In all lieklihood the only remaining question of the primary is which two of these four will make it to the primaries: Ahaan 22, Anastasiya 22, Sanath 15, dustin 4

Not directly consequential, but it may be of interest to see who will take #4 in the primary: Jack D'Aurizio or Ilmari Karonen. They are currently tied at 323.

ratios seem to be rigidly maintained from earlier measurement

@quid I don't know if I will get enough to make it but I am just happy to have made it the positive side.

@dustin Perhaps one day you'll reminisce about this formative experience from your congressional office.

@AlexanderGruber I am not compelled to run for any of those offices now or in the future.

Sanath has withdrawn from the race; the top 10 are essentially guaranteed now.

The 9th, 10th, 11th place candidates right now are Ahaan 23, Anastasiya 23, dustin 4. A 19 vote margin can be overcome with 10 voters (thanks to downvoting), so I'm not sure I would call that "guaranteed".

I forgot there were 12 positive score candidates, not 11. I agree with your assessment. (The negatively scored candidates are far below what could reasonably be overcome.)

@AlexanderGruber so you are just moderating here to prepare for political office? :-)

All: I have withdrawn from the race. I believe we have several better candidates.

@MikeMiller: Thanks.

I agree with Mike.

@DanielFischer: You have my vote.

@Thomas You would have had part of mine.

@DanielF I'm impressed by your responses to Bill.

Certainly they demonstrate the patience you claim at the end of your answers.

I have read enough on meta to not immediately be thrown off by Bill's style.

@Thomas Primary counts are not meant to be accurate (and they aren't). I was going to vote for you. Disappointed, but of course it's your decision.

@Behaviour: I am sorry that I disappoint. I truly believe that we have better candidates.

Current top 10: Daniel Fischer 799, Jyrki Lahtonen 603, Pedro Tamaroff 481, Ilmari Karonen 335, Jack D'Aurizio 333, Arkamis 257, Shaun 123, Ahaan S. Rungta 29, Anastasiya-Romanova 秀 24, dustin 5.

@dustin's effort was not in vain after all.

@Thomas I second or rather third or fourth the sentiment of being sorry you quit the race. (Even though you have a strange approach to upvoting ;-) )

(To avoid misconception let me add, the parenthetical refers to a meta debate on the subject; not some specific votes.)

@quid: You mean: meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/17522/… ?

@Thomas no that one meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/17232/…

Ahh yes ... :)

With so much being said about deletion of posts, nobody even mentioned comments (or did I miss it)? This is a thing that only moderators can delete (outside of rare flag-based scenarios), unlike posts. In this connection, Tim Post posted his ideas about an hour ago.

Comment deletion is a hot topic on other SE sites I visit. I suppose MSE moderators might not do much of it.

Most of the present mods don't. Then again, the workflow of see comment->flag->mod reads comment->delete does not scale that well with the site. So I'm not surprised they don't want to encourage yet more flags.

I rarely have an issue with that. The problem with many comments on MSE is that they should be part of an answer, rather than completely gone.

Weird. The above comment of mine is nonsense.

The original links just fine.

:19151281 Glad to see I'm not the only one struggling in SE Post Linking 101.

@Behaviour technically I had no issue with posting but with following the link. Is this better or worse?

Or who knows maybe it is one of your evil links that go once here once there. ;D

Having read the above again, I see again I said something stupid...not the best of my days today.

@quid It's alright, it's not my best day either.

Back to the topic: two of top ten candidates are yet to answer the questionnaire: Jyrki Lahtonen (who said in advance he'll be late) and Anastasiya-Romanova 秀.

Note that the latter has, for whatever reason, not been on MSE in four days.

Yeah. Let us change the topic from my stupidity to others laziness! :-)

Generally I wished the schedule of the election left a bit more room for such things.

There'd be nothing wrong if there were a day or so in between nomination, primaries, and election.

OTOH I feel the election itself could be a bit shorter.

The primary phase, I think, is needlessly long, given its purpose.

But it's good to have questionnaire answers posted by the beginning of the final round, on the off chance that someone will read them. Candidates need substantial time for that. Meanwhile, we may as well keep clicking buttons in the primary round (which few people do today, of course). Closing the primary would not serve any purpose.

In other words: Consider the primary round over, and today being a vacation day in the election.

@quid that link is 128 characters. Whenever there is a string of over 80 characters without whitespace, chat adds a couple of HTML spacing entities.

@robjohn thanks I did not know this.

@quid It is described in this answer

@quid unfortunately, the workaround will not work with URLs

hi @BillDubuque

I think the proper solution in chat is to format links [text](url).

@BillDubuque: haven't seen you around these parts in a while. How are things?

@DanielFischer The intent of my questions had noting to do with "throwing you off". Rather, I sincerely hoped to understand your reasoning on trading off your deletion campaign for mod duty. If you really believe so strongly in that campaign, I cannot make any sense of your choice to put yourself in a position where you can no longer engage in that compaign. Alas, you never answered that. so I am left feeling that I have no clue whatsoever about what motivates you in this regard.

@Behaviour yes, if those spaces are ignored.

Let's test

It seems to work.

@robjohn Hey Rob, I'm peeking in a bit on MSE after some folks pinged me about the recent elections. I've been away for a few months or so. Hey Skull. So what major things happened in the last few months? Did MSE lose any more significant contributors?

@BillDubuque It's not a campaign for me. I'm just doing my part in participating in a bit of clean-up of the site. I know you have fundamentally different ideas about what is good for the site, but you may be able to believe that I'm just doing what I think is good for the site.

@BillDubuque I don't think so. Things have been quiet on the account deletion front.

Grab a hat @BillDubuque and join the party :D

@skullpatrol I got one for a downvote, but luckily it was reversed after. I still have the hat though.

@robjohn how many do you have?

Me too. (Was not reversed though.)

:(

@skullpatrol only 6. I am not trying to get hats by doing things I wouldn't normally do.

@DanielFischer So maybe the disconnect is that I inferred - based on activity - that this was something very important to you -based on principles you would never compromise. But maybe it's not so important if you are willing to relinquish that power for mod duty. But speaking as a former mod, I would never do that if it were something that I felt very strongly about because one has more power as a 10k mod than full mod, due to the ability to use nonbinding votes.

But then I have nothing against downvotes.

@quid I don't like downvotes that have no bearing on the answer.

This is most of the time impossible to tell anyway. A creative mind can rationalize "everything" and the contrary.

@BillDubuque can you tell us a bit more about the new platforms you mentioned? (Perhaps in another room if you feel it is off-topic here.)

@BillDubuque Participating in maintaining the site is important to me. In which way I do that, not so much.

While a non-creative mind will do the same thing repeatedly and expect different results.

@quid Unfortunately I cannot spill the beans quite yet - hopefully soon.

@Behaviour Spolsky's remark makes no sense. In fact usenet had good search capabilities via the DejaNews and Google Groups archives. But the SE search capabilities are among the worst I've even encountered.

Luckily there is perm-ignore in chat. feature-request add it to meta too.

@BillDubuque Newsgroups did not have LaTeX or images to contend with.

@robjohn True, but even ignoring that, I find the SE search to be woefully inadequate. Too often I end up having to do a site search via Google to find things.

@BillDubuque I don't know whether the site search has changed, or I have just become more adept at using it, but I have found it more useful recently.

@Behaviour Do you have me on permanent-ignore?

@skullpatrol I do ;-)

@robjohn :D

@skullpatrol To earn that, you have to start debunking some of his many SE fanboy quotes. I cannot understand how it is possible to drink that much SE Kool-Aid without exploding.

@BillDubuque I'll get right on that.

@BillDubuque Some people are simply a lot better than others. Don't worry about it.

@quid I don't worry about it a bit - rather, I find it all quite hilarious. I recall rotfl'ing for days when I saw the version of his profile that professed his love for Shog9 via a modded xkcd comic. I can't wait to see the next installment. Drink up!

Great, so you have something to look forward to.

Just like me, I am looking forward to learn the details of your platform.

@quid I'll be sure to let you know when that flavor Kool-Aid is ready.

@robjohn Thanks for the tip. Maybe there have been some improvements since I left.

@BillDubuque if I may ask here, is your presence now to be counted as return, or are you still in the state of having left the site?

@quid The jury is out...