@Ӎσᶎ You should really put your answers up in meta. Meta is perfect for this, since chat scrolls out of the way and is hard to see, while Meta is a nice record that everybody can go and see easily. Meta is also the official way the SE staff went with for it. The prior "town hall chat" format was overwhelming and confusing.
@Ӎσᶎ Is that sarcasm, or are you genuinely accusing me of plagiarism?
If it's sarcasm, I'd like to point out that one of the questions on the questionnaire asks whether you'd be comfortable with all of your posts having a diamond next them. Would you be comfortable with that particular post, which can be interpreted as incredibly hostile, as having a diamond next to it?
@jimrings: sorry, not at all. I'm suggesting that rather than spending a lot of time failing to come up with novel answers to stock questions you'd do what I did and look for an answer that matches your opinion and paste it in. People who paste the same question in to 50 different places are not expecting considered answers every time.
My original impetus to look at the nomination process was purely because Carrie was making threatening noises about what would happen if no-one else nominated. Then once I started trying to find out what was involved I got very frustrated by what I could charitably describe as the incompetence of the people in charge of community moderators.
The process for improving the process of finding moderators is dysfunctional, which means that even obvious problems have not been addressed. The upshot is that about 10 hours of work on my part leaves me with a lot more knowledge about how moderation works, but at the same time very confused about what's involved.
So now I'm questioning whether I want to put myself into that position.
When this first came up a few years ago I withdrew from the site because I didn't like what was happening but I didn't feel that I could help fix the problems I saw, I couldn't even really explain what they were. Recently I decided to create a new "Moz" account rather than continuing to create psuedonymous accounts when I wanted to participate, because I thought that after 4 years the system would have been streamlined.
But the problems are still there. There's a lot of guidance available, but it's still in two forms: "I think this" statements, often from Jeff; and "I've collected a bunch of stuff into a FAQ, hopefully it's correct and up to date".
Which often leaves even people asking questions on the site a bit in the dark when what they want to do doesn't exactly match what's written (I give you... shopping questions). That puts extra load on moderators, who are in turn often not quite sure what they should do. I like that (some of?) those discussions are public, but I'm not happy that even when the result of the discussion is formalised it can be (and is!) overridden without explanation by the site owners.
It sounds to me like the things that you're seeing as problems, I see as strengths. I think it's a good thing that the community doesn't receive a lot of guidance on certain issues, like shopping questions. This gives individual SE communities the ability to determine what's important to them.
And I think it's equally good that every once in a while, the higher ups, like Jeff, make a decision on a contentious issue that the public sphere has been able to solve. Sometimes decisive action is needed.
There's also certainly no doubt that some stuff can be better documented. But SE is a large and quickly growing organism. I'm willing to cut the team a bit of slack and assume that they're doing the best they can just to keep up.
@Ӎσᶎ I think a lot of it is that each individual SE site is its own community, and the SE staff (the people ultimately in charge) let each site form its own community and rules, to a large extent.
I didn't think the problems that @Ӎσᶎ is referring to are a part of Bicycles SE, so much as they're problems with the SE system at large. Have I misunderstood?
@Ӎσᶎ It's more about coverage than load. One of the current mods doesn't reliably have time to log on, and the other two mods are known to take a day off from the site now and then, or even to go on vacation now and then.
@Ӎσᶎ Guidance for mods from "the top" is light and ad-hoc, mostly.
@freiheit: the "to a large" extent thing is one of the things that concerns me. If I see an employee post in violation of the rules, does that mean the rules have changed or just that they're making an exception because they think it's important? If I ask and they ignore me, is that because they don't think the answer should be known or are they just too busy?
@Ӎσᶎ The moderators leave those in place because it's not clear that the bicycles.se community believes they should go. It happens to be an issue I disagree with the community on, but enforce the apparent community consensus.
@Ӎσᶎ That was done by first gathering questions, voting on questions, and then pulling them all together into a single post to ask all of the candidates. The point is for the community to see what the different candidates think about the different issues. That simply works better on meta than on chat.
I'm "lucky" in that my job right now is to wait for someone else to supply a critical piece of equipment. I'm waiting as hard as I can :)
@freiheit I realise that, and I agree. I'm trying to use it as an example of where the rules lag the practice and it's not clear where the current limits are
@freiheit If I want to ask, say "do the moderators feel that the acceptability of shopping questions should be revisited", is that an acceptable meta question?
@Ӎσᶎ Just naming a few random users and asking on meta about their opinions on shopping questions would probably not be acceptable. But moderators (and candidates) get to have extra scrutiny due to their extra powers.
@freiheit Also, you realise I'm giving that as an example of a question that is outside the rules that are available but seems likely to be acceptable anyway.
So yeah, it's a real question that I would like to ask, but it's also a meta-question that I would like answered.
@Ӎσᶎ Well, meta is for the the community to talk about the site. The rules are inherently much laxer on a meta site than on the main site. It's also good for announcements and other stuff like that.
The meta-question being "how can I know whether my question is appropriate?"
And the underlying point being "it is unreasonable to expect people to read the FAQ, use an outside search engine to find related discussions, read those discussions, synthesise a summary, and act on their opinion of the summary".
@Ӎσᶎ If there's something we discuss on meta and come up with a clear and concise decision about whether or not its on topic, we can always put it in the FAQ (or help center thingy or whatever it is now).
On bicycles the "just ask and see what happens" actually works quite well because the site is not busy. The worst counter-example I've seen is askubuntu.com/questions where questions rarely get votes or answers because there's just too many questions flowing in.
One thing I'd like to see is "help" up next to "Questions Tags Users Badges Unanswered" but I can't work out whether that's been tried or suggested before
@freiheit @freiheit How do you figure that it's not clear that the community thinks shoppign questions should go? Your Meta post on shopping questions received strong support. meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/828/…
And there was another Meta post about explicitly banning product rec questions on the vote-to-close page that didn't receive the same overwhelming support, but also didn't receive any opposition. meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/828/…
2014 Bicycles Stack Exchange Election
2014 Bicycles Stack Exchange Election