@AIQ Hey I know you lost the election, but I still hope you will stay here in ELL

@EddieKal I lost the election - that's fine, but the greater loss is that of the community. I wonder how Glorfindel feels right now. I'd like to ask him, are you happy that this happened? This is exactly what I wanted to prevent several months earlier, when I wrote a meta post - outlining a dozen sockpuppet accounts used to rack up reputation points by the winner of the election.

What you have is someone creating multiple sockpuppet accounts to ask questions, and then answering them from their real account to gather up reputation points. And then not to mention upvoting their answer from all their puppets. I am sure this comment too will be removed. It is so sad that all you guys care about is policy - to hell with truth and honesty, right? God knows best.

The ends do not justify the means. Dishonesty should not be overlooked because someone made valuable contributions.

@AIQ are you around?

@EddieKal Yeah.

@AIQ If you truly think that someone won the election through vote fraud, you should escalate through the contact us link at the bottom of every site on SE. Accusations against other users should not be posted on meta. It is extremely unlikely that someone actually ran a sock puppet ring on SE that was investigated and didn't get suspended. There is no way that you have access to the information that you would need to know for certain that someone was sock puppeting

@ColleenV I didn't say they won the election through vote fraud. I am not going to escalate this anywhere. You are right, very unlikely but not impossible. I can do the same and I can assure you there are no tools in SE that can detect that I did it. If I change my VPN address for each account there is no way SE can connect all the accounts. If I open different email accounts to register for SE using different VPN locations then that makes it impossible to connect all the accounts.

I ask you that you don't take this as "He's salty he lost". I ask you that you consider what I am saying because I love ELL and I'd want the best for the community

@AIQ Well I'm going to escalate it. If it's been investigated and no wrongdoing was found, you need to stop defaming that user with unsubstantiated accusations.

@ColleenV ColleenV, I don't care about the CMs or the upper level management. I care about what you and other folks here who I dearly respect thing. Tell me, do you believe me? Or do you think I am lying?

That's all I care about.

@EddieKal Not so much. I only started coming back to SE a week back ... I have other site accounts though

@AIQ I think that it is not just against the CoC but it is morally wrong to publicly accuse someone of vote fraud with no evidence and to accuse moderators of covering it up while refusing to go through the proper process

@ColleenV I already told you I never accused them of election vote fraud.

@AIQ I said vote fraud

And mincing words doesn't make it less wrong

@ColleenV Also I didn't accuse any mod of covering anything up - I said they didn't care about it enough to push it further ...

@ColleenV So you are saying I am in the wrong here?

@EddieKal ColleenV said what I said about then is morally wrong. This is really sad. I have failed.

@ColleenV I provided evidence. But it wasn't good enough for you all. Anyway, I really really appreciate all the help you all have given me over the years ... ColleenV Snail J.R. and MAR taught me a lot about English ... and also how to be a better person in general ...

I am happy I met you all!

whiff

@EddieKal

yeah?

what should a mod do

if they want to bring anyone to a room where they are not there?

or are not members of the site

what do you mean?

wait

@Unknown Please - also Glor and Mari.

@@ should work here

@Glorfindel

@Mari Lou A

@ColleenV

Where are you?

chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/131123/chat-with-aiq

@Unknown you need to double ping @@ (use two @ before their names)

@@Glorfindel

@@Mari Lou A

@Unknown um, I don't think you've pinged them successfully

also why would you want to ping them?

AIQ asked me to

okay

only moderators can do that

@hyper-neutrino this user is our newly elected mod

and for good reason; you really shouldn't be using superpings unless it's something really important, and it doesn't seem like that's the case

@EddieKal oh, my apologies. well, they are not being treated as such because they didn't set their chat parent

you're not a moderator in chat unless your parent account is a moderator, so you need to change your chat parent to ELL

@hyper-neutrino I didn't know that! I was trying to figure out why. Thanks for the info!!

no problem :) I don't really like it but that's just how the system works

@EddieKal Are you here?

?

I'm going to say one thing, and then I'm leaving chat forever. Every time I get sucked into chat I fucking regret it.

@ColleenV Did you see what Void had to say?

They wanted you to see that ... before you leave, just have a look

@ColleenV

It's a request. @ColleenV I won't ask anything more!

AIQ you were wrong to publicly accuse them regardless if the validity of your accusation. It is a violation of the CoC and it it just plain wrong. There's a process, and if you had followed it, you would have saved everyone a lit if grief.

@ColleenV The CoC can get me banned for life for all I care. The failure was not mine!

@ColleenV What process are you talking about? The process that failed in the first place? Maybe I am not the problem. It is the process that didn't work. Because I tried.

You keep saying I was wrong because I brought it up publicly - well that's how life is. Isn't that what freedom of speech is about ...

You've got to stop blaming me, and maybe realize I am not the one who was dishonest ...

Look, if you think there are any factors that should invalidate an election result then you should escalate that to the community team using the appropriate private channels. What do you think will come out of publicly discussing this here? We (even the ELL mods; I'm not even a mod here) can't remove Void's moderatorship or anything.

Besides, creating separate accounts is completely within the rules of SE; many staff have sockpuppet accounts and I have at least a few - it's only voting for oneself, whether that's normal reputation-granting upvotes (or even downvotes) or election votes - that's against the rules.

From what Void said, they never did that (and you mentioned something about a VPN, but without giving away unnecessary details, the tool we use for detecting vote fraud doesn't need IPs), and if you think they did, again, that's something to send to the CM team, not this room.

@hyper-neutrino I am not interested in removing his mod-ship. Unlike you guys, I am a sharp shooter. I am honest and I know what happened. I am not saying all this here because I am mad I lost, but because I was approached by Void in a different room where he wanted to share things with me.

If this was all right and as per SE rules, they probably wouldn't feel the guilt. You have to have a very keen eye to see how such things (sock puppets) are being misused ... which I don't think ColleenV has. What do you guys stand for? COC policy or the truth?

It seems you all are too hung up on site policy ...

"If this was all right and as per SE rules, they probably wouldn't feel the guilt." Actually, that's completely untrue, but that aside, if it really was against the multiple account rules, then they definitely should have their moderatorship removed (I respect that you're not interested in pursuing that, but that's objectively what should happen). If there really was fraud, then both the policy should be upheld, that they are removed, and the truth should be available.

@hyper-neutrino I don't care about all that. My intention here was to get ColleenV to see this. And to ask Glorfindel here, one man to another, why the fuck did he do nothing? That's it.

But what you did was accuse Void of fraud and accuse the ELL moderation team of letting it happen and doing nothing, which accomplishes neither of those.

@hyper-neutrino You keep saying that - I don't care that in your minds I accused someone - oh god what a terrible thing I did - ... Look where process has gotten you all ... Btw I did not accuse the Mod team of letting it happen - never said that - I said it was Glor who removed my post ...

You think the CMs don't know about this?

Anyway ... I don't want to talk about this anymore ...

I don't want to be in a place where policy, bureaucracy, and redtape is valued more than integrity and honestly ...

@hyper-neutrino The main reason I made this public in my Meta months ago (which was removed by Glor and ColleenV) was so the community would it.

I tried handling it in private but nothing worked

But it is what it is ... there's no point trying to explain this anymore ...

Alright. I'd request all mods to just leave me out of it. If you think I violated policy, ban me / remove me. But I think I've spoken about this a lot, and I am no more interested in talking about it any further.

@AIQ I understand you're upset. We've asked the Community Managers to have a look, a couple of times. (Not just before/during the election.)

I deleted your Meta post because it was specifically naming a user, which is not allowed. (Perhaps I should've left a comment clarifying that, but at the moment I thought it was obvious. My apologies for that.)