@Chris The last thing I heard from them was that he was busy moving and was planning on getting back here soon. It was a comment on meta somewhere, quite a while ago.

I'm planning on bettering my life too. I've run through the entire review close-vote list and left a bit of a nasty mod-hammered trail behind me I'm afraid

But some of those questions were just so blatantly homework or far fetched rubbish

Anyways. We'll see what will happen. I think many science stacks are experiencing trouble. Over at Health there are voices to pull the plug from the site

At Psych we are pretty much at a stalemate for years; not enough active users, not enough questions, many self helps and so on, you know, same old same old

I've been spending most of my little spare time over at Psych. I'll spend more time here now.

@AliceD I have done this occasionally, too. I don't like it too much, but what shall we do? The other option would be worse for the site in my opinion.

@AliceD The usual things that happen after people finish a PhD. :-) And also life gets a somewhat different focus.

@Chris What's that other option?

And the message here from terdon on the right in the starred list dates back to December

I put up a meta post sometime back I thin and brought it up in chat

There's just a handful of active hi rep users

That 'is this site dead' post was actually accurate on that regard

I'm not too happy about this all

David is scrutinized, but he's one of the few that has kept the old spirit up, like MattDMO did for a long time. He unfortunately doesn't visit anymore afaik

@AliceD Just leave this postings open.

@Chris ah yeah of course, not a good thing. But I was elected on this site with the proposal not to mod close too much. I don't like it

My mod hammering has been rampant over the last 48h

Although most of these postings will most likely be removed by automatic processes since they are seen as abandoned.

@AliceD Me either.

They have to be downvoted three times (net score -3)

At least afaik they survive with better scores

No, low views, no answer and no upvote are sufficient for automatic closure and eventually deletion.

Oh that's good to know!

That's why I always vote down these postings.

But still - if left unhandled it's a sign that garbage is welcomed

Not a good invite for potential (educated) new users

@AliceD It also attracts more garbage.

@Chris Most certainly - Perhaps let's start with a neat meta post on this, perhaps even sampling the list of active hi-rep users?

Remi has joined the reviewers though. That's a good thing

But I think it's not more than a handful.

And commenting is poor too. Downvoting is great, as it attracts reviewers, but it doesn't helpmuch in improving questions.

@AliceD Sure. And since he is an expert in some fields, he can close some topics directly.

We could sum it all up in a meta post perhaps.

@Chris True, he's the proud owner of the evolution gold badge and perhaps genetics too

I don't know if people read it, but it could be worth a try.

@Chris yes, but at least it's a starting point to refer people to

That's right.

I realise this has been suggested before, but I still think the most effective solution would be to split into a Bio-general and a Bio-professional, even though I accept there are some reasons not to.

@Chris Hey, some of us didn't even find this site until we'd finished our doctorates ;)

@arboviral I heard that this happens :-)

@arboviral The problem is that bio.professional will most likely have very low traffic.

For the same reason that I don't ask questions. I have learned to research this myself or ask colleagues from the field (which rarely happens).

@Chris I have had a few questions that I really was actively researching myself and at least one of them got a seriously good answer. Over at CogSci papers have been suggested that are now actually mentioned in my papers :)

But yeah, admittedly it's a rare thing to happen

@AliceD I don't say this does not happen, but at least not yet for me.

@arboviral I had my doctorate for years before stranding here

I started in the final phase of my PhD. Was a good distraction from writing :-)

From comments when I mention the site I know some people end up here via Google but don't sign up, probably because of the question quality issue. And I know the group that was proposing the Ecological Statistics SE a while back refused to countenance joining Biology.SE because they saw it as full of silly questions.

Basically I think we have 4 options: (1) leave things as they are, with low traffic and poor quality questions; (2) get more ruthless about "non-professional" questions, and turn Bio.SE into BioProf.SE, (3) set up a parallel BioProf.SE, or (4) set up multiple specialised SEs like MolBiol.SE which are likely to have very small communities. Each of those has advantages and disadvantages.

I think we will not succeed in setting up more clones of bio.sx.

@Chris I think this is the real problem - a well-trained biologist (or any scientist) can usually research answers to their own questions without resorting to SE. I think we need to think about what sorts of questions professionals would use SE for - maybe experimental troubleshooting? Questions about statistics of design might belong on Stats.SE (although they're not terribly helpful usually) and publishing, careers might belong on Academia.SE.

We have to improve the quality.

Yes, this is the problem.

Actually I missed an option between (1) and (2), which would be to give up on Bio.SE being a place for professionals to ask questions and formally 'rebrand' it as BioCurious.SE or something. Then if in the future we think there's an appetite for BioProf.SE we won't be accused of overlap.

@Chris I agree we should bin the terrible questions, but some of them are clearly legitimate in the sense that they are written following our guidance and the user appears to be genuine, they're just not very scientific. It's the sort of question we get when we do school visits. And if the site consists mainly of those it's a science education site, not a professional exchange site.

Actually, I have one more "questions professionals might use SE for", which is technical translation - I know we get a fair few of these on the chat. Maybe it's time to move these to the main board?

Just checked back, and I think I'm talking about the questions @Terdon described as "trivial" back in December. If a question is otherwise correctly asked and on-topic but is about something fairly basic, I don't think it deserves to be closed.

@arboviral That's correct. One persons trivial question is another ones hard one.

Maybe if we figure out a less prejudicial tag than 'trivial' (BioCurious?) to flag entry-level questions and make it clearer how professional users can choose not to see those? Could we even customise the SE front page to add a switch to make then invisible? (Seems unlikely but I don't know what options we have for customisation.)

I don't see trivial as too negative. This is a matter of perspective and experience. A lot of the things our PhD students learn are relatively trivial for me, because I have done them several times. For them it is not, but they will eventually get there.

@Chris Personally, I would expect telling someone their question was "trivial" would be seen as a criticism (see also english.stackexchange.com/questions/410583/…). I think we need a more neutral-sounding term if we're going to go down this route.

@arboviral I see your point and agree.

The only problem I see with trivial questions is when they are used to circumvent self-study.

I think a professional bio site would be great but I don't think there is any way it attracts a big enough community for most professional users to take advantage, for the reasons you all have already brought up.

The other problem is that we're (almost) all professionals in different fields - I may want to ask a 'trivial' question about an area outside my field. Hmm. Maybe we just try better policing, and maybe each try to submit technical questions more frequently (even if it's unlikely anyone else can answer them better). Then, once we have a decent body of unanswered questions of professional quality, we can maybe point colleagues at the site :)

@BryanKrause The only way we could (I suspect) would be to be 'adopted' by one or more SIGs (Special Interest Groups) of scientific societies. For example, I sit on the committee of one of the BES ones (britishecologicalsociety.org/membership-community/…).

However, the closest we've come is the ecological statistics one mentioned above (which might actually have been BES's Quantitative Ecology, now I think about it) and they had a discussion and decided they wanted their own separate one - again, because of perceived question quality. I would have liked to persuade them to join Bio.SE instead, but when the proposal was closed they decided not to bother engaging.

Yeah, I think the problem with being adopted by just one society, formally or informally, is that it will mix oddly into the stack. I think that was some of the motivation for the bioinformatics people to leave, because their questions here just weren't really fitting the rest of the community and we were rejecting some of their more technical questions that were more about programming than any underlying biology.

I think a site for professionals is untenable. As has been alluded to, the questions that professionals have can mostly be answered by literature or experiment. The latter is impossible to do on this site and I can't imagine many professionals taking the time to dig through literature to answer someone else's question. I, and I suspect others, only do this when we find a question interesting.

Therefore, I think a biology related site would need to accept questions from at least the graduate level, if not undergraduate as well.

I think the problem is one of scope. Biology is such a broad topic that the site becomes a dumping ground for everything remotely related to life. It also suspect that this contributes to moderation difficulties since people are less inclined to look at questions outside their field (or maybe that's just me, but I usually won't open a question if it doesn't have a hint of molecular biology to it).

Further adding to the problem of moderation, technically every question related to life is a "general question about biological concepts", which is explicitly on-topic. This makes it difficult to close questions which are about biology and somewhat reasonably framed, but which would hold no interest to a professional or graduate.

A plausible solution for me is separate sites for different fields (ecology and molbio, for example). Even though these are still incredibly broad fields, separation would give the individual sites focus and make the distinction between on- and off-topic questions much more apparent. In other words, it would be easier to filter out the crap that no professional or graduate would find interesting.