The Litter Box

Sarov

00:37

There was a kerfuffle about pronoun usage. SE was enforcing 'if someone tells you his/her/their/xer/its/Pope's/SuperMegaAwesomeBetterThanUr pronoun, you must use if or you're in violation of the code of conduct'.
Monica took the stance of 'Okay but using their for singular is grammatically incorrect. Can I just use gender-neutral when someone asks to use "their" instead?'
And SE replied 'No, you're not allowed to change how you reply to specific people'.
To which Monica replied 'Okay what if I just always use gender-neutral for everyone then?'

At least, that's the basic public knowledge, as far as I'm aware. Some details may be missing/misleading. I've tried to reproduce an unbiased account as best I can, though.

...Oh but I guess I missed the actually relevant part.
Many moderators resigned in protest.

Nicolás Castellanos

01:18

@Nai54 I dont know currently

but I know that

I feel that

@lila well, I first entered in StackOverflow, and then in Pets, that was my second community in SE.

I am in various communities

And I dont have a good english xD

Nai54

02:59

@NicolásCastellanos Your English is fine, don't worry! :)

Journeyman Geek

03:12

@Sarov You could agree with SE's stance on pronouns, and not be ok with Monica's removal (as I was)

And I quit MSE as a mod, and primarily came back because I didn't trust SE to be good stewards of it

I still disagree with many of the actions taken and kinda hope they will never happen again

Elmy

04:53

@Sarov The most important part (just in case someone is completely oblivious to the topic) is that Monica was banned by SE for her questions without any further discussion or "trial". And then THINGS BLEW UP, because many moderators felt like SE doesn't value them as humans.

Elmy

05:13

@Sarov oops, I didn't see that there was much more information in your post, because half of it was hidden... Your summary of the events is much more in depth. Monica was a long-time moderator when this happened and many other people felt like SE disregarded their own rules and code of conduct and disregarded Monica as a human with a real life where these events had real consequences.

I must admid, I feel kind of used as well... not "abused" but "used". SE provides the infrastructure and rules for all of these sites, but they don't invest the effort to uphold the rules and quality (and if they do, they do so in a very poor way). They make community members do all that work. If we hadn't had 3 candidates for moderator positions at the last election, this site would simply have been deleted. That's the main reason why I volunteered.

Journeyman Geek

@Elmy there's... differences in opinion over the role of the smaller sites

I think we're partially but not completely over the idea that only SO matters

And that community support has some value

but I personally think that if you want to celebrate diversity and have a healthy, vibrant community, you can't 'just' focus on people who are devs now

Elmy

@JourneymanGeek absolutely. My personal oppinion is that our little site with almost nonexistant traffic compared to SO has just as much value and every user who got some help here that they couldn't find elsewhere will probably agree.

Journeyman Geek

05:29

Yup

lila

13:10

hi

Sarov

I might disagree with the 'just as much value' notion (population does matter, after all), but I would agree with 'enough value to justify the effort for its existence'.

Morning.

lila

13:24

@Sarov Oh thanks, I think you did a good job with objective description (I already knew most of what you have written and that is how I understand it). What I meant by non-familiar was that I still nonetheless feel like I am missing a lot of essential details about this, but I guess most of us do.

Sarov

13:40

Yeah, kind of the point. Only SE and Monica really know the details.

Journeyman Geek

@Sarov different sort of value

@Sarov I talked to nearly everyone involved and all I can say is...

its messy as hell

Sarov

14:07

"Did my turtle die or did it just ran away?"

I have never seen a turtle 'run'.
(They swim amazingly fast, though.)

lila

15:27

@Sarov :D

Do you know the joke about this, it says the snail climbed on the turtle and said "let's go", the turtle started walking and covered one meter within an hour and then stopped, after another hour the snail reacted "wow stop galloping so fast, this is not rodeo!" :D

Sarov

15:52

Heh.

lila

17:35

New answers have been added to a few old questions, I upv*ted one of them and added to the spring cleaning campaign list, but the other ones are a bit short; we didn't establish any official rule that we only add answers with >0 score, but I am reluctant to add all the new answers. Stewards of spring cleaning campaign, what do you think about this? @Elmy @Nai54

Sarov

"upv*ted "?

2

I didn't realize that was a taboo word.

lila

18:36

:D :D :D

It is taboo, together with a-cept, a-swer, cl-sed, d-wnv-te, gr--n t-ck, cl-ck, th-nk you, th-nks...

Nai54

19:23

@lila Frankly, the new answers are (INMO) everyday new user clutter that is just repeating other answers and mostly strings or random and unrelated words. Not bad enough to delete, but certainly not deserving to be featured on the Spring Cleaning Meta Post.

We've had similar problems on Writing SE that escalated even to Meta SE.

20

Q: I need help dealing with a problem user

As a user who takes it upon himself to moderate and improve my active communities, I have a situation where I need advice. Let's say that the problematic user is example123. Now, let's say example123 is unregistered. Any question they post is under a new account, but the account name is the same....

Similar case here.

I left a comment as a warning/reminder to this pets user here pets.stackexchange.com/questions/31036/…

Hopefully, they will calm down with answering questions. I often see similar cases.

Of course, there is suspension in extreme examples...

But this one seems manageable

@lila ??? A bit confused here? ;)

lila

19:52

@Nai54 "Seven dirty words" :D :D :D meta.stackexchange.com/q/238835

Nai54

Never seen that one before :D

lila

@Nai54 Oh I think this is not actually that bad. From my point of view it is a sign of enthusiasm, which is positive; I cannot really blame new users writing overly generalized answers because they are common on discussion forums, and it takes a bit of time to familiarize oneself with how SE Q&A works in practice and how to focus one's effort into posts that consider the fact how SE is not a discussion forum and doesn't work like one...

@Nai54 thanks

Nai54

@lila True. Just have to wait and see.

I do also admit that I was the same for several weeks on English Language and Usage SE ;)

lila

@Nai54 I have seen a few (I don't remember how many exactly, but below 10) cases like that in the whole year and it never ever required any suspensions (as far as I know; I was not a moderator all the time, but even as a regular user you could visit someone's profile and see whether they are suspended).

Nai54

But then I got a slap on the wrist from a mod there, and boom! My content has greatly improved and my total rep is 5k. Moral of the story is that a nudge in the right direction can help.

lila

20:03

@Nai54 Hahahaha you see, these <10 cases of new users like this: the first one I observed was myself :D

(in retrospect)

@Nai54 And this answer where there is little content beyond material quoted from external sites: yes that is sub-optimal and I also feel like you do because it definitely takes a lot less effort to quote external source than to write it yourself; but I have seen a few surprisingly high-voted answers (on Pets, that is) that are just like that, with little material beyond quotations...

@Nai54 I was actually searching for an existing old high scored answer like that, but I didn't find any so later I promise I will give you a link of example once I find it ^.^

Nai54

Thanks for the feedback!

lila

@Nai54 Oh you are welcome; also, in the subject of "ans-guess-wers" (:D) here is Q&A I instantly reminded myself of after reading your custom flag message: pets.stackexchange.com/q/27300 both answers are guesses; the less optimal one is my one-year-old gem of wisdom (I'm kidding of course) and I am not even ashamed of that because it is impossible to objectively cite any external references as to what this thing is :D

Nai54

Great example :D

It's always weird to look back at your old answers

lila

20:20

@Nai54 My first "please slow down" was with suggested edits of tag wikia descriptions, our former moderator Yvette C. told me that they were missing important details, but nonetheless, most importantly - appreciated my enthusiasm! And yes, they were indeed missing the details but I convinced myself that it was good idea because these wikias were empty to begin with, so why not?

Nai54

Exactly

lila

@Nai54 Haha yes, but can we really blame our former selves if we didn't know any better? One answer of mine about dog training was sitting there with +0/-0 for a few weeks, then I stopped actively reminding myself about it; then a few months later, as I grew solid appreciation for detailed elaborate answers, I reminded myself about my little two-sentence abomination and I was so embarrassed that I just deleted it (my only one I have ever deleted so far).

Nai54

Hahaha I have a few deleted (about 3-4 on English Language and Usage - my first SE site, and 1-2 total in other places)

As I am writing this, my dog is snoring behind my chair (he can squeeze through and fit behind it) and it is very distracting!

lila

20:40

Oh okay, is it normal for a dog to snore? I mean, I know they could do it, but for example in humans snoring is a sign of loose tissue (sorry I don't remember the official term) and this is not physiologically normal.

Nai54

20:57

It is normal gallant.com/blog/my-dog-snores-is-that-okay for example my dog is snoring because of the odd position he is sleeping in

(he doesn't do that normally though and he doesn't have a short snout or medical condition)

lila

21:40

@Nai54 As I promised, examples of answers composed mainly/almost exclusively of quoted content:
https://pets.stackexchange.com/a/7250
https://pets.stackexchange.com/a/19107
https://pets.stackexchange.com/a/23711
https://pets.stackexchange.com/a/6546
For now I wasn't able to find more, sorry but if I come across better examples then maybe I will remember to show ^.^

Nicolás Castellanos

22:28

Moderators can give reputation points theirself?

lila

No they cannot. Reputation is given/taken by the automatic system based on voting on posts, etc. and isn't manually given.

In my head it is like money emission: only the few facilities approved by the state have monopoly on printing money and nobody else. If all moderators were allowed to award reputation, it would be similar to approving all the police officers to print money in their homes. (I am simplifying, modern currency doesn't work like that, most money is not printed by government but "created" by banks).

If you upvote someone else's post then technically you are giving this person 10 points of reputation, and you don't need to be a moderator to be able to do that ^.^ but I guess that wasn't exactly what you were asking.

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