@MJD >:)

Double downvotes for you, Tamaroff!

@MJD AGH! Right in the ego.

You people with Wikipedia pages are the wurst.

@Behaviour But it's the ranking of the negatively scored candidates that's interesting.

Did we ever get clarification if negascores make it to the election phase?

@MikeMiller They do.

Sorry, I'm not writing a script that makes multiple AJAX requests to the page to fetch the negative scores. I'm busy working on my On the Road hat.

On the Road is sooo 12/15.

It is 12/15 here.

Ah! Perfect.

Figured. The only negascore candidatest that look like they have a shot are (ordered by decreasing score) Sanath, Anastasiya-Romanova, Ahaan, dustin.

@Behaviour Apologies again for those comments I made -- you're absolutely right, I was just surprised at how some people downvote @JyrkiLahtonen and @PedroTamaroff.

@Behaviour Your behaviour is almost impeccable!

That's how he's managed to help so many people over the years

@Shog9 Years? Member for 7 months, since 2014-05-02. :P

Just feels like years then

@Shog9 Don't let him fool you. He just sheds occasionally.

heh

@Behaviour Moderators have access to all life details. Shog9 refers to your work at the soup kitchen.

@Shog9 One of the issues discussed during this election (homework dumps in particular) could be alleviated by the SE quality project. Unfortunately we've no idea on whether the changes to SO homepage will have any trickle-down effects here. Any hints?

@Behaviour that's sort of an open question right now, one I hope to bring up on MSE once i've published some of the data collected on SO

What's the SE quality project?

My gut feeling is that most of this won't be useful on sites getting less than 40-90 questions per day. But after that, stuff like automated quality scores based on analysis of the existing content start to have some real value. Once we're in the hundreds to thousands, manual Triage can support that.

@MJD Redesign of how new questions are reviewed and displayed. There were a few discussions on Meta.SE.

@MJD Some sites get hundreds of questions per day. Stack Overflow gets thousands. At these scales, it becomes increasingly difficult for a community to keep track of what's being asked - dealing with the amount of noise starts to cut into time that a lot of folks would prefer to be spending on answering.

So we're looking at a few different options for making it easier to quickly sift through it.

Thanks.

Right now, Math's getting somewhere between 600-700 questions per day. That's an order of magnitude less than Stack Overflow (and then some) but still a lot. If your interests are niche, you kinda have to wall yourself off from most of that.

Are you aware of the recent problems we've had with people showing up to ask the questions from the USA Mathematical Talent Search competition?

I have to say, those answers to the questionnaire are pretty long. I demand a hat for reading all of them.

Mookid seems to have withdrawn.

Campaign funding debt.

There's only one spot I'm not sure of my vote for and only a few people jockeying for it. I guess my philosophy on these answers is that I'll only read those.

Since I criticized Ahaan a while ago, let me say I still prefer him over Anastasiya-Romanova... revising my vote.

@MikeMiller I think the questionnaire is mostly meant to inform the final stage of election. Though it might help in borderline primary cases.

@Behaviour That's how I intend to use it. Still a hell of a lot there, even with four people.

@MJD think of it as developing an "under the table" sort of mathematical talent };-)

Shocking!

Scotch is better than bourbon

I hate you now

@leo if my vote weren't unilateral i'd report that as offensive

@AlexanderGruber hahaha

> I should admit that I have a specific personal interest in getting access to the moderator tools on Stack Exchange: I'm the maintainer and primary developer of SOUP

No, you should not admit it, Ilmari. :)

too late. I'm already planning on putting him to work.

Give him access to mod tools on ilmari.stackexchange.com, for SOUP's sake.

Or even easier: on Ask Patents. Some people are still using the site, but nobody wants to moderate it.

@AlexanderGruber Which bourbon do you like?

@leo I was born and raised real close to the part of Kentucky where they make Bulleit, I like their rye too.

@AlexanderGruber I'll give it a try. I've tasted Jack Daniels

But right now it's cold, and the scotch is doing pretty well

@leo Jack Daniels is alright. Kind of the budweiser of bourbon

Except that all bourbon is good

So even the budweiser of bourbon is pretty great

Yay! @DanielFischer Has 500 up-votes!

I hope Daniel to be a moderator.

@Behaviour In fairness to SF, the candidates with the most rep did win. :-/

Also, in the last math election I was 5th out of 10 in the primary voting, but something weird happened in the actual election.

Wow! there's a way to see actual vote count without using Behaviour 's boolmarklet. First split vote count and then cast your vote!

Daniel Fischer, not the bourbon

@AlexanderGruber Do you mean this Budweiser or this Budweiser?

@ArthurFischer The Anheiser-Busch one

@AlexanderGruber Oh.. so a bit of an insult, then. ;-)

^^^ yes, an atrocious insult.

@ArthurFischer Right. I'm saying Jack Daniels is a generic, low quality bourbon

:-/

haha I see

But that's like having generic, low quality waffles. Would Belgian waffles be better? Probably. Was it still great? Yes.

@AlexanderGruber So... decidedly not like Anheiser-Busch Budweiser.

@ArthurFischer There is no waffle equivalent to budweiser

You'd have to mix bubblegum toothpaste with sand in a waffle iron and drink it through your nose

@ArthurFischer I don't think I would have a problem with that in this election.

@AlexanderGruber That still sounds more appetising than a Bud Light.

@MikeMiller I certainly don't think that the top-3-by-rep are unqualified, and they each seem to have a good head on their shoulders. That's part of the reason why @AlexanderGruber and I haven't mysteriously suspended any of them in the last few days.

(The other reason being we'd be de-modded pretty quickly, I think.)

@Integrator My bookmarklet is meant to get all scores in descending order, just so that one does not have to fish around the page for #3, #4, etc.

@Behaviour I know, I was just concerned about total score!

@Behaviour Ahaan is now higher ranked than Anastasiya.

We now have 10 candidates with a positive score :)

Daniel Fischer 516, Jyrki Lahtonen 392, Pedro Tamaroff 321, Jack D'Aurizio 212, Ilmari Karonen 200, Thomas 195, Arkamis 167, Shaun 51, Sanath 2, Ahaan S. Rungta 1.

@ArthurFischer Not very weird, considering that 4 were elected, and you were not far behind #4. Last year's primary result: Alex Becker 295, Alexander Gruber 250, Michael Greinecker 207, Julian Kuelshammer 203, Arthur Fischer 185, Dominic Michaelis 88.... those in italic were elected.

@Behaviour Also, reputation (IIRC).

@ArthurFischer [Off topic] The comments to the last math.SE blog post appear to be spam. (I wrote in the blog chatroom, but wasn't sure it would get any attention. I couldn't ping any moderators there.)

@DanielR Thanks. I've been personally neglecting the blog myself (other obligations in life), but I'll take a look right now.

Wow... (seemingly) more than 600 people voted!

11 positively scored candidates now: Daniel Fischer 655, Jyrki Lahtonen 493, Pedro Tamaroff 391, Jack D'Aurizio 267, Thomas 249, Ilmari Karonen 248, Arkamis 204, Shaun 81, Anastasiya-Romanova 秀 12, Ahaan S. Rungta 11, Sanath 7.

kingW3 has withdrawn

Sanath and Ahaan have swapped spots since your last message.

Since the top 8 are some distance ahead of the rest, I'll post 9-11 now: Anastasiya-Romanova 秀 16, Sanath 12, Ahaan S. Rungta 9.

Tip: if you have time to read just one of candidate's responses, read Ilmari Karonen's (saying this even though I'm unlikely to vote for him). It is refreshing to read a thoughtful post by someone who's not among the same 10 people who were arguing over the same things for the last couple of years.

@Behaviour: Yes, it seems that he has more experience than his Math.SE reputation gives him credit for.

He's a model "citizen of the SE world". Along with Tim Stone and Shadow Wizard, he'd be one of my top choices for a moderator of Meta.SE, if there were a moderator election there. (Maybe there will be, who knows.)

So why not vote for him here?

I gave him +1 in the primary, but he's not among my top three.

What is your nationality @Thomas?

Tight race continues in the 9-11 range: Sanath 15, Ahaan S. Rungta and Anastasiya-Romanova 秀 tied at 13.

@Behaviour Thanks, I appreciate the compliment. (Not sure it's really proper for me to star that myself, but hell... all's fair in love and website politics, or however that goes. ;)

Sure. SE even allows candidates to vote for themselves (except in the primary round), so why not.

Daniel Fischer's answers arrived.

@Behaviour Read and upvoted.

With answers like that, my chances this time are starting to look pretty poor, though. ;)

I found it impossible to vote on those posts; everybody said something I agree with, and also something I disagree with.

Do you have any idea of what this means? ^

Pedro Tamaroff's answers arrived.

@Behaviour *looks for job offers in inbox*... hmm, nope, no idea. :)

@Behaviour That's good!

@Behaviour I welcome your opinion on my answers. Don't sugar coat it, eh! (Though you rarely do)

@PedroTamaroff I decided to refrain from commenting in that thread, sorry. I post enough on Meta as is. (Formally: 263 answers, second to Willie Wong's 365. Putting the various accounts together: way over 500.)

> Users lack knowledge of how the site works.

^^ this. This is a more serious problem than PSQ themselves. (They are somewhat related).

Don't worry @DanielFischer, nobody reads meta anyway.

@Behaviour Agreed. IMO, it's also a problem that's only partially solvable at the community level; it would really help if the software could be tweaked more to guide new users towards the right path.

(And yes, SO has the exact same problem too.)

One concrete problem is that, at the moment, the search box actually kind of sucks for finding dupes.

The "possibly related questions" list that pops up when you start typing a question is much better, but it only shows up when you've already decided that "OK, I'm gonna ask a question myself."

@Behaviour I'm glad you agree. =)

@IlmariKaronen I think the search box is okay; the search button sucks. So after typing there I hit the bookmarklet which searches the site with Google using the content of the box. Why does not SE have this option built-in? :/

Maybe add it to SOUP? :) (I know it's not for new features)

@Behaviour Why not indeed...

If I ever get around to implementing optional toggleable fixes for SOUP, that might well go in.

But yeah, I do try to keep any new features in SOUP to things that I'm pretty sure 99.99% of the user base wants, or at least won't be bothered by. Replacing the SE search with Google might not quite make that threshold.

That said, SOUP does have some completely new interface features. Here's one I really should advertise more:

@Behaviour that is disappointed that my post isn't worth being read. I put a lot of thought when crafting it.

@dustin maybe I overlooked something but where is it said your post is not worth reading?

> I like the fact that the primary vote is public. It means I don't have to read the statements of candidates who are already out of it, and they don't have to waste time writing them, either.

From here

@quid doesn't need to be said directly. By saying one post is more worthy then all others, indirectly, to me, means mine isn't worth the read.

It was my guess you referred to this @dustin, but I disagree!

@quid I figured as much with @Behaviour response.

I starred @Behaviour's remark since I agree that this post is the best (was the best at the time he wrote it, I did not see the latest ones).

But yours is good too.

I read it with interest. Especially the start about difficult users.

It's true that some people are really good at making provocative remarks that stay below the radar when one is not careful, and that this is a moderation issue.