@Sue, I agree. Aravona hasn't been here for a long time, ditto Kate Gregory and Clare Steen. April Rain is a woman, and has some good posts. @Willeke, it wasn't obvious to me from your name that you are a woman, but I don't know Dutch. Knots seemed like a man's hobby -- sexual stereotying is hard to stamp out, even for this woman who went to MIT when there were about 20 women per undergraduate class -- roughly 2%.

@ab2, I would never have guessed from your nick you are a woman, not checked out your profile yet. With @Sue it is easier, certainly when you remember that famous song about a boy called Sue.

Knots range from lace up, several of my friends in the International Guild of Knot Tyers do knot work most men would not attempt, but others do practical knots for out of doors use or for boating.

But then, some of the men work with very thin string, resulting in miniature versions of bellropes and the likes.

And I assumed @ab2 was a male all this while :'D

In most cases I think it is not important whether the person asking or answering is male or female, as long as they know what they are writing about.

And the English language makes it easy to ignore, with no gender changes to the words or grammar.

Yep. I wouldn't really care if the person is a male or female. As long as the question/answer makes sense, gender becomes immaterial.

@CharlieBrumbaugh For record, I upvoted that answer of yours.

@Sue It would be great if you could share a pic. We will be able to tell which language it is :). It's great if she can become a teacher and give back to her village and help them move forward. It's surprising how basic some needs are and how privileged some of us are when compared to the rest. And Madhya Pradesh is not where we live. I believe even your daughter doesn't stay there. It's pretty far away from where we live. For me it's around 1500 km away. It's a bit closer to @WedaPashi

@Willeke are you not biking today?

No, have to do things in the house. I plan to use the Flevo for my commute this week but I can not find my mirror.

Yesterday I borrowed my friends one, (having remembered one when already half way to her house) but she will want it back when we meet next.

Found my mirror, it had moved from one table to one near it.

ahaha that's a clever mirror

Or lousy house keeping. But I have decided to walk in at my parents, so I am going to use it now. (5 minutes or less, so not really a ride.)

Bye

@CharlieBrumbaugh I think we have way too many medical questions, which should be closed, including that impaled in the stomach question. (It's not just because I don't like gory things.). We tread a vary dangerous line. We do the same with acclimatization and exercise questions. Interestingly you voted to re-open the impaled in the stomach question, after my friend @ab2 did pretty huge edit. Why did you think it was okay after it was edited? You don't need to answer that, or defend anything you do.

I'm just surprised to see you uncomfortable about it when you were one who fought for it.

I don't intend to argue with you at all-please know that!

Avoiding too much conflict is one of the promises I made to myself after getting angry and emotional a few weeks ago. If it can be a civil discussion, though, it can be helpful.

I do like to hear other people's opinions about questions, and your opinions are passionate.

@CharlieBrumbaugh Our meta had a question about how to deal with dangerous questions, outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/35/…. One of the answers, outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/a/45/5547, suggested a disclaimer which could be used as a comment on those questions. I think it's a good idea, although maybe shorter.

@Willeke I absolutely remember the song about the Boy named Sue. Even after all these years, I have at least part of it memorized. "My name is Sue, how do you do? Now you do? Now you gonna die!" I'll check now and see if I was right.

@Willeke-Yup! It's a part of the song, which was basically about a dad who gave his son the name Sue to toughen up in the cruel world. Interesting.....

@Willeke, I agree with @Ricketyship, I assumed you were a male because of your interest in knots. It wasn't until you responded to the backpack question that I found out.

@ab2, I thought you were a male too because you went to MIT during the time where there wasn't much focus on females in the tech field. I wondered off and on, though, because your answers and demeanor seem to be more sensitive than some of the other people. I'm only saying "some" because there are plenty of men here who are kind and sensitive. If I look back, I think there was a place where you mentioned a husband a long time ago, but you don't mention him often.

What I'm learning is that I have many "judge a book by its cover" presumptions, which is never a good thing!

@Willeke and @ab2, I frequently wish I hadn't given myself an obvious gender-related name, and just used something generic instead.

It would be evident in here because I mention my husband often, but on the main site it's different, and I think I should have done it differently.

I know we can change our name, but don't know what happens to what was posted under our previous name. There is a user here who has changed just the last letter, so I could probably look into his activity and see if the name has changed all over the network. I'm pretty sure you can't change the name in the past comments though.

I like having my beliefs front and center in my avatar, but bible believers come in all genders!

@Willeke-I'm curious about how you think we compare to Yahoo answers in terms of the way we use the site. I know you said you had to do tons of policing of the site in terms of gross content, but other than that, do you see a positive difference here?

@Ricketyship @Willeke I have known @ab2 was females ever since my rabid carcass question:)

@CharlieBrumbaugh, I assume you are male, because of what I see in your avatar pic, but with your name it could be either.

Amazing that people connect knots with male so automatic, knots were universal and arty stuff with knots was much more a women thing in the 1970's (when I started.)

Again, being in the guild I know as many man doing the arty stuff as women doing the craft stuff.

@CharlieBrumbaugh and @Willeke. I confess also that I thought the heavy climbers were all men.

That's a total misconception.

Sue, when you change your name, all official postings of your name change. So that is all Q, all A, all Comment. But every time someone addressed you as Sue will stay as such.

@Willeke Thanks-that's helpful to know.

We have some people on Travel who have changed their name, some of them several times.

@Sue I don’t mind the medical questions so long as the answers are well backed up. What I found irritating was people keeping the other answer on the impalement from being deleted while at the same time trying to close the question

@CharlieBrumbaugh-if I had a neutral name would you have assumed I was female because of my aversion to the gory questions? My emotions? My dislike of conflict? All of the above?

None of the above?

Yahoo answers has no quality control, (beyond being able to report obvious trolls, rude answers and spam) and no rules against duplicate posts. One of the first questions I answered had 14 about identical answers, I did post a completely different meaning of the word they asked about.

@Willeke I suppose your gender is obvious to people who know Dutch but I don’t think many people here know Dutch

@Willeke I think you said you were active on other forums too. Do you see a difference between us and them, in a good way?

I've never posted on a forum, partly because there's so much guess work.

In the past people could vote their own answers, to be selected as 'best' if the asked had not selected one within a week.

@Sue I don’t know.

They stopped the voting but now very many questions stay open.

@CharlieBrumbaugh Fair enough!

Forums are all different. Good ones have people checking for quality, poor ones never stop people from posting whatever they want.

And some are on topic, some have on and off topic areas and some are a big mess.

Stack exchange has variations but is mostly kept within reasonable limits.

@Willeke Yahoo! Answers seems to be a boogeyman around here where people say let’s do x or we will turn into it

@Sue, does that answer your Q?

@Willeke Yup, thanks!

@CharlieBrumbaugh, Y!A is getting very bad and the traffic to it is way down.

I've looked at birding forums a lot, which also vary in quality.

There are sections where 1 in 100 Q is on topic, 75 in 100 is insulting, racist or whatever other reason to delete here.

When I started in Y!A there were several questions about travel Netherlands per day, with often in the weekend about 5 to 10. Now it is down to about one per week or even already per month. That is the on topic ones, after the not on topic have been cleared out.

And it is like that all over the site, even in the chatty areas.

A good mod makes all the difference.

@Willeke That's absolutely true! Were you a mod?

Yes, on three sites at the same time, two knots and one slings (primitive weapons)

And the most important action was to quiet the people down who were fighting.

@Willeke Wow-that's a ton of work! Quieting down fighting people is tough.

And on all the sites there were more mods. On the slinging site we had a very active group, most of them doing two or three subforums but able to step in when needed in others.

If you have people awake around the clock and those checking in two or three times when on-line, it is easy to do.

@Willeke So do you think your specific sites have enough mods?

After I left the knot forum got a mod who was doing the checking once a week, letting the fights getting out of hand.

Mostly yes, in some cases too many.

@Sue even if you change your name your writing style is distinct enough it would be easy to recognize you

@Willeke Yikes, that's not nearly enough checking. That's one of the things I like here. Even though not all the mods are vocal, like @RoryAlsop, they're always around.

In Lifehacks there is a mod who clears away comments almost as soon as they are posted, while I think that comments are a good place to get information if you do not know enough to answer the question.

I have re-posted comments with the strong line 'do not remove till OP has seen it'.

@Willeke I know one of the Lifehacks mods well, because he's a big contributor at Gardening, and was my mentor when I came to SE. I don't know if he's the one shutting down comments quickly, though. It's not really his style, at least at Gardening.

One I remember is when someone with very curly hair wanted to use a home made chemical straightener and I posted a warning against that for health reasons.

I think all Stack Exchange sites have multiple mods.

@Willeke Definitely comments should be given a chance, unless they're rude or argumentative, even then I wait because there are almost always either nuggets of information in comments, or requests for clarification, all of which are important.

And I might like comments a bit more than the site intended.

Yup, all SE sights have multiple mods. I think 3 may be the minimum. I wonder if you might like comments more because you come from the more comment-oriented forumss.

Also, when he decided the Q was not on topic, he would deleted the given answers to be able to close and delete the question.

You've seen how they can be helpful.

Travel is good in comments, if they get out of hand they get moved to a chatroom, not deleted.

@Willeke That would be someone other than my friend, who also pops in here every once in a while. He doesn't have a slam-hammer style.

@Willeke Moving to a chat room can be better, I agree.

I'm probably the most frequent one who flags whole posts with tons of comments and asks the mods to sort out what's okay and delete the rest.

@CharlieBrumbaugh, why would you have known I was female due to my writing style?

Flagging is alright, because in that case there are at least two people involved in the decision.

@Sue, I am looking through the comments I got in that stack but I am still not sure which mod it is.

@Willeke, I wondered about that. I used to ask @RoryAlsop to help me a lot, but then I realized he's not the only mod and it's not his responsibility to cater to me, although he always helps! I just noticed travel has a lot of new users. Is that common?

Travel always has people coming in with one question, some keep coming in, most do not. Some stay a while and then drift off.

The problem there is that a few of the big accounts have stopped or taken an extended break around the same time. Some angry or hurt, others just because of a change of personal life.

Strangely enough I never associated @Willeke’s knot abilities to a male. Stereotyping does knot work all the time I guess. ;)

@Willeke, is this post from your meta relevant to this discussion? It's about deletion of comments. travel.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4568/…

People who see my knot work will almost never assume male, making miniature baskets and covering miniature bottles.

I don’t know if males and females have distinctive writing styles. I don’t see a difference in the way Charlie writes or @Willeke writes. I do see an emotional attachment with @Sue’s writing.

I like to read meta from other sites, even if I don't know anything about the site.

@Willeke even without knowing yor style, I wouldn’t associate knot craft with a gender.

@Ricketyship I know I get emotional, which gives me away as a female. And I tend to judge angry people as male. Wow, I had no idea I did so much stereotyping!!!

@Sue, most names in that Meta Q are from travel (indeed, two of the people who have changed their names in the past are in) and the deleted comments I was aiming at were in Lifehacks.

First time I’ve caught @Sue online :D. Hi there.

@Ricketyship Hi!! By the way, I have some pictures of the writing from my Indian girl--want to see them?

I bet that Meta Q was from the time the people walked away angry.

@Sue emotional need not be female. I don’t see any emotional angle from @Willeke at all.

Different kind of removed comments.

@Sue indeed.

Yes, minimum is 3. "Difficult" sites may get more, but will definitely get more CM attention. As sites grow, elections happen either because load stats go up, or because existing mods or the community ask.

@Ricketyship, that is because I have not been in this chat yet when my sugar level was really off.

With mature sites mods really try to intervene as little as possible - supporting the community, cleaning up mess, responding to flags etc

@RoryAlsop Just out of curiousity, do you feel over-worked as a mod because we ask so may questions specifically to you in here?

@Sue no I was saying that it would be easy to tell it’s you even with a name change

@CharlieBrumbaugh I agree. Very easy to identify sue.

Wow I don’t remember having this many people in chat in a long time

@Sue definitely not. Sometimes when I am going through my general flag response/clean up stuff I need to park answering until I have more time, but it's all good

@Willeke hahaha would be interesting to see.

@CharlieBrumbaugh Neither do I. I usually just leave messages and people see them Monday morning. Charlie never seems to be far from the site, though.

@CharlieBrumbaugh nowadays @Willeke, me and @WedaPashi are often here.

If I see a problem on one site and there is not enough reaction on flags (due to lack of activity) I often go into a random other chat I know about and ask there. Specially the one that covers the hats in winter has people who can act in almost all sites.

I have one site where a couple of folks have done amazing work finding bad posts, and flagged them for mods. So I batch those up and do eg 20 or 30 at a time

I have the habit to open the chat at least once a day and I do react on being pinged.

@Ricketyship, I'm going to put up a few pics. They're not great quality. If they're upside down, I apologize. I think I can tell which way is which just by the way the page is turned when she writes. Then I get a translation at the same time.

I am online when I am home and awake, which is 6 hours on working days and longer on weekends.

I tend to have most chats open all day so I can dip in and out, handling the easy ones as I go and doing the hard stuff in planned breaks.

But I am not online for most of one day each week.

Hi @RoryAlsop

@Willeke just that our timings match when we come online.

@RoryAlsop I thought it was a feature where the mod is auto logged in all the time.

@Sue I typically budget 40-60 hours a week for voluntary work of one sort or another. It's mostly infosec work - either for local community or industry - but mod stuff is in there and a local charity I work with.

@Ricketyship I bet you are a night owl. I am going to bed 10 PM to midnight, Europe time, you are much farther east.

I usually have the site open when on a computer and used to have notifications on my phone but one user was bugging me to the point I turned them off

Moderating is generally okay - because people are generally okay. There are exceptions that are very painful, but luckily we do quite well at avoiding/preventing the worst stuff

@Ricketyship no, but I do click on the Rejoin Favourites link

@Willeke well I do sleep late and wake up early. I seem to be doing good with around 6-6:30 hours of sleep everyday. And a bit longer on weekends.

@Sue yes please :) I’m waiting.

@Ricketyship I seem to have lost the ability to upload. I'm going to refresh the page and try again. I sized them down so they should be fine...

And @Willeke reminded me - I hadn't said Hi. So hello everyone :-) Good weekends? It's been beautiful here so have been gardening all day

First good gardening day of the year so lots of pruning

@RoryAlsop I’m assuming you are from US. Did the spring finally start?

I know a friend from Ohio. She used to send me pics of her weather forecasts with a sad smiley.

I'm Scottish :-)

It's been a slightly damp spring, and we have had much more snow than we should have in march

But it's been 16°C today under blue skies and golden sun

If we are going to post photos, I am going to share some knot ones. Wine bottle and miniature

Sh:44021197

And these are as small as the small one

I have a very crafty daughter - we have been looking at knotwork and macramé as she really enjoys crochet

Are there better resources than YouTube

Depends on how she learns. I have a site.

@RoryAlsop ah. Isn’t trainspotting Scottish? I couldn’t get past the first three pages.

knopen.ismijnhobby.nl.bales.id.au/frames/…

It is very Scottish. But not really the dialect/accent I have. I do know people who speak like that though

(it runs on a different site as well.)

I will have a look and see if that works for her. Thank you

@Willeke whoa that’s really beautiful!!! How long does it take you to do these?

Otherwise, just google on macrame, there are many sites and in this work it is not important to get the right one but the working one.

Sure

The one next to the wine bottle, about 60 hours.

The others less but 20 to 40 I guess.

Thanks

That’s a lot.

But what a piece of art!

I am working on a basket that is going in the 100's of hours, maybe up to 1000's of hours by now.

@Willeke, Those are awesome! @Ricketyship, I've never had this kind of trouble uploading pics before, please don't leave.......

Miniature is not fast to work but it allows me to carry a series with me when I go to show them.

What got you into knots?

@Sue no problem :)

Genes I think. I must have been trying to do my shoe laces years before I was ready to learn it.

Speaking of pictures I find it highly irritating that mobile chat doesn’t have an option to upload

I have gotten instructions in school, first textile craft I took to and have done it ever since. (I was about 9 then.)

@CharlieBrumbaugh realised just now. Makes so little sense when most of our pics are clicked on mobiles nowadays.

Just select Desktop Site - that's what I do

@CharlieBrumbaugh, can you see?

@Willeke can see but can upload from mobile. But selecting desktop site works apparently.

Can’t* upload from mobile.

I have better ones...

While I have the stack app, I only use it to get a hat in the winter bash.

You can use the desktop site but it not the easiest

@Sue not Kannada.

Can you see clearly enough, at least by zooming? I have one that's closer, I just can't seem to get it to load.

Oooops!

I can see :) but it’s Tamil by the looks of it. Unfortunately I don’t read Tamil. Else I would have read it for you.

That’s the thing with India. We have so many languages.

@Willeke sounds like a great usage of the app.

I will check it out a bit more now I have mobile internet/data as part of my phone contract. Maybe I can use the site when away from home.

(But not at work, need my hands to work, no time for a phone.)

@Ricketyship That's cool, thanks for trying!

@Willeke What do you do at work?

@Ricketyship, same question.

Are you guys all techies who work from home?

@Sue same question

Our company makes labels. I get them as big rolls and make user sized rolls. Say from about 15 kg to 1 kg sizes.

@Sue ahaha I am a techie. Mostly detecting telecom frauds.

I take work from home once a week. But I’m at work 4 days a week.

I was in the medical field for many years. My passion was helping eradicate cigarettes from the world! (No offense to those who smoke!) I was a smoking cessation therapist. I also worked as a paralegal at a non-profit in support of larger companies suing big tobacco. I helped write grant proposals. I edited a monthly document which was approximately 1200 pages, before the internet could do everything. I also wrote for and edited other tobacco-related documents.

@Willeke labels as in?

For me it is 38 hours, spread over 5 days.

Now I'm disabled, and am home most of the time.

rectangular and flat pieces of plastic, although we often cut points to them as well.

@Sue whoa that’s quite impressive!!

@Ricketyship Detecting telecom frauds is awesome! So necessary!

@Willeke I have worked with a Dutch company before and it seemed like they were always on bank holiday

@Sue it’s fun. I’m lucky. I enjoy my day job. And weekends I trek. Which I love.

@CharlieBrumbaugh I thought Dutch had a proposal to reduce the number of working days in a week to 4?

We have a few more than the USA, but not that many. We also have 25 days of holidays each year, and if working less than full time, (40 hours/week) you can often take that time as days. Not where I work, alas.

@Willeke that’s a lot

@Ricketyship, never got through, average working per week is 36 or 38 hours.

@Ricketyship Thanks, it was and is my biggest passion. I got to be in on the ground floor of legislation banning cigarettes from public places. My biggest "claim to fame" was a mention in the 1984 Surgeon General's Report on the health of tobacco in our country. I've seen internal documents from the big companies explaining how to get kids addicted starting at the age of 10. Such a shame.

Common for Europe.

@CharlieBrumbaugh What do you do besides SE?

@Willeke 25 holidays is much more than most of us get in the US!

I do Web development and database administration

That is the land of the freedom for you.

@Sue we Indians with a thousand festivals don’t get those many.

Do all of you guys know lots of languages, or at least two? It seems like English is not the first, but you couldn't tell it from the way you speak.

@Sue, I have never smoked and love you for making the world better for me.

@Ricketyship I love your festivals-so colorful!

If we can not get the kids not starting, we might win that war.

@Willeke Wow-that's a humbling compliment. I hope I wasn't bragging. I just think I was blessed with the greatest job in the world.

And yes, the only way to win the war is prevention.

@Sue, only Dutch (native) and English, but with the time I have spend speaking and writing English, most of it for consumption by native speakers, I should be at native level by now.

Litigation is helping a bit though. And there are increased taxes on tobacco products, but people find a way to afford them.

Oops, one to many not in that 'winning war' line.

@Willeke Yah, I wouldn't have guessed you didn't come from here.

One interesting thing about SE is how international it actually is.

@Willeke I get what you meant!

@CharlieBrumbaugh That doesn't surprise me. Do you work from home?

I can read and understand spoken more languages. German better spoken, from Norwegian to Italian I can get the meaning when people are not speaking to me but to someone else.

I probably asked that, but am not sure where in this conversation!!

@Sue not usually

Or when written and me having the time to work it out slowly.

Learned some Spanish but that is about my worst for understanding.

Well I speak English, Kannada, Hindi and a bit of Sanskrit. I am trying to learn a few phrases in Italian thanks to my few Italian trek mates.

@Ricketyship That's a lot. Is it hard to learn the alphabet in the Indian languages. It looks like art to me.

I am not good at learning and using grammar, and do not take in new languages much anymore.

@Willeke same here. I’m an odd ball for most of my trek mates. I don’t smoke or drink. And since I have a beard they assume I at lease smoke. No clue what the connection is though.

@CharlieBrumbaugh, what kind of companies do you do developing for?

@Ricketyship Is smoking common where you live? I know the laws are not the same as ours. That's funny about the beard connection! I don't smoke (obviously) or drink either.

Maybe from all the sailors on film, beards and cigarettes.

I do not drink much but when I do drink I mostly drink one glass of something strong, like wiskey or rhum.

@Sue smoking is common. Although each of the cigarette packs have a gory image to try to warn people. But yeah, pretty much the same as US.

@Sue I will admit to working for this one home.srom.org part time and volunteer and my "real" job I don't say online because its politically contentious and we get a lot of hate mail

@Willeke That sounds interesting too. Lots of detailed work. People probably don't understand how much work goes into what you do, and just sort of take for granted what they don't see.