@Emrakul no problem; I never imagined it was directed at my message

@Victor Thanks for your post about downvotes. It's a great post and helped me see another view about what downvotes mean. I just happen to 100% disagree :-)

@xnor I am expanding it a bit to explain why I think that downvoting is something extreme.

@xnor Updated the answer.

@xnor, now I will tell you a secret: I already left two stackexchange communities due to receiving unexplained downvotes and felt really discouraged to ever come back.

@Victor I'm sorry to hear that

@Victor is PPCG one of them?

Yes

that's too bad

i don't think I can convince you to come back, but I should say that I also have gotten random-seeming downvotes

so I think it's just something that happens, nothing personal about you

I understands one or two random downvotes from nowhere. But sometimes I was getting multiple downvotes with no single word about. That thing was supposed to be fun, not frustrating.

@xnor I removed my sentence for now because I'm not sure "fast" is a verb (I think it's "fasten")

do you mean an adjective?

No, the first "fast" was meant to be as in "held fast"

it can be an adverb as #20 here: dictionary.reference.com/browse/fast

what was the sentence again?

i can't see the edit because it was during the grace period

It was "Bolt and fast him or he'll bolt fast", by which I think the proper word is "fasten"

what about "Bolt him fast"?

I'm trying to research but net's being slow

with "fast" modifying "bolt" meaning "bolt him securely"

Oh, I see

Yeah that does work

awesome!

this is like collaborating on code golfs!

If I change "him" to "me" I can save 2 chars

i guess the speaker is a werewolf

an impressively short solution

it should stay until someone comes in with an answer in "Eng", a more compact version of "English" designed for sentence-golfing

I was trying to play with other words

e.g. rent and lease both mean the same thing both are both auto-antonyms

And fast/bolt/buckle/bound all have the "tied down" meaning

for rent and lease, are the other meanings flipping the role of the loaner and loanee?

Hmm not that I can think of

@xnor Just to get a second opinion, does my update work?

I'm almost tempted to lose the comma, but it doesn't sound as good

i think so

:) huzzah then, hopefully that'll be hard to beat

Also as for the downvotes question, I like to downvote if the puzzle is too simple, doesn't provide enough clues or looks messily constructed

Unfortunately, they're all subjective

(It does mean that puzzles which hide their clues a little too well may get downvoted, but if I'm interested enough in the puzzle I can always revert the vote once it's solved)

@AE - You're accusing me unfairly again. It was Avi and Oblong who were offensive, and both got suspended from chat for a while. I was trying to make valid points in a sensible way. Admittedly I have been known to make references to certain German regimes, but in the last few days I have refrained from anything offensive. Go back and read all the chat transcript if you want.

@xnor I commented on your meta post. I actually don't think your view is even all that different from SE norms. If a post isn't interesting, then it isn't useful

the only additional thing I would add is that I'd only downvote it if I didn't think it would be of interest to anyone

I wouldn't down vote it if simply isn't interesting to me (because I'm not in to that kind of puzzle) but if I think it is actually a bad puzzle, I'd down vote as not useful

@Victor if that's the case, you are really taking down votes too hard. It can also help to ask in chat if people have ideas about why. My personal experience is that if you phrase it such that you are genuinely looking for feedback on how to improve, even if the DVer doesn't see it, usually someone is helpful enough to try to figure out what might have been the reason

I do understand the frustration, but everyone gets very random DVs at times

if only because someone is going around and trolling

the only time they really bug me is when there is an actual incorrect answer and mine gets DVed without explination, so there isn't even anything I can defend to point out that there is wrong information on the question (other than simply commenting on the wrong answer)

@Victor might be a serial DVer. Sometimes people decide to downvote out of spite

the system tries to remove such occurrences, but it is hard to determine for certain if that is what is occurring

@Sp3000 "hold fast" is a valid phrase. Fast can mean held in place securely

:) yeah, I was trying to use "fast" as a verb back then which I don't think it right

ah, that I'm not sure on

personally, I love the kinds of phrases where the punctuation makes a radical difference

and I absolutely live for the moment a troll uses such a phrase without bothering to use punctuation and I can add the "proper" punctuation to make them mock themselves

@randal'thor yes, but the transcript is WTHTL;DR ;)

@AJHenderson Sometimes I take days working on something that seems to be very interesting, and then I post it. A few minutes later it is scored -2 without a single word about. Posting a comment "downvoter, care to explain?" is an exercise of futility, no one will never explain that, and nobody ever cares about either.

@Victor yes, but if you post something like "Does anyone have any ideas how I could improve my post?"

is far more likely to garner responses

it's the defensive tone that turns people off to responding

A panda walks into a cafe...

because you don't easily know if the person is saying "my answers is perfect, how dare you?" or "I genuinely want to improve, could you please let me know how you think I can do so. Thanks for the feedback."

@AJHenderson I already tried that in some cases. Just got silence as response.

I've yet to see an SE site that doesn't respond positively if you make it clear it is the later

@Victor oh, that's unfortunate

and unusual from my experience :/

but that also may be because I (almost) always comment my DVs unless it is an obvious problem with the post

I used to comment far more often when downvoting. I stopped doing it as much after getting dragged into disagreements in comments more times than I could count. It's just not worth it in most cases, because like AJ said, you have no way of knowing what the response is going to be.

And sometimes, the post just is stupid or badly written. Saying that, however, is a sure way to start an argument.

@AJHenderson The worst case was a -8 I got in 2012 (not in this community, it didn't existed at that time). It just made me delete my question and never come back.

@Victor that's an impressively large number of DVs

I've gotten a double digit negative, but it was a meta feature-request, so a bit different.

Was it during Winter Bash and everyone was trying to get a hat?

@Geobits well yeah, on meta, if you have single digit downvotes it's more like having a +20 on most sites

@AJHenderson I went to meta and asked. Just got a lot of people complaining about me going to meta. So I said myself, screw up that, I don't need them.

@Victor which site was it?

Computer Science in the early public beta.

ah

yeah, I haven't done much there

it's funny because while I'm a full time developer, I do very little on the technical side of SE

well, I guess IT Security is kind of technical

A bit :P

But anyway, at this time, I am extremely unhappy with the puzzling community. I tried a lot to try to fix it. But the more that I try to fix, the worst it gets. Seriously thinking about leaving.

well, IT Security branches out in to security in general since you can't really seperate different forms of security clearly

and security itself really isn't that technical

it has technical elements, but it isn't like SO or Comp Sci

@Victor When you say DVs were you also referring to your recent post on the Internet question in Puzzling Meta?

@AJHenderson True, but it's no Scifi & Fantasy.

@Geobits yeah, or Photography, or Video Production, or Sound Design, or Community Building

which are my other 4 main sites

@Sp3000 No, I am refering to everything in the main site. Downvoting on meta is something different.

Ah k

@randal'thor I recommend not speculating about suspended users. When it goes that far, the offending content has usually been deleted. Sadly, experience shows that high-reputation users are not immune to abusive behavior.

On a general note, well, I see from the star list that other people have already said that: instead of whining (and yes, I use this word on purpose) about “negative feeling”, you should engage in constructive debate. Constructive debate sways people with arguments based on fact, not with insults or passive-aggressive statements like this.

hey @gilles, I added a comment to the meta comment thread filling you in on the origin of the post

@Gilles People including D'alar'cop, Victor, and even Oblongamous (who was pretty offensive in here) have tried to engage in constructive debate by their posts on meta. They don't seem to have got very far.

@randal'thor they got their way: challenges are on-topic

TBH I'm getting pretty disillusioned with this site. It doesn't look as if there's going to be much improvement in people's attitude problems (naming no names), and I'm hoping to find a better climate elsewhere.

It's a shame. I was really enthusiastic about P.SE when I joined; I earned about 1000 rep in my first week. But since then things have got much worse.

D'alar'cop went out in glory, becoming the site's top user and then publicly throwing up his hands and walking out before getting suspended. Maybe I'll keep up my status as the site's top hatter and then walk out when all the hats go back in their boxes :-)

@Gilles - I take on board what you say about suspension, but I have very strong suspicions about why D'alar'cop was suspended, and if I'm right, it was UNFAIR. I may be wrong though, so I'll say no more yet.

@randal'thor I think that if everyone takes a step back it could stabilize quite a bit, but I will admit, sites having ambiguous scope can be very trying when trying to figure out consensus

it is HARD to form concensus

but it doesn't happen when people are too caught up in wanting their way. And the end result community probably won't be what some current users are interested in

sad, but true

Perhaps there's hope in the fact that @Gilles and I have (I think) almost diametrically opposite views on the nature of the site and yet can converse civilly?

(note, I'm not saying that means it will go in any particular direction, just that invariably, some people end up not liking the consensus, whatever it ends up being)

Hello everybody

@randal'thor yeah, and that's really the key kind of thing to try to get to. That's how you figure out consensus and figure out what aspects really matter to each group

it's also why I've tried to be active in here as as much of a middle man as I can be

I'm strongly on the liberal side in such matters. As @AE has wisely said, if you like X kind of puzzle, you should be OK with X kind of puzzle existing, and not need ONLY X kind of puzzle on the site

hi @avigrail :-)

the fact I value the community but don't have a horse in the race is hopefully helpful

@AJHenderson Yes, you and @Seth have been very helpful

but do know that your community isn't alone in dealing with these kinds of issues

Sound Design had to deal with the exact same kind of thing and was even more diametrically opposed

but in the end, what happens to the site is decided by those who are active on the site (especially the site mods), and I see little cause for hope there :-(

that wasn't meant to be an attack on the mods specifically

in case it sounded that way

people are so bloody tense

and believe me when I say, you guys are a lot healthier than sound design was

@randal'thor um, not really. He said he was leavng, but he was still replying to comments hours later.

@AJHenderson ouch

you actually have meta discussion, it may be frustrating and progress may be slow, but SD ended up having to go to the moderators just deciding things because we'd post meta topics and get three votes

all of them from mods

@Gilles - Would you have preferred if he'd just ignored you? He was showing good manners to you by responding to your comments. I believe him when he said he'd decided to quit.

and pretty much 1/3 to 1/2 of the site walked off due to noise that cropped up while we were trying to figure out our refined scope

@randal'thor if you start responding to people after you've said you were quitting, you haven't really quit

@AJHenderson - That sounds pretty bad

it was excruciatingly painful, but now we're kind of settling in to a groove again after about 4 months of trying to work stuff out and getting people active again

And yet although we have a lot of voting here, there's a lot of controversial stuff on meta with loads of UVs and loads of DVs

or is that normal for meta?

the big thing that let us move forward though was that the people that were too emotional about stuff left and/or calmed down and realized we were all on the same side, just had different ideas of how best to pursue it

even if that ended up down to the mod from the SSD group talking with me and working stuff out

people like D'alar'cop and I haven't been too emotional about stuff (point fingers at Oblongamous and Bobbee/Avigrail if you like!), but he's left and I probably will too

Im still here to talk if needed

@randal'thor yeah, and that's unfortunate, because there is value in what you have to say

not because 'the site isn't becoming what we want it to be', just because we can't stand the atmosphere here :-(

but I also understand that it's stressful and not much fun

@bobbee There's too many mushrooms around here!

I might get you and Gilles mixed up :-p

There can never be too many!

you'd probably both be offended at that

So what unresolved issues are there now? It seems everyone agrees the consensus is that challenges and riddles are on-topic.

@randal'thor relatively normal for meta, but it isn't as bad as it appears

There's the issue with random downvotes, but that happens on every SE site so I don't think that can really be fixed.

@Victor are you confusing Computer Science with Theoretical Computer Science? You have no deleted question on CS. CSTheory has a habit of downvoting questions that aren't research-level, so off-topic questions can easily reach a negative score there.

it still ends up showing consensus and helping refine what matters to the most people

but it isn't as fast a process as many would like

I also want to clarifiy the evaluation process

(therefore my latest riddle)

@Gilles Maybe, it was a long time ago. In fact I don't even remember what the question was.

@randal'thor I'm truly hoping we can get the atmosphere mellowed a bit. I'm hopeful about it and honestly, I'm close to taking stronger actions to help with that if needed in chat. I can't do anything on the site unfortunately, but a CM might. Getting the in-fighting stopped and getting back to the productive discussion that has been trying to go on underneath it is VERY important

or the site will self-destruct even before the good favor with SE is burned up

btw why did Victor's answer here get 4 DVs? To me it seems excellent, if perhaps overly long. TL;DR is not good enough reason for a downvote!

@pacoverflow the big problem as I understand it, is how to define quality

@AJHenderson Some of us have been trying for DAYS to get the CMs (I assume that means community mods?) to do something! They refuse, saying things like 'it would be redundant' or 'I can't see any problem here'.

@randal'thor I haven't read it all, but questioning searchability, maybe? It's the whole point of SE. If you don't want searchability, use a forum.

@randal'thor No, CM = community manager = Stack Exchange staff

it seems clear to all that puzzles fit, but that not all puzzles fit. A puzzle could be, to use a wikipedia term, "not notable"

or not sufficient quality

Shog9 is the head of the CMs

but that is SUPER subjective without some more definition

@Gilles - OK, my mistake

@AJHenderson I agree

Of course not all puzzles fit. Just like not all programming questions fit SO.

Shog9's attitude when he got involved in this chatroom was ... unprofessional ... to say the least.

He said he didn't think there was any hope for the site.

What sort of message does that give people, coming from the head of the CMs?

@randal'thor Um, no, not at all. Given how bad the non-deleted messages were, and I assume the worst were deleted, his reaction was pretty mellow.

@pacoverflow you know, it might be worth a meta post to strongly encourage commenting DVs for now, if only to help understand what reasons the community is identifying that something is low quality

that might help with consensus forming

@randal'thor “Shape up!”

though it also has the risk of spawning arguments in the main site

but that would help identify points of asking "is x a good measure of quality?"

@Gilles Shog9 deleted a long so-called 'rant' from Oblongamous, which (although Oblong had been very rude elsewhere) was not offensive at all and was just trying to call attention to some problems he'd perceived with the site.

That was the worst thing Shog9 did here, IMO

Whaddaya mean 'shape up'? Are you talking to me or to the site in general?

@randal'thor yeah, the mods are right not to take that kind of stance though. It isn't their job to set consensus if the community is willing to talk it over and figure it out. Having just come out of a situation where we had to do that as mods on SD, you really don't want it to have to go there

and I believe I can safely say the mods don't want to be in that situation either

it is NOT a fun situation to be stuck with

because literally no matter what you do, you are the bad guy

As I keep saying (I'm not sure if I've said it to you before), the mods DID try to set consensus, and status-declined or no status-declined, some people are still going by that, at least in their attitudes and often in their voting too.

That's why we wanted a new post from the mods

not to enforce any policy, just to make clear that 'we haven't got any problem with challenges in themselves'

@randal'thor I'm summarizing Shog9's message to the chat participants

(obviously some challenges can be bad, like some anything else)

@randal'thor while it was curt, I think he said something that needed to be said

I think it was intended in part as a wake up call

@randal'thor The problem is when an overwhelming proportion of challenges are bad