What is the purpose of pointing out questions lacking context/personal input in this chat? I regularly spot these as I browse recent unanswered questions and vote to close if it is warranted, as well as occasionally going through the review queue. Many of these questions do indeed end up closed. They call attention to themselves, no witch hunt is needed :)

Please don't use rude and offensive characterizations of people's good intentions in your use of the analogy "witch hunt", @Math1000. I wonder where @PaulWhite is now.

@quid: See the above comments, as well as note the fact that your objection has not been addressed. Thank you.

@amWhy Why are you pinging me here?

@Math1000 Don't start this again. You do not know the histories of the users involved. Please contact the Math SE moderators if you wish to know more.

Well, you still appear (faded) in the chat room. Just want to point out the bullying doesn't all originate from regular CRUDE users.

@user21820 I don't really know what you're referring to. I took an example linked to from this question math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28390/is-crude-healthy without any regard to usernames.

@PaulWhite Because "witch-hunt" is a very offensive term.

@Math1000 Exactly. You don't know what we long-time users of Math SE know. So please don't attempt to make judgements that you do not have sufficient information to make.

I meant a "witch hunt" against the problem of low-quality questions, not the users that ask them.

Member for 5 years, 8 months, 1056 questions answered, ~261k people reached - does that not qualify as a "long-time user"?

@user21820 @amWhy So deal with it.

@PaulWhite I can do so, but I don't want people to turn around and call me a dictator or something.

@Math1000 If someone asks you politely to refrain from using a term they find problematic, please do so.

@user21820 You'd rather ping me personally to deal with it? Like my time is less valuable than yours?

@PaulWhite Please observe carefully who pinged you. Not me.

And I'm not sure your remark "like my time is less valuable than yours" is very nice. =S

I'll agree that it is not the most germane term, I will think of a better one.

@Math1000 Thank you.

@user21820 You pinged me personally when I replied to amWhy.

@PaulWhite Since you were here already, I stated my reason for concurring with amWhy. I didn't ping you to ask you to do anything.

I am quite happy to remove the burden of room ownership from anyone that doesn't feel comfortable with that responsibility.

I am sorry if I disturbed you, @PaulWhite. I assumed, given your presence in the room (that you had not left the room, formally), that you were still interested in monitoring the room. I will leave you out of future issues. I thought about flagging the comment, but that may have brought someone altogether unfamiliar with this room. In any case, I apologize for bothering you.

@amWhy I am here because this is one of the rooms I am monitoring, yes. Please feel free to ping any chat mod present (including me) if there is an issue requiring mod action, or you need assistance or advice.

@user21820 It seems to me the issue in chat is mostly resolved.

@Math1000 I'm deeply curious what you come up with. Each of my initial ideas could be taken to be at least as offensive as witch-hunt.

⎕←↑∪↓5 2⍴3 1 4 ⍝ in 17.0 you can remove ↓ and ↑

@Adám
line(1,0) : error AC0505: error (SYNTAX ERROR) executing line "{0::⎕←⊃⎕DM⋄⎕←↑∪↓5 2⍴3 1 4 ⍝ in 17.0 you can remove ↓ and ↑}(⎕NS⍬).⍎'⎕CY''salt''⋄⎕SE.UCMD''←box on -f=on -t=tree''⊣enableSALT⋄⍬'"
                                                               ^
Complete: 1 error.
DOMAIN ERROR: There were errors processing the script
 '#'⎕NS ⎕FIX'file:///home/runner/.bin.tio.dyalog'
∧

Real time: 0.015 s
User time: 0.006 s
Sys. time: 0.011 s
CPU share: 110.67 %
Exit code: 0

⋄ Compose←{(⍵⍵ ⍺)⍺⍺(⍵⍵ ⍵)} ⋄ f←+Compose(×⍨) ⋄ 2 f 3

@Adám

Rebuilding user command cache... done

Real time: 0.899 s
User time: 0.858 s
Sys. time: 0.034 s
CPU share: 99.22 %
Exit code: 0

Oops.

← 5 messages moved from The APL Orchard

@Math1000 The point is that stumbling on those questions is not effective enough under the view of some people (me included), and so this room proposes (among other things) more effective measures to bring those questions to attention. Simply put, John Ma communicated, in 2 lines of text, 7 questions which he found problematic.

And in case it is not clear, John Ma did nothing more than function as a human review queue. Review queues also do exactly the same job of bringing low-quality posts to the attention of users.

Then it seems the review queue system could be improved or expanded in some way to handle this. That would be a more systematic and transparent approach than manually identifying problem posts in chat. Especially considering I only now became aware of this practice by chance after years of actively identifying these posts and voting to close them. Isn't that a bit ironic?

@Math1000 Your suggestion may sound good, but it will never work. The really problematic posts are those for which the general user base will judge incorrectly. Only the experts in the field will know what those posts truly are.

@MikePierce A "witch hunt" is more of a campaign or strategy against a particular person/group with undesirable beliefs or behaviours. The focus here is on the quality of the site; if there are abusive users that continually post bad questions despite them being closed (and being told why they were closed) then they can be dealt with separately.

@Math1000 You would do well to stop using terms that are associated with murder. See this article. Say what you want to say plainly instead of using loaded terms.

@user21820 So how do we qualify "experts in the field"? By reputation?

@Math1000 That's one indicator but there are some users with high reputation earned from answering poor questions. However, if you are at all familiar with a mathematical field, you can quite easily tell who are the experts.

I wasn't using the term, I was explaining why it was inappropriate.

@Math1000 Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, so never mind.

What do you mean by "expert in the field," exactly? I don't believe the standard for identifying low-quality questions is particularly high. It certainly doesn't require a PhD.

Got to go. Bye.

I didn't mention names, just a particularly toxic remark within this "human review queue." I would like to help, but again, the focus is on improving the site as opposed to calling out particular users, right? Except in the case of abuse, which of course be dealt with in other ways.

I don't know what to make of cryptic remarks about "what's really going on."

@Math1000 I consider users who characterize other users on this site as "witch-hunters" to be abusive users on this site. You can't lambast some users for being "abusive", and then reserve the right to be abusive in return. This conversation needs to end now. You have a venue on the nearly week old meta question in which to vent, short of using abusive language. Don't perpetuate meta conflicts within chat rooms, as there is rarely anything "abusive" happening here. But then you came along

today to try and stir up trouble by using abusive language towards users of the room, indiscriminately. That will not be tolerated.

Unless you are prepared to read 10 months worth of transcripts from this room, day in and day out, you are not in a position to judge the work of this chatroom based on an off-the-cuff meta post espousing the thoughts of one user.

Mistakes were made, surely, but they are far and few between, and no worse than your mistake today in calling users here "witch-hunters". Most of us are working hard to refrain from engaging in "not nice" language; are you willing to do the same?

I don't recall characterizing anyone as a "witch-hunter." I don't know why people seem to be putting words in my mouth.

"You should just not jump in when you don't really know what's going on."

"Unless you are prepared to read 10 months worth of transcripts from this room, day in and day out, you are not in a position to judge the work of this chatroom ..."

This is giving me a weird gatekeeping vibe.

@Math1000 No one here is engaged in any sort of witch-hunt. That is an abusive characterization of the activity of this chat room. Please don't "play dumb". As I said, this conversation is over with. You're free to participate here constructively. You are free, as is any and every user on MSE, to post constructive suggestions: "consider this for closing".... "Please consider reopening...", etc.

@Math1000 It is implied from your comment here and this next one.

I think this conversation is going nowhere and I am going to remove the whole thread. Anyone is free to continue in the chat-room to which I'm moving it.

Please do not continue here. Thank you very much.

← 55 messages moved from CRUDE

It's only natural when someone gets banned for a year and the best response some people have is "im sure there was a good reason, drop it or I'll kick you"

← 1 message moved from The h Bar

Very last thing: authoritarians become moderators, it's a natural inclination, they need their authoritarian impulses challenged, especially when they indulge those authoritarian impulses over something as pathetic as a physics chat

@bolbteppa it's always the rogue moderators that do things like this, they don't have a home where they belong so they just wander the chat rooms banning people for absurd amounts of time without context.

← 2 messages moved from The h Bar