Today someone asked what might be an insulting question, about the existence of Matter Modelling SE. The problem is that the person that asked that question, is a moderator. How do you think this can be dealt with?

@NikeDattani Personally I don't really find it insulting, they were just being a bit too blunt I guess.

Whether they are a mod or not wouldn't change any outcome (I think you meant they were a mod)

@TheSimpliFire Thank you for the reassurance :) I feel quite strongly about our site :)

I only discovered afterwards that they are no longer a mod.

@NikeDattani I know you do, you've put so much effort into it. It is rare to see someone with that much enthusiasm

Thank you :)

@NikeDattani One way to tell is if their username is coloured blue in chat

Wow! I didn't even notice that until now! I see your name is blue and mine is black

Never noticed it before!

:)

@NikeDattani Btw, sorry about that. It's just currently I've got a bit more to do than I used to (part of it's writing a paper) but hopefully will get back onto it after August

And there's also a Math Moderator election which I'm contemplating, and of course that's the least of the pressure

Anyone who has been through Area51 knows that it's extremely difficult. For me it was 9 months of almost full-time work. Really it's not easy to get a site approved by the SE company, and it's become harder and harder as they've made the requirements more and more difficult. So being asked "why should you have your own site, aren't you just Physics.SE?" is for me quite a mouthful! But I didn't want to get in a fight on chat :)

@NikeDattani I proposed Math Challenges a few years back and believe me, these questions are almost friendly compared to those asked by really doubtful users

I think Physics.SE is a very general site, which covers also high school / GCSE physics, which would not be on-topic for a "researcher-level site" like Matter Modeling. Maybe you can think of it as like MathOverflow vs Mathematics.SE ?

@TheSimpliFire Good luck with the paper! I was just saying that we need some more "vote often" because voting has died down, and now the early users have a huge advantage over the new users, which is a bit unfair for the new users.

I mean the early users could get 200 points in a day just from one question, but now it's a lot harder to earn rep, which I think is a bit unfair for the new users.

That happens to every SE site. Check any of their highest voted questions and I'd bet most of them came from the start of their public beta.

Good luck in the Mathematics.SE election! If you remind me, I'll probably vote for you, because you're certainly one of my favorite mods in the network.

Thanks for the support :)

I've seen that you've done a lot for OR

And for MM (Matter Modeling) too. I think you came quite close in the election. The problem was that there was 7 nominations, and Tyberius, Camps, and Thomas all have 4000+ rep.

I try to keep OR a bit more active nowadays, as from mod analytics the activity is decreasing

@NikeDattani I don't think that was the main problem. The main problem was IMO, (lack of) knowledge, and I am content with the elected mods

I'll try to help more with OR once we've got some more things done on MM.

Thanks for the offer, but for you MM's the priority

@NikeDattani I am aiming for the BMJ Open :)

@TheSimpliFire I've seen some sites where there's been mods that weren't the biggest experts in the field. Even some where a mod didn't know much about the field at all, but knew the SE Network quite well. The problem here was that there was 7 nominations and a lot of them did have expertise in Matter Modeling. You got more votes than AloneProgrammer though :)

@TheSimpliFire Nice. I have done some work in computational biology in the past.

I didn't know that as I didn't check how many votes each person got. But still good to know

Here's one of my computational biology papers where I was the last author.

That is an interesting paper. Mine hasn't got anything to do with biology though as it's a (systematic) review of RCTs

This method I invented in that paper was used recently in a paper that confirmed the similarity between COVID-19 and coronaviruses coming from Bats!

The first author of my above 2015 paper, is the last author of this COVID-19 paper. I've highlighted in yellow the sentence in the abstract where they say they confirmed the connection between COVID-19 and Bat coronaviruses

As ironic as it sounds I haven't read a single COVID-19 paper

There's too many of them now!

This was one of the first ones though. It was on arXiv in early January, and published in April.

Nice

Well this will be my first paper, so I'm just hoping for the best

Anyway, I got a meeting in 15mins, so I'll see you later

Good luck on the paper!