@DavidZ your input would be much appreciated here :)

@nitsua60 though you are in h bar often, you seem to seldom talk there. How amazing that you talk so much here!

@CaptainBohemian I'm usually "in" there because I've got it favorited, so when I log in I get dropped into all those rooms. But, frankly, most of the times I've spent more than five minutes following the conversation I've been repulsed, so you're right: I've interacted very little there.

I am a physicist by education and some-time profession, though, so I wish it were a place I didn't find so distasteful so often.

@nitsua60 what do you mean by "favorited"?

there is a button favorited which you can click?

@CaptainBohemian If you look just below the search bar in a chat room there's a star you can click. That adds the room to your list of favorites.

Then if you go to "all rooms" or "site rooms" there's a tab for your favorites, or sometimes you can click a button to "log in to all my favorite rooms."

I seem to have seen that button, but I have never tried to see how that works.

(The "log in to my favorites" button seems to appear when the page loads and you're in no more than one of your favorite rooms.)

this room also has that star.

it turns out those buttons work this way.

no wonder some people are always in several rooms whenever I see them in a certain room but seldom talk in some rooms they are in.

I just wondered how they can go to so many rooms instantly when I first see them in a room. Now finally I know this magic.

@nitsua60 do you like to be pinged? You said you are almost always pingable. I don't like to be pinged because it always creates a sound startling me and yet I hope to be informed when people talk to me.

if there is a way to mute that sound, I would be happy.

@CaptainBohemian I don't know about "like," but it doesn't bother me and it's useful for some things.

@CaptainBohemian I feel like you can mute the tab that the chat window's in, no?

@nitsua60 I don't know which tab you mean.

why doesn't ping bother you? It doesn't create a sharp sound to you?

@CaptainBohemian It makes a noise but I, personally, don't find the noise bothersome. I don't know what else to say.

To be clearer: if you find and kick the culprit... the room's still the type of room where people aren't helping curate norms, aren't demanding civilized discourse from each other, and it's just going to happen again.

@nitsua60 its strange you favorited the chat room but find it "so unpleasant." anyway agreed it needs to be hospitable to everyone incl newcomers. but keep in mind, while a noble goal, many oldtimers (even mods!) dont see it as their job to answer questions there. btw you seem to have hinted repeatedly you maybe have a physics phd? what was that ref to boulder?

@nitsua60 ahem, fyi there are a lot of younger high-energy dudes in the room, its sometimes full of testosterone and theres a lingering/ ongoing antiauthority vibe. mods are authority. even reasonable actions will be opposed sometimes at great length/ energy. adolescent stuff, eh? btw re all that, you are familiar with (regular) 0celo7?

@disposedtolearn I don't think I particularly have anything to add there

ok, thanks for your time :)

btw, nice hat!

@vzn I "favorited" it because it's a hotspot and as a mod I wanted to help keep an eye on things before it ended up getting nuked from orbit. (Our endearing term for a chat room getting destryed by SE staff.) That's why I tend to scare-quote "favorite." And yes to Boulder, though I left off after comps II and a few years of data collection/analysis to change careers. (I.e. I'm ABD.)

@vzn If true, that's unfortunate. An explicit reason for suspension is "takes up an inordinate amount of moderator-time," and that sounds like a recipe for disaster removing people who don't behave well from the community, leaving behind a well-behaved community.

I should be clearer--in that last statement I meant that if "even reasonable action s will be opposed sometimes at great length/energy" is true, that's unfortunate. I pass no judgment on whether a concentration of HEP people is good or bad =)

@BalarkaSen In response to "It is simply being perceived as such.", I want to say that perception is everything. Hyperbolically, if you're perceived as a rude and inconsiderate person, it does not matter whether you "really" are such a person or not. In this case, you seemed to ridicule nitsua's request of being kinder to people who don't understand a certain language.

If you didn't intend to do that, I'm fully prepared to believe you - I'm just telling you that it came across like that.

@ACuriousMind That's an interesting philosophical proposition but a completely useless one in practice. Any person can make anything out of your statements - eg, the flagger of the reddit post I linked to who perhaps thought I had some political agenda behind posting it (or so you seemed to imply).

I can't apologize for/justify every single interpretation of my statements. It's just not practical.

(To be concrete, what I posted in response to 0celo7 - not nistua - was a more surreal attempt at a humor. I thought the hilarity would be obvious because it's by an Indian dude - me - claiming to mock an American by saying he doesn't know how to speak Latin. It's just a perfect mockery of English language supremacy - which I don't believe in for natural reasons)

@BalarkaSen Obviously there has to be a distinction between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" interpretation of statements. But for example in the case of the reddit post, you posting it and finding it amusing certainly reasonably implies you approve of - metaphorically or otherwise - pissing on Trump, which generally implies disrespect. That's not a Nice statement.

@BalarkaSen Ah, sure. I - and 0celo7 - may well have understood that. But others lacking the context - of you being Indian, of you preferring this kind of humor, etc. - might not. Chat is public, and although I realize it removes some opportunities for humor you should try not to say things which seem harsh or mocking to people not familiar with the context

It's not true that finding something inherently funny equates to approving it. Absolutely false, I think. That's the whole point of gallows humor; if I am to make a literary point, Beckett writes in Waiting for Godot at one point that Vladimir and Estragon would get an erection when hanging themselves from a tree. Does that mean the author approves of the idea of death and finds dying of people funny, or even worse, sexually arousing? No.

Completely unreasonable point of view

@BalarkaSen I don't disagree. But think of the more common point of view - and course of action: Posting something humiliating/insult about a political figure and saying it's funny has the implication of the poster approving of the humiliation in most cases. It's the well-trodden topic of not making every joke in public that you would make in private

@ACuriousMind I mean I see your point but it still doesn't make clear the line between what's considered Nice and what is not (and it'd be ok if that line had zero width but it doesn't seem to have that, to me). It's not ok to say you consider a post on reddit which is a picture snapshotted by some random dude finding a urinal onto which some other dude slapped a photograph of the president of United States. Fine. How much of that iteration is allowed?

If you want to impose a rule make an unambiguous rule. Because, and I speak honestly, my moral values cannot distinguish how far is morally wrong in this context.

I'm not making you do a philosophical exercise just for no reason.

It's truly unclear to me.

Am I not allowed to say I find such and such sections in Naked Lunch funny, which happens to contain eg, a graphic description of a talking ass?

I mean your point is that I'm indirectly part-taking in a vulgarity of sort, or so I am perceived as. How indirect is still direct? That's my question

@BalarkaSen I'm afraid if the line was perfectly clear to me, moderation would be much easier. I try to judge offensiveness from the viewpoint of someone uninvolved in the actual conversation but not living under a rock - I've discussed this at length with Daniel before in this room - and of course I may misjudge.

And as much as we'd like to provide a fully consistent moderation all around the clock, there are always going to be periods where no mod is actively watching and those where many mods are watching and disagree about how to judge certain messages (and we do often talk about that in private channels as well)

Certainly you must realize that it is impossible to come up with unambiguous rules that are not led ad absurdum by some - imagined or real - circumstance

I mean one of the options for me here is to think multiple times about posting things I find humorous, say (my posting of the reddit thing was pretty instantaneous; I shared it with a couple other people outside of the physics chat too - so instantaneously I did not feel my posting of it was directly questionable). I could do that if that is what you ask of me (at the cost of not being communicating as actively or completely freely, perhaps, but maybe for the better, sure, I could do that)

But surely you realize that globally that's a troubling theory in general. Not everybody would be as understanding as me

Or would be as articulate, for what it's worth. So would an instantaneous ban be a rightful decision, without clarifying at least a little bit where the line is drawn?

I am not claiming for a fully consistent moderation. Just that the current state of moderation is unhelpful about clarifying these issues

Eg, it's a better idea if you just say that the mods judge the messages which are problematic based on such and such perspectives instead of setting up an elaborate list of inconsistent and unhelpful rules, that'd be much better

At least that's what I think

@BalarkaSen I think I am indeed asking for that, to some extent. But, I mean, a single message misunderstood or a single message flagged is not the end of the world - at worst you get a half-hour timeout (and I'm not a fan of that mechanism, but it's one I am mostly powerless about). If you get consistently flagged or told off - worry about that, but take a single admonition in stride.

@BalarkaSen Where do you see us "setting up an elaborate list of inconsistent and unhelpful rules"?

(That's a genuine question, btw)

I find this complaint puzzling in light of many other users complaining that there is no list of specific rules

@ACuriousMind Fair enough, I could follow that. I have been banned before for many, many times but mostly on non-issues in my and many other's opinions (except on one occasion where something I said was seriously offensive - I didn't realize it was - and I take every responsibility for it), so it's still unclear to me if multiple half-hour timeouts are an indication of anything, but I won't belabor this point further.

@ACuriousMind Oh by that I mean the list of multiple occasions you have invoked the stackexchange's Be Nice policy based off extrapolation.

It's just invoking a rule without clarifying the viewpoint of the moderators.

@BalarkaSen I feel I have tried to explain my reasoning every time someone earnestly asked for it, like you did now. If I didn't, I apologize.

I think the problem leans far less on you than the rest of the moderating community.

But that's an opinion.

@BalarkaSen Among 200+ (or however many mods there are) people, it's pretty hard to get a consistent line for moderation and we debate frequently about it. I don't think the present situation is perfect but I do not have a good idea of how to improve it.