I also don't think its fair that you are all of a sudden upset, its impossible to hide retags and I did something like 800 edits between September and December, that would have been a far better time to mention any concerns.

I didn't retag dinosaur to dinosaurs, only a mod can do that without a complete untag, let the tag be destroyed and then retag.

I fail to see the difference between rejecting edits because of the author and downvoting because of the author, neither are very nice. Putting two tags identical to scope on meta back after I hunted them all down and read through every single question on meta to make sure all of the ones about scope had the scope tag applied is not very nice or helpful to other people on the site.

Neither is removing the edible tag (which I did not create) just because when I went to make sure it was applied to every question that deals with whether or not something is edible I put it on one of your questions.

What I would like to see happen

Either remove the on-topic and off-topic tags on meta or let's make them synonyms of scope.

Put the tags you removed because I edited them into place, or start a meta post explaining why they should be removed from all questions to be consistent and what the benefit of all the retagging is going to have.

Remove the remarks that say I pettily changed dinosaur to dinosaurs because I didn't.

Here is the olive branch,

This site is supposed to be fun and enjoyable I mean we are talking about recreation here and none of the bytes used up so far have really helped that. Sometimes you will see people fight over certain things and end up not talking to each other, I am probably ignoring 3-4 users myself. Arguing over tags is one of the sillier things people have fought over.

I think you and I have gotten along better than with a lot of people on the site, and it seems like it would be a shame to start ignoring each other over a few tags.

I would also understand if you are tired and stressed and sleep deprived at the moment, you have a new small human to take care of. This level of argumentativeness doesn't seem to be normal for you in the two years I have been here. I just wish you would find someone else at the moment to take your frustration out on.

Like Rory said, I am sure we both want the site to be better, we are just arguning over how exactly

@RoryAlsop @Ricketyship @Liam See above

@Liam, @CharlieBrumbaugh, @RoryAlsop, @Ricketyship, I was not going to get into this fray, but I have strong opinions about this tagging stuff, but I haven't said enough. I hope to be polite, and we all do have the best interests of the site at heart. I know we have a bunch of meta posts, trying to get opinions from more people, but some of the people who spend the most time on those posts are in here too.

@Liam, @CharlieBrumbaugh, I edited the hunting tag. Honestly Charlie, I don't understand why you applied it, and I don't understand why you didn't edit it when it was brought to your attention. It was created a number of years ago, but I've never seen it used that way. I really thought you may have added it by accident, because I know you do mass tag-edits. If we took every tag description that literally, we'd be in a worse mess than we are.

On the other hand, there are lots of tags that have no descriptions, and say nothing more than "questions about ..." Charlie, I know you did a lot of those back when we had no wikis at all, but they're not much better, so to say you worked really hard to make sure every tag had a wiki is true, but didn't necessarily improve those tags.

I'm sure Liam is tired, and little Liam and Mrs. Liam are tired too, but I think you may be burning out a bit yourself. You devote a tremendous amount of time to the site, but have begun to brag and become defensive, and attempt to set rules based on things you've been doing, and post some snarky comments on meta and in here. I know you're frustrated, and have been working really hard on the tagging efforts, and I'm not minimizing that.

I'm just seeing less of your sense of humor, and more of what looks like anger.

I'm guilty of waiting too long before expressing my feelings, and I don't like conflict. But there have been a number of times I've been part of the group in here asking you to slow down on retagging. At one point we had a discussion that we'd let @RoryAlsop do it because it didn't bump questions.

@RoryAlsop, I think we need a tag for the indoor gym questions. We have a lot. Would you give me your opinion? There's a new question that's on hold as opinion-based, but if you look at the others, most of the others are too. There's not a way to see them all at once, so OPs don't even know what to look for, like the OP in the new question.

Actually, if we re-worded it in the way I think he's saying (which I would not do without permission), it would be a duplicate of something, which he wouldn't have known because they don't come up. Actually, there's a major mistake in the end of the first paragraph of outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/17620, where OP used "climb outdoors" twice, when he meant "climb indoors" first. The new one is probably close to a dupe of that.

@Sue I am probably am burning out some, it keeps seems like once I get something going, I can do one or do questions and then I run into resistance and at the same time there are times where it seems like if I don't do it nobody will

@CharlieBrumbaugh I get that. Is there a way I can help?

I want to weigh in on the metas but they confuse me!

Is that where you feel the most support is needed right now?

I have my own frustrations too, like reviewing, which is one of yours, and opinion-based, where we are such a big mess I can't even describe it!

I wish people would quit fighting over scope and just try to edit the questions to be on topic

@CharlieBrumbaugh Yup, but we have so much trouble deciding what is and isn't on topic!

That leads us back to the scope mess!

Honestly I wonder if we aren't running out of questions

The site has been around for 7 years and we still are stuck with the same number

I didn't realize that pattern. I can see a certain level of site analytics, and I know when we are and aren't getting questions, but I didn't realize the pattern had been the same for so long.

It's strange really, since we've expanded the scope to include virtually everything!

I have more questions to ask, and should get on it, so I can be a better contributor.

@Sue The biggest bumps is questions per day come from users self answering. All of the days where there were 10 questions asked, most of that came from either self or "artificial" questions

I noticed that, or questions that were so deeply opinion based that we become like a forum.

Self-answering is encouraged. I just think the questions shouldn't be made too simple, just to able to put the detail in the answer.

I have self answered a lot, because I do a lot of research before I post a questions. Maybe waiting to post the answer is better. I don't know.

Your self-answered questions are generally well-written, especially the answers.

Can I make fun of a question of yours, just to lighten us up?

It says more about the site than it does about you.

@Sue I suppose

I'll delete if you want.

Its probably fine

It's How should helmets be placed on the ground, outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/15735/…...

@Sue and?

That seemed utterly ridiculous to me. If a person is getting their gear ready to go on a trip, it would make sense that they shouldn't need to be taught how not to let their helmet roll away!

Yet, it was very popular, especially the answer!

I thought it was funny that people downvoted the question for being simple, when the answer is right there

Actually I just wanted to draw the turtles in MS Paint

Ha, ha, I knew there was a motive there!!! Interesting, though, a person after you answered and said the exact same thing.

So, 13 upvotes for your MS paint turtles and way fewer upvotes for your harder working, more intelligent questions-what does that say about us?

@Sue It means the upvotes follow interest and not effort

I spent less than 5 minutes on this question outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/18330/…

Exactly!

@CharlieBrumbaugh I know, and it got the most votes because it was the first one posted, even though lots of people ended up saying the same thing.

Its also frustrating in that if you want to get lots of upvotes, you have to get enough votes from the community to get it onto the list and then get people from outside the community to vote on it

I agree about that, but that's a different issue.

@Sue The other thing is that more answers mean the question stays on the list for longer, so some of my upvotes are in part from the other answers

Actually, if you want to get people from all over the network, you have to ask an opinion based question.

@CharlieBrumbaugh That's true too.

@Sue If people think they can answer a question they are more likely to show up and vote

@CharlieBrumbaugh That's absolutely true.

That's why the opinion based questions get more views

@CharlieBrumbaugh Right, it is.

Do you go to other sites from the hot questions list and actually answer them? I don't, because I don't know anything about anything, except sometimes gardening.

@Sue I am not really all that active except for here. I will upvote questions as I find them but that's about it

The other frustating thing is that the timing matters this question outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/5007/… was well received at the time, my similiar questions and answers got downvotes

I upvoted that a long time ago, as I have with most of yours. As for the similar questions, do you mean the newer ones of the same type, about knots?

@Sue Yes, my ones about figure eight knots

@CharlieBrumbaugh By timing, do you mean that the other one was asked so many years ago, and maybe our climate has changed? Or our users? Or what do you think?

@Sue I think that the context was that they were trying to get the question rate up, and so they were encouraging self answers.

@CharlieBrumbaugh Which sounds like we've come around to where we were a few minutes ago!

If I understand it correctly now the idea would be to close knot questions as dupes of the one about knot resources. In any case I quit asking knot questions and will probably quit asking dino track questions as well. Its just not worth the trouble

@CharlieBrumbaugh I get that, but you also have a lot of other interests, which is pretty cool!

@Sue That's the resistance I am talking about where I think I have a bunch of guaranteed questions and two to three later it all comes to a stop

Same goes for hunting questions and ones about firearms

identification questions are okay but to many at once I am sure I'd hear about it

@CharlieBrumbaugh I've noticed a pattern on the site that many people feed questions one to the next to the next, and after a few people do get tired of the topic. Maybe we should separate them.

@Sue At the same time, if we had more questions, there wouldn't be so much tiredness of one subject

And so goes the conundrum!

and yes we do cycle through topics quite regularly

@CharlieBrumbaugh Cycling through topics can be fun, because people do get interested by something they just saw, so they're not artificial, but they do wear out after a few.

To me it looks like we're trying too hard, when it's really just a genuine interest sparked by a previous question.

Or, maybe we're just trying too hard :)

Or not enough, in my case.

If I asked every bird and animal question that I study online every day, everybody would quickly either complain or fall asleep!

One thing I personally have to do is remember to make my questions more geographically relevant.

Speaking of falling asleep, I should probably go try to do that before hubby gets home from work at 2:30. He worries if he doesn't think I'm getting enough sleep!

@Sue I should go to bed to

Okay doke. Thanks for taking the time to chat, and for your hard work, even if I don't always properly appreciate it.

Hello and goodbye to @Ricketyship, @RoryAlsop, @Willeke, @WedaPashi, @Liam, @ab2 and anyone else I'm sorry if I forgot.

@Sue Why don't you expression your opinions on a meta question? Also, i'm still waiting on you for you to ask the question on editing posts :P

here's an ironman eraser :D

Hi @anderas how's the weather in Germany?

Hi @Ricketyship :-) Perfect: sunny but less than 20°C

And in India?

Where I live, it's good. 32C and cloudy. Usually the temperatures go pretty high. We seem to have lucked out :)

Are you a rock climber? If so, how do you cope with these temperatures? (Here, everybody goes for the less-sunny crags starting at 20°C :-) )

Naa.. I'm not a rock climber. I do a bit of bouldering now and then. But that's not a regular activity. I'm a trekker. I do a lot of treks. Summers are really difficult for treks due to forest fires and the heat in general.

@CharlieBrumbaugh, my reason to be negative on your figure of eight questions was that they are to narrow in scope and therefor do not add anything to the knowledge already on internet. A good section about when and why to use the knot and when NOT to use it would improve them. But I feel that one question which covers more than a single knot would be much more useful than a whole series of almost identical questions about single knots.

And the same goes for dino tracks and whatever. A specialist question about a very narrow subject will only be useful for those who already have quite a bit of knowledge but those will not need the question.

I would be much more interested in a question asking (in a good way) how likely you are to come across dinosaur tracks in the world in general (which is too wide) or in a certain kind of environment. And if so, where to find how to identify it.

Living in an area where there are no fossils found at all, I would not know how common they are elsewhere.

@Ricketyship, can you please add your favorite blood suckers (not) to this top community wiki answer (in the local dangers bullet point, next to the tick season bit)?

Done

And everybody checking out that link, please read (and consider upvoting) the self answer which hangs at the bottom right now.

Thanks

Hi @Willeke Good morning to you

Good day to you as well @Ricketyship

How's your cycling going on?

As a rule I will not ask for down votes and only for close votes when the content is nasty, but I will freely ask for up-votes when I think the content is worth it.

Been to work on the bendy bike all week, getting used to it. I am considering a short tour today but feel rather lazy.

Today is a national holiday/bank holiday as it is the Kings birthday.

Yesterday the guys at work added a few bits of metal to the bike so now it has a ring lock on the front (driven) wheel and I am rather happy with it.

Ring locks are the norm here, easy to use, can not forget it, can not forget the key at home. But you need a second lock to secure your bike to a fixed object.

What's a bendy bike?

The bike I have been talking about before, the one that bends in the middle to steer it.

(that is me on the bike, with the point where it bends under the seat, just under my hand

Ah the same one! OK :)

Isn't this the flav bike or something?

Flevobike. (Flevoland is the area the bike was developed.)

Felvobike :) is it the flevobike itself?

Flevobike is the name of the brand as well as the name of this particular type of bike (even when made by other makers.)

I've a long weekend coming. 4 days off

Good to look forward to. Any plans?

will go climbing in a gym for 3 days :D that's all the plan I have for now

Might go running as well

While it will fill your time, I bet you would like to do something more exiting if the opportunity was there.

I am usually happy to sit in my house, with my back to the window.

Would have loved to travel and hike up a mountain. But summers are bad.

And if it is summer already your summers are long.

For us the real summer is still two months away.

Yep. Summers are long and hot and miserable. The western ghats dry up. So the grasslands will be super hot. And the streams dry up. So water becomes an issue for hikes.

Summer ends here by June mid

(And as they say in England, 'summer this year was on a Thursday afternoon', short)

Ah, your summers are mostly early. Then start the monsoon, with poor conditions for hiking?

Monsoons are good for hiking. I like the rains. Even though it gets tough due to the constant rains and leeches and all. But monsoons according to me are one of the best times in the mountains. The whole landscape turns into dark, lush green

Post monsoon is also good. But then the difficulty is reduced as it'll be cooler up the mountains. With little to no rains.

ricketyship.com/2017/12/shades-of-green-and-sea-of-clouds.html Looks something like this during post monsoon seasons

I have never been in proper tropical conditions, the 'worst' I have been was as a tourist in the North of Australia, a short time before the rains. It was hot and humid but as a tourist we went from natural pool to man made swimming pool, on the way taking in the famous sights.

That is jewel like green. (But I live in a country that is almost always green, in dry summers we import water from the rivers to the fields, most of the year we use the same ditches to drain the excess water.)

I am going to read the text later, looks like something I want to read.

Well for us, the summers are harsh. Since there's still some wild tropical forests left, those cant really be irrigated. The streams dry up there. The upper reaches of the mountains/hills are grasslands. These grasslands get really dry.

the whole landscape turns to brown up in the grasslands.

That's how the grasslands look during monsson/post monsoon

monsoon*

The yellow/brown in the picture is crops about ready to be harvested, other times of the year it is all green.

So much difference.

It's all flat land

This is a polder, which is land that is really flat, and water controlled.

The pic I posted is from the western ghats. We have farm lands too. But they wont be as vast as these.

But much of the country has less than 50 meter total elevation, the highest 'mountain' is 300 meter.

300 m is your highest? I'm currently at 1000m :)

And we share that top with Belgium and Germany, as it is on the one point where we have land borders meet.

The highest point in my area is closer to 50 meter, but the lowest is -23 meter or so.

so much difference :) we are separated by 1km of vertical distance :D

Fun

yeah. maybe that's why i'm not too much into beaches

Neither am I, although as the bird flies it is only 3 km away from here, 5 km by road.

Good to walk in moderate to strong winds but keep away when it is sunny and hot.

I've to plan for my hikes in July. August I'm flying to the north

so No time in august.

@RoryAlsop Can you make off-topic and on-topic synonyms of scope? The meta post saying it should happen was here outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1022/…

@CharlieBrumbaugh STOP EDITING MY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS!

ok, y'all calm down now

@Kevin I don't want my question edited. That is all

@Liam general tag guidelines are that tags should be plural, and normal users can't make a tag that just adds an "s" so Charlie didn't go through and retag everything

@Kevin Look I really dont want to get involved in this again

I have more important things to do with my life

And the point of allowing editing is, well, allowing editing. If there is a specific reason to object to an aspect of the edit, you can calmly tell the editor and/or raise a flag if it's flagrant.

@Kevin Charlie did retag everything (4 questions it's not hard to do) because he said he did

then straight after saying this all the dinosaur questions had gone

I though good he's seen sense

Then dinosaurs appeared...hmmmm

I'm sorry I'm sick of this

I've been pretty much running this site for years

I'm literally on the verge of rage quitting

@Liam No I went and added the fossil-identification tags to the questions. That's what I meant when I said I would retag. My bad for not being clearer

I decided right I'll just leave it be

but then (once again) I'm in work on SO and my questions get edited

I'm going home

bye

@Liam Look, I would hate to see you leave over this, and I will admit that adding the hunting tag to your question was a dumb mistake on my part. Can we quit fighting over the tags? I mean in the long run its not the end of the world how a question is tagged.

Gahhh.

hi @imsodin. Regarding the answer on long distance swimming, have you used those? Does that hamper your swimming?

@Ricketyship, I did that ride I had hoped to do, about 30 km, flat roads and green fields and/or water on both sides.

@Willeke awesome :)

Some dikes to ride on or next to, for the rest mostly really flat.

sounds really beautiful :_

:)

For me it is, but then, I grew up in this area and it is the standard I learned to love as a child.

I love mountains but to me they are strange things.

haha for me mountains are the second home. Forests are the first ;)

To me open build up areas are home, fields and open forest/parks second.

how we grow up makes us.

indeed

are you going cycling tomorrow also?

I would not know, depends on the weather and my mood. I am perfectly happy at home.

:)

on one of the treks we got this majestic view of Mt Kanchenjunga

I read that page/trek you posted a link to, I am going to read more on that blog. it is great.

These stone cairns are to show the way on a trail

Those pics look great. And a lot of white stuff for India.

many a times, there are no trails so these act as markers

@Willeke Thank you! that's kind of you!

@Willeke We have a huge country. Lots of diversity in terms of what you come across.

But you have to be high in most parts of the country to get any snow.

Well these are the himalayas. So we will be high. The other parts do not get any snowfall ever.

Unlike many other places, we do not get snowfall in lower altitudes.

@Ricketyship, jesus, those shots are gorgeous

@JonathanLandrum Thanks Jonathan! That's Kanchejunga. How can it not be gorgeous?? We were in awe of just seeing the majestic mountain.

I keep telling myself "one day"

one day i'll get to the himalayas

@JonathanLandrum You should. If not to climb, at least to hike around. It's some other world out there.

i spent a bit of time in thailand, and managed to go to myanmar and laos, but i never got to india or nepal like i really wanted to. so close, and yet so far away.

well i'm lucky. Since I stay in the south of India, I get to see the variety of the south and the grandeur of the north

didn't i see a post of yours in here that it was in the 30's where you are today?

Bangalore

the place where I work

does it get much hotter than that later in the summer?

i've been to bangkok a couple times, and it gets outrageously hot, and i'm from a subtropical location!

wayyy hotter

To be fair, bangalore is one of the more reasonable places in terms of weather

it's much hotter in the North. They experience up to 43-45 in the next month or so

holy shit

Yeah, and it's just heat. Not the humid heat you would've seen in Thailand.

so it burns. You don't sweat, you can end up with a good heat stroke

That's another pic from the himalayas. It's called the Spiti valley. The river you see is the Spiti river. We stayed at this monastery called the Kee Monastery. The contrast of the green farmlands and the dry barren mountains is crazy

Good night/day to all.

@Willeke nights!

seriously looking forward to the weekend

it's arbor day, and i plan to take my 4-year-old daughter out to a park and plant a tree

honestly, that would probably be a good source of questions for the site

@JonathanLandrum That's brilliant :) a good cause as well.

@Ricketyship i'm trying to get her into conservation as early as possible

@JonathanLandrum That's great! We need more people to understand what the wild means.

To see the forests, to roam in them. To climb up mountains.

i do wonder about the logistics of it, though. we live in a city, no vehicle. we rely on public transit to get around. i suppose we could purchase a tree from a nursery, and maybe a couple of shovels, but where to actually plant the tree is the concern. i suppose a public park is really the only option we have, given our location.

@Ricketyship she almost has no option in my family, haha!

@JonathanLandrum It's great that you are trying to leave a small carbon footprint. I travel by public transport too. I don't find many who do that nowadays.

@JonathanLandrum Why's that? :D

That's a great question. You and I both live in large metropolitan areas, and are fortunate enough to have good public transit options available (I'm in Chicago). So it's understandable for people not in our situation. However, even in our two cities, there are millions who choose to drive a vehicle to work. I don't know what they're getting out of that. Traffic is horrible, the time it takes you to commute is different every day depending on the traffic, gasoline is expensive, etc.

@JonathanLandrum Yes. And most of the days I see people in my city driving cars all alone. One big car for one person. And the surprising thing is that we create the traffic which we blame. I feel it's got to do a lot with the "status symbol". Societal pressure to own and drive a car. Because everyone else does too.

oh absolutely, i can definitely see it as a status symbol thing. in my building, when i get on the elevator and push the button for the ground floor, the people around me who are getting off in the parking garage almost seem to look down on me because i'm walking. on nice days, i'll even skip the transit option and just walk the whole way to work! it's only about an hour, and it's good for me, and it's nice seeing parts of the city i rarely get to visit otherwise.

Same here. It's a bit sad though. Some of us who go outdoors and try to see the forests and mountains seem to understand the degradation that we are causing. Most of my colleagues at work don't travel to the kinds of places I do to. They only travel to the touristy ones. They don't seem to get what this all saving the earth is about.

And that, along with the status symbol makes a really bad combination.

The city where I live, Bangalore, used to be one of the cooler cities. When I was spending my schooldays here, the max temperature during summer would be 30C. Last summer we hit 39C. That's a 9 deg change. And that's in a span of around 15 years! This summer, we have somehow lucked out. Some clouds from the Indian ocean seem to have helped with the temperature. But it's nothing less than alarming to see how crazy the climate has changed.

that's alarming

or it should be, but the problem is that it's not actually alarming the people who need to be alarmed

yeah... well... I saw a clipping of the French president speaking to the congress about climate change. It was almost funny (if not for the seriousness of the issue). He was teaching how climate change cannot be ignored to a cheering congress. The congress of the country that pulled out of Paris agreement :D

Have a good day @JonathanLandrum! Have fun with your daughter tomorrow :)

thank you, @Ricketyship!

@Sue I agree. We are an outdoor site, but gym work is very important in a number of disciplines. That new question is very opinion based, as are a small number of the others, but that's fine.

(Sorry I have been out all day - I have been running a conference)

@Ricketyship wow - beautiful

@Ricketyship No, only seen them being used - I am very much not a swimmer myself :)