclear what you're asking" and the other was "this looks like a self-study question"
