@JosephWright Yes, I appreciate the email (now that I know about it). I hadn't seen it until later because it went to my personal email instead of my Stack Exchange one. No big deal.
As for contacting HedgeMage. Please note that I did not use her name in my post. Shortly after my post, Joseph said (in chat) that he would contact her to find out what had happened (still without naming). Please remember that at this time I was trying to find out if my reaction was over the top or not. Look at the first paragraph that I wrote. (sorry for shouting)
@JosephWright A mention of that would've been wise to keep outsiders such as myself from drawing incorrect conclusions, but I can easily forgive that ♪ But you can see where I'm drawing a bit of confusion about the friendliness of the community.
It seemed best to make direct contact first, and we've tended to use e-mail for that
I'm certainly not keen on @HedgeMage or anyone else feeling we've been over-the-top. I guess that part of the surprise here is that we've mainly been 'left to get on with things' by SE
Again, I have no problem debating policy, and sometimes I'm downright wrong. I don't even mind being told I'm wrong bluntly and in public. (There were but two parts of that long post that I found at all inflammatory.) However calling out a new user in public is wholly inappropriate -- I honestly hope I never see that again -- and the drama level that came out of this whole thing was just very high for what little is really going on.
@JosephWright That's a good thing! I was just explaining why I didn't know about your email until much later.
@GraceNote: Just read your comment on the meta question. Joseph then went through the records and found three other such incidents. One where a comment had already been left by one of our own moderators. I didn't note the timings of these so they could be all part of one "event".
@HedgeMage I guess we've taken an approach more like a forum, where you'd say 'please mark up your code' or 'please post a MWE' as a reply to a question
@HedgeMage But you're not a new user! You're an employee of SE. So when you act, we don't know if this is a new policy, or maybe it's the mysterious CHAOS group, or ... what? We don't know. You could have told us what you were doing. You could have stopped by in chat to say, "Just passing through and took a look at ....". You could have left a meta post explaining what you did and why.
@HedgeMage I'd not realised that people would get a notification of a comment-then-delete: we've worked on the assumption that we need to let the user come back, see the comment, then act, and also that users should first have the chance to modify/delete themselves before the mods do.
We did that precisely so that a "delete, then un-delete if they fix it" policy for cases where we didn't want garbage and noise left on the site would be practical.
@JosephWright I'd like to "vote" for keeping the policy as it is. I think it's useful for others to see how to act. Seeing a non-answer posted together with a polite explanation can be a great help to someone to ensure that they don't do it themselves. Back to the parenting: kid 1 tries eating raw chillies. Kid 2 sees and thinks, "Hmm, don't think I'll do that".
@HedgeMage No. An SE site's value lies precisely in its being useful to its community.
As someone who is apparently being blamed for the 'drama', I think that just the use of that term is inflammatory. I also think that the parents metaphor was also very misplaced, and didn't contribute either. But enough of that discussion. Is there any independent evidence that the way we're doing things is detrimental to the site?
@AndrewStacey You didn't by name, which is good. However, about half the time they take posting the critical comment as a stronger reprimand as the original comment. It's something we discourage for the subset of comments (specifically, a single mod comment immediately before deletion, or a moderator direct message) that are considered private to some degree.
@AlanMunn No, there isn't anything necessarily detrimental going on, but I don't think it's particularly advertised anywhere that there is this "No action for 24 hours" rule, for starters. I can understand the defense of your friendliness policy.
@JosephWright Gotta love those typos! I'm going to try to convince my students that "froxen" is a mathematical term. Can anyone give me a good concept that that could define?
It remains that it confused me to see the tone of your comment as, to me, absent of knowing the email exchange, that's the "greeting" that HedgeMage got as being "new" to how the community operates. It seemed very antithetical to the message of the post as a whole, which is what confused me.
@GraceNote I can understand new users not knowing how to find out what is going on or what local conventions are, but the SE team know who the moderators are and could just ask them. 6 flags is not much. Why not just drop a line to our moderators and say, "I noticed a few posts that were flagged but no action seemed to be taken. Would you like us to help you keep an eye on things?"
@GraceNote I think also the issue was that common courtesy would demand that a new user (even with extraordinary powers) would hang around a bit to see how things worked before jumping in.
@GraceNote As I've tried to explain, the post was not intended as a message to HedgeMage but to the community. Moreover, as an employee of SE, I don't count HedgeMage as a "new user" in that sense. So a special conjunction of circumstances means that, yes, HedgeMage did get a slightly unusual "welcome".
@AndrewStacey I didn't care about that part until the point where I had other people getting up in arms about it. I have an unusually low drama tolerance, but that also means it's pretty hard to make me mad :)
What strikes me is that there is a difference in how SE expects flags/deletion to work and who the TeX.sx community does. As one of the community mods, I try to do what the community wants, but I do see where the SE approach is coming from.
@JosephWright It boils down to the issue here being social adherence more than the actual enforcement (since the end goal is rather the same for both approaches)
@JosephWright We really need to get you into mod chat or at least reading the newsletter. Then you can hear Jeff beat the "all flags handled in 24h or less" drum. :)
@JosephWright I have made that argument myself and we're working on it... though I don't know whether "it" will end up being policy refinement or a new utility to track this stuff.
@HedgeMage Slightly more seriously, I don't accept the "Just because Jeff says" line. TeX is ... unusual in the programming world. And it's users are often academics. If I'm typical, then we don't really like to be told, "This is how things must be done.". One reason why we work in a university rather than in the "real world" is that the amount of "This is what you must do" is kept at a minimum.
@JosephWright Though, in the case of spam or outright noise, I'm 100% behind "delete it until they fix it" -- doing otherwise lets the garbage hang around as an example to others of what can be gotten away with.
It's strange to enforcing a policy on a community without getting antiquated with the community. I mean, if it works here, what's the problem? I'm amazed at this authoritative tone. Maybe it's just me, I just been here three months or something but I never saw any problems of noise or bad quality posts. Actually I've found tex.sx a nicer, better handled site than any other SE sites.
@HedgeMage Absolutely agree. And as evidence that they do so, I have almost no recollection of any spam on the TeX site. The only stuff that I've come across is in deleted stuff.
Well, while this has been going on, I've figured out how to draw a cube.
@JosephWright @GraceNote is there any chance I can trouble you to write up a note? I'm a little burnt out on this one, and frankly my son's building a very attractive-looking race track in the living room ;)
@NN I think you missed some important comments of mine earlier -- specifically that it's not a problem we need to address now, but if/when tex.se grows in size, the policy will have to be changed, because beyond a certain scale that approach causes junk posts to overwhelm the site.
@HedgeMage "Our amount of messages still allows for more patience, particularly with inexperienced users." End of citation. Is there something unclear?
@GraceNote I think @JosephWright had an idea of what would be most helpful. As far as I'm concerned I think something to show that the drama is over and that the policy will be addressed in some vague and distant future.
Of course, the whole thing was just a set-up. I noticed that I had no starred comments in the list in chat. Now that that's been rectified, I'm happy. I'll finish my cube and get out, too.
@Caramdir Yes, @JosephWright is particularly in tune with the football talk. :-) But we have also been known to venture into actual TeX related discussions from time to time. In fact before this little tempest in a teapot arose, Patrick added a patch to luaotfload based on a conversation we had in chat.
@AndrewStacey We need the gold badge "Received a 'Nice Answer' comment from @Jake " on a tikz question.
and eventhough every number is trivially palindromic in infinite bases, you always find a base in which the number is not trivially palindromic, so it is still funny.
("always" in my last sentence meaning "always that such a base exists")
