@ethan you can add me to the list

Added @DanStowell

I think we could ask to launch the election process now as there will be a notification for everybody when the nomination stage is announced (1 week or 10 days before people can start nominating themselves), then again 1 week for the nomination stage duration, so this leave plenty of time for other people to think about it and nominate themselves I believe.

@selene it is. Most sites run an „interest check” post on meta before launching the real election. This helps gauge interest, especially as the main risk for SE sites lack of moderation. Feel free to copy-paste as needed.

@Noil if that is the case, then yes starting it now might be a great way to "flag" everyone that hey - we will need moderators, then we can maybe post about who wants to be one since they will get that alert?

I think part of our sort of "slow step" right now is that most of the folks who have been active from the beginning who know what moderating is and why we need it, can't nominate. But getting the word out to newer folks who maybe only joined after the public beta launched might not be as aware about that?

@Selene, I agree that an additional post in meta right now may be useful to some, it cannot hurt anyway!

I personally think that ideally @selene and @Shannon would be allowed to run. It's unfortunate that an "external" force is putting restrictions on who can and can't run for the election.

For what it's worth...I am guilty of what I was suspended for; my intentions were pure and it was just over enthusiasm and feeling a lot of pressure and uncertainty with the Area51 process and how it deals with sites like ours (that have this great community outside the normal SO/SE realm) but for that reason I understand why I cannot run. How it all went down was very frustrating, but at this point I'm just trying to look forward and be positive and see this through!!

That is kind of you @NikeDattani and I have appreciated your support and input as someone else who has gone through the Area51 process! I plan to stay involved and help out in whatever other ways I can so I'm ok with not being able to nominate myself at this point.

I totally understand the pressure and uncertainty in the A51 process. I think it's also important to note that the people who implemented those suspensions, do not really understand the A51 process the way that people who have been through it do.

yeah it definitely needs some improvement. Did you see @Shannon suggestion over on the main meta?

It's easy to say that referring 100+ people is difficult, especially when there's so many bugs in the A51 system, but anyone who hasn't actually done it, will not quite understand why it's so difficult, and how difficult it really is.

yes...we were on zoom calls with other researchers around the world literally helping people fix their registration

So when I saw how many people you and Shannon referred, I really felt bad that they wouldn't let you run for moderator. It's like not letting parents raise their own baby!

@selene That's so frustrating.

haha yes a bit, but also, I want to see my baby leave the nest and flourish on its own

You mean this one?

Yes! that one. We are hopeful the advice and feedback there will be taken to heart

I do hope they listen! In my experience, they usually don't. I'm not sure if you saw my post on this thread which got deleted by a community manager?

Yeah I did see it, actually before it was deleted

It contained a screenshot of Meta.SE's highest-rep user (a former Community Manager / paid staff of SE) saying that those hundreds of suspensions shouldn't have happened without a warning. They deleted the screenshot (so even though I can still see my own deleted post, I can't even see the screenshot!). Luckily I saved everything before that. My first sentence of the post was a recommendation to save it in case the post gets deleted!

I also said "if my rep turns into 1 after this, you know what happened" :)

Oh I did not see that screenshot. Yes the lack of warning was what really upset a lot of folks in our community. I did see your comment about saying it might be deleted and then saw that you went down to 1 so was impressed with your foresight on what might happen

I've been around for a long time and have seen almost everything :)

@NikeDattani I saw your post once it was deleted from the history (but not the screen capture indeed); as i found it interesting, i flagged it and asked why "marked as spam or rude or abusive", and then they added the reason in comment that you probably can't see:

It's unfortunate that you didn't see that screenshot! I'm not going to post it again since SE went all the way to imgur (the image hosting site) to get it not only deleted off of SE, but also removed from imgur. However if you search on Google or Meta.SE: "If it actually is a very enthusiastic friend, they should know better than to continue this behavior after being warned about it" you'll see what I mean.

"This post was removed because creating a specific public list of users who one believes to have conducted themselves poorly, especially by de-anonymizing votes, is a violation of the Code of Conduct and constitutes harassment of other users of the site." Maybe you could repost it without the usernames of moderators if it still makes sense without?

The same post gives guidelines for moderators to send a warning for the first occurrence, and a suspension for subsequent occurrences. I was pointing out in that post that these guidelines weren't followed. They wiped it out quite quickly though!

@Noil I don't think it would be "safe" for me to re-post it without that list of users. I think I'd get suspended for that. They ignored my response to their private message and made it clear that they don't want to "work things out". I actually didn't de-anonymize any votes, and as the first paragraph of my post said: I was only presenting publicly visible information.

However it's interesting that they'd say it's "harassment" to publicly call out users who one believes to have broken the rules, because that's precisely what they did do to "hundreds of users" when they publicly lowered their rep to 1.

I was able to see the "list" of suspended users by sorting through the users by rep (lots of familiar people with a rep of 1, despite having tonnes of badges!).

(finally, it seems that the number of suspended users were 70 (and 20 warnings) according to a staff bioacoustics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/148/73)

@NikeDattani Was the list you posted really publicly available or jut for users with some high priviledges?

@Noil Totally publicly available.

Hi @Mithical !

"Was the list you posted really publicly available or jut for users with some high priviledges?" --> On Bioacoustics I have about 250 rep, which isn't enough to see non-public information. Everything I saw and posted could have been seen by 0-rep users. It's public information.

@selene That's a positive approach, I appreciate that.

@NikeDattani Hi.

@Mithical How are you?

@NikeDattani Wow even they are against the suspensions. I wasn't around when he was still a CM but from browsing meta I can tell the influence he had and that the community loved having him as CM. And can I ask more specifically what the screenshot what? Since I cant view deleted posts and I don't remember seeing it before it got deleated

@Ethan I worry that the CMs won't like it if I explain in more detail than I already have, about the contents of the deleted screenshot. They deleted it, which probably means that they don't want people knowing about it. They didn't just delete it off of SE, they went all the way to the image hosting site (imgur) and got them to wipe it out completely. I'm still shocked that they would delete a screenshot of a Meta post by a former CM who even now has the highest rep on all of Meta.SE.

@Mithical I wonder how Codidact is going nowadays?

@NikeDattani Wow they went that far. They really don't want that being seen. I should check archives of the question

It's going alright. I'd note, though, that your reference to this former CM (i.e. Shog) is rather misleading; he has not commented on this particular case to the best of my knowledge.

It wasn't intentionally misleading. In fact the same comment gives instructions for how to find the original post, which was from 12 years ago, and you'll see that it was giving general guidance about giving a warning to first-time offenders and suspensions for "subsequent occurrences", rather than talking about this specific site. I think you have to try especially hard to find it misleading.

I wasn't referring to your meta post, that's been deleted. I was referring to your messages here in chat.

Specifically, this message:

Said user wrote that post a decade before this incident. Saying that he was "....saying that those hundreds of suspensions shouldn't have happened without a warning..." is misleading at best, since those comments were not about this scenario.

Misleading "at best"?

Hi @XanderHenderson

It's the first time we're seeing each other in a room that's not associated with Math.SE!

@NikeDattani Good morning.

@Noil , @selene , @Ethan we have a bunch of mods from other sites showing up. If you want to save screenshots of anything, now's the time!

@XanderHenderson Is it morning for you? Hawaii?!

It is always morning somewhere.

I think Hawaii and other Pacific islands are the only places where it's morning right now :)

It is morning on 50% of the globe, plus or minus timezones.

That 50% is almost all in the Pacific Ocean. It's 4:26am in Japan, which is "technically" morning, but I don't think that's where you are is it?!

@NikeDattani ...that's... not a very productive statement, and only serves to foster ill will against moderation.

Moderators are users as well. Implying that mods are only joining the chat to delete stuff is rather disingenuous.

I didn't think that anyone joined only to delete stuff! However, it's a realistic possibility that it will happen.

Okay. I'd strongly recommend against making statements like that one, though, for future reference.

I started off by saying "how are you?" and "how's Codidact?". You ignored the first question, and after the second question you quickly changed the topic to antagonizing me, so I had my guard up. I'm now making it clear that I did not mean to imply that mods joined "only" to delete stuff. Are we good? I hope so! I have to go (been here far longer than I intended!).