mm, I suppose so

it is true that I wanted relevant words in more than I wanted that word out

@KateGregory Hi! Ooops, I meant to also say to exclude that word.

I know it would get long, which is why I'm not sure how to say it, but is there a way that convey both?

Or would you rather I leave you alone! :)

By the way, I've flagged for a moderator to clean up all the nasty comments that were made. I don't think you were treated nicely.

I also flagged the answers for the same reason.

Anyway, my hubby has dinner ready (he's awesome!), so I have to go. Thanks for caring enough to pop in! And I can't thank you enough for pushing hard for positive change!! It's not easy.

@Sue without the comments it would be impossible to tell why what happened did

And by changing the title it makes it look like people here don’t want to make it easier for us to be able to find instead of objecting to changing words to be gender neutral

Big edits should happen before answers not after

Would a Q about how to find a private, knowledgeable, reliable guide for a trip in Yosemite be on-topic? My husband can no longer hike, much less backpack, and, although I know where I want to go, and how to get there, I need help with carrying stuff and I am uneasy about a solitary backpacking trip. Hiking with a group is absolutely out! If this is not appropriate for the main site, does anyone here have an idea?

@ab2 I have friends who work for symg you might check them out

Southern Yosemite mountain guides

There is also summit adventure which might do it and who I used to work for

@CharlieBrumbaugh I see what you mean about the edits, which is why we shouldn't do big edits ourselves. Edits have been known to make either the question or the answers radically different. We have a number of meta posts about that. Even I had to apologize to each person who answered this meta question, outdoors.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1255, because the way I had initially written it was based on a false premise.

You had already changed it because I hadn't been back since @RoryAlsop's comment made the question incorrect. I know you were doing me a favor, and it did help. I had to tweak it a little to include the full extent of what I meant.

I wouldn't have touched @KateGregory's title, because it was a big edit, which is why I asked her if she wanted to change it.

@Sue But the thing is, once a question is answered, you shouldn't make big edits either because it makes the answers out of date

It shouldn't matter if it is the OP doing it

As for the comments, Mods have asked me (meaning the community) to flag posts for if they have long comment threads, especially when some are rude, offensive, defensive, no longer necessary, etc. I've been told t's easier for them than flagging one at a time.

@Sue Without the comments, the votes and answers really don't make sense

When it all settles down, I just leave a note, as politely as I can, asking them if they'd like to delete anything. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Not all of those comments were necessary for the votes and answers to make sense, at least in my opinion. Luckily I'm not a mod!!

Oh, while I have you and we're talking about comments, I wanted to clarify why I took issue with you leaving a comment that someone shouldn't upvote certain posts. You're right that voting is discussed in comments all the time, but those are whether or not something should be open or closed, not whether or not they should be upvoted. I just didn't feel like someone should have been told the question shouldn't have been upvoted. That's what that was about.

>Never put boiling water in a Nalgene

Says don't upvote this answer as clearly as anything else

I wasn't going to engage with you on the post itself. I think that would have made it worse! You can always ping me to talk about that stuff, and the next time I chat, I'll definitely hear you out.

Wait, let me go see what you mean, cause we're cross talking and it's confusing me!

I am getting sick of cleaning up after the random incoming posts and upvoting them isn't helping

Can you give me a link to that one?

Funny thing is here outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/19376/8794

I didn't get a single downvote

For saying the exact same thing

I'm confused-where on that post did you tell someone not to upvote?

@Sue No, ShemSegers comment led to people not upvoting my answer

Or when someone leaves a comment saying

This doesn't answer the question

That means you should go downvote it

@CharlieBrumbaugh On that question, your answer and his got exactly the same types of votes, +2, -2. Did your upvotes happen, then his comment, then your downvotes? The order of that would be interesting to know.

@Sue The first donvtoe came at the same time as the comment and then another one later

Okay, so I can see where one led to the other. But if he was right (I have no idea) that you had given incorrect advice, some people might be likely to downvote. By the way, I had upvoted the question, then when I came back the two answers were there with the same upvotes and down and I didn't feel like I understood any of them enough to vote one way or the other, so I didn't.).

And the other answer didn't seem to address the question specifically, although people liked it the best. (The higher upvotes could have been because it was the first answer, which happens a lot, but that's a different story.)

@Sue The frustrating thing is that the comment has no evidence, and if you look into it farther, as in the other question, there is plenty of evidence that it is fine and not something you should never do

@CharlieBrumbaugh I honestly don't know if his comment would have caused those downvotes. Maybe that's why people are asked to explain downvotes.

If it's really bothering you, you could always edit in the information you found for the other answer.

@Sue Its really not worth it

@CharlieBrumbaugh I agree. Back to what I asked in the beginning, though, if you don't mind.... How is it helpful to specifically (not by implication) tell someone not to upvote a post. I get it that you want to clear away these posts and you can't if they have votes, but the poor newbie doesn't even know what downvotes mean, and the person who was specifically trying to be nice ended up having to defend his position.

Looking back, I don't like my comment to you either, mostly because it even further confuses the OP, so I'm going to delete it.

@Sue Because the newbie probably won't come back, and if they were going to put effort into it they would have already done so. On the other hand by saying not to upvote, then maybe other users won't upvote poor content and we can get it cleaned up

It's going to make yours look out of place, because noone will know what I said, but I still think I should. I just have to find it...

By the way, I think asking people in here to downvote or delete is fine, like you do.

@CharlieBrumbaugh That happened to that newbie very fast. We didn't even give him time to come back.

@Sue I don't think its unfair to expect a certain level of competency from new users

Though to be fair, we should have deleted the other low quality answers ahead of time

His answer wasn't dumb, or silly. It was a real attempt to answer the question, and to offer something to the community. He's probably never even been to a community like ours. It's what happened to me the first time I was here (at a different SE). I got slammed for not understanding the system, because it was anecdotal and needed references. then they waited a few days for me to come back, which I did. I added references, and was told that they weren't good references,

and all of a sudden my answer disappeared.

It was very disheartening.

@CharlieBrumbaugh I do think if were going to, we should have deleted the other low quality questions before.

Those can get confusing because new OP's are only doing the same thing they're seeing, and don't understand the difference.

That would require other users to downvote and flag and vote to delete those posts

I have been protecting a few recently because that way new users can't answer them

@CharlieBrumbaugh Yes, we don't have enough users, or consensus, sometimes for deleting or downvoting those posts. Protecting is awesome. That question was a perfect example.

@CharlieBrumbaugh Level of competency is highly subjective.

From your offsite endeavors, it looks to me like you're either a teacher, or at least understanding of people who come in not knowing anything, and you guide them.

I just added a delete vote and a downvote to that post. I agree that poor guy will probably not be back. Hope that helps.

By the way... I hope you don't stop posting answers with a bunch of links in addition to your quotes. I don't why they're getting some downvotes. To me, they're better than big walls of quotes with only source links, with very little of your own text.

The recent batch of downvotes came after I explained a downvote to one particular user

@CharlieBrumbaugh Oh, so they seemed like revenge downvotes? I hate that!

That's an abuse of our downvoting privilege, not that it can be stopped.

@ab2 Hi! I have questions in my mind like that, especially like how to find a reliable guide for people with certain disabilities. Basically what you're looking for is one person to help you, right? I'd ping everyone and ask them to take a look at your post in here, because it might be getting lost in the regular discussions and people don't know you need advice about asking the question.

There might be a way to word it. The answer could be what Charlie said.

If people thought it was on-topic, it would free me up to add one for me!

It's probably on topic at Travel, but I don't know if you even want to go there. I like to stay here, although I think they'd like some of the things I haven't bothered asking here due to certain meta posts.

You could ask @gerrit and @Willeke.

Travel has some really funny tags! @CharlieBrumbaugh, since you're the most active tag-refiner here, you should have a look!

@Willeke and @gerrit, who came up with geek-travel? travel.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geek-travel

I love the definition!

Hey @TestingChatbot, I tried to use the pingable thing and either it didn't work or I didn't do it right. I did !!pingable and then enter. It didn't do anything so I deleted it. I'm going to try again.

Nope!

So, good Monday (still Sunday here) to all-@imsodin, @ab2, @CharlieBrumbaugh, @RoryAlsop, @Ricketyship, @TestingChatbot, @WedaPashi, @Willeke, @gerrit, @KateGregory, @Kevin, @Aravone (when you come in), @Liam (also when you stop by), and anyone else. I hope I didn't skip anyone!

I just found out that the Queen of England owns all Mute Swans in all British territories, including Canada. Aravona probably knows that. I just think it's cool!

Hope everyone had a great weekend.............

I spent my weekend in Oxfordshire campaigning for peace with the Space for Peace group www.space4peace.org