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Anyone who visits CrossValidated for more than 10 minutes will notice your ubiquitous great contributions to this site, and anyone who visits longer will recognize your enormously valuable insight and skill as a statistician.
When high-profile moderators like yourself across the SE network make this decision it might finally get the message through to those ...
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Sorry to hear. I have never trusted Stack Exchange to be a long-lasting source of information due to their for-profit objectives and sometimes very hostile moderation policy. I encourage everyone to regularly export their data in case one day the ship sinks for good: Is it safe to use Cross Validated as a note keeping software?
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Gung, thank you for your service as moderator, and I wish you the best success with whatever you choose to do with the time you would have spent moderating CV.
I'm glad you have decided to stay and contribute, because your answers have been useful to me in my work.
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The thing that SO, Inc. cares most about is that it has something of a unique online community: people who generally behave themselves.
Moderators play a key role in maintaining that. Stepping down or threatening to step down isn't a good solution, because
good moderators can be replaced with worse ones;
purging SO of rebellious elements seems like ...
18
I'll frame this more widely in these terms: people here may readily disagree with (a) someone else's upvote or (b) the OP's acceptance of an answer.
Clearing (b) out of the way: An OP's acceptance of an answer is their exercise of their privilege. In principle, they are free to accept an answer they find helpful and need pay absolutely no attention to the ...
17
An historical record of all elections to date is maintained at https://stats.stackexchange.com/election. There you can find summaries and links to the original election pages (which provide details right down to the voting records).
The Sheriff Badge is awarded to anyone who has served as an elected moderator for at least a year. By linking to the list of ...
16
Do you have a vision for the future of the site that is different from how it is now? In other words, do you hope to move the site in a new direction in any respect? If so, what, and how would that be an improvement?
answered Mar 16 '15 at 20:16
gung - Reinstate Monica
131k5 gold badges76 silver badges130 bronze badges
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The multiple objectives of any SE site create an inherent tension, forcing us to make decisions that trade off between
Being accommodating to people (especially new visitors) who just want a question answered (quickly),
Creating high-quality, canonical answers to clear objective questions,
Establishing a well-functioning set of semantic links to make it ...
16
What other sites on SE system are you active on, if any? Compared to these sites, how would you characterize the atmosphere and style on CV, if it is any different? How are you going to handle questions and topics that are borderline between CV and these complementary areas of expertise?
15
https://stackoverflow.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy
Identity Theft and Privacy. Users that misleadingly appropriate the
identity of another person are not permitted. Users may not post other
people's personally identifying or confidential information, including
but not limited to credit card numbers, Social Security Numbers, and
driver's and other license ...
14
The preferred solution is to flag the moderators, who have additional tools for limiting edits and, if necessary, limiting the abilities of individual users to interact on this site.
Mods can also create chat rooms and invite anybody--whether or not they have ever posted anything--to a private conversation. Occasionally this has helped reconcile ...
14
Added in Edit: Now that two of us are accused of abusing our position as moderators, I'm not sure I can contribute anything further.
You have said of each of us that you think we're abusing our positions; you have the right to email the people that oversee us (yes, even us completely unpaid volunteers). See this meta post which explains how to do that.
In ...
14
As well as, or instead of, taking any of the actions @NickCox has discussed, we can flag or vote to close the common questions as duplicates (preferably soon after they're asked), thus ensuring they're linked to a good answer.
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In your opinion, is there a serious threat/challenge that Cross Validated currently faces? If yes what is it? Do you believe that as a moderator you could contribute more towards dealing with it, and if yes, how?
13
I like the idea of splitting. I don't know the exact history here, but it shouldn't determine the best set of reasons to use henceforth. The EITHER/OR structure of that reason has long seemed awkward to me: now it appears that it was a way to get round the limit on number of reasons allowed. What is important here, simply but fundamentally, is that reasons ...
12
Nali, I do owe you an apology. The proper way to proceed when I encountered a flag on your first post was to (1) recognize that you are a relative newcomer and welcome you to our site and (2) add a comment explaining why your post had to be deleted. I could plead extenuating circumstances, but that would just be an excuse. I am sorry about the ...
12
Your efforts to try to improve the site are appreciated!
As I understand it, if enough reviews / suggested edits are rejected you'll automatically generate a (temporary) ban without any intervention by a moderator.
This should lift in a few days.
[If it's still there on Monday, please notify a moderator; we should be able to reverse it.]
12
Solution: exact copy elsewhere
It is possible to have a virtually identical format, widely and productively used, under control of a non-SE entity that is invested in high-quality treatment of the subject area. I'm thinking of this site's bioinformatics equivalent, BioStars.
https://www.biostars.org/info/about/
https://physicsoverflow.org/
Recent efforts ...
12
It is difficult to read what your question is about. Your introduction is:
I really like the truncated normal but I want to make it discrete. I need a discrete distribution and I hate approximations (the best fit for my data is truncated normal but my data are discrete [0,25]) I am fixated on the kernel and the nice relations and ratios of the different ...
11
The deleted answer has been restored.
I am guessing that the deletion of that post was a well-meaning response to a (well-upvoted) comment by a community member claiming that it did not answer the question. Subsequent edits to the answer appear to have addressed that comment, but evidently they were overlooked by another community member who flagged the ...
11
I appreciate your interest in helping curate this site and hope you will continue to do so.
Since I declined the second flag, I can explain. It was a simple mistake. The system does not clearly present a flagged comment to the reviewer: it shows the whole sequence of comments and attempts to bring the flagged one to the top of the screen. Due to ongoing re-...
11
Accepted means accepted by the original poster (OP) of the question: that's an SE-wide definition easy to understand.
The main consequence of good answers not being accepted is some lost reputation for those who posted those answers.
Not what you are talking about, but I will add that the main consequence of the best answers not being accepted, but some ...
11
If I recall correctly, in the last two elections some nominations came in the last couple of days of the nomination period; that may be the case again.
At most two moderators will be elected this election -- we only requested two slots even though I said on chat the other day that I felt we could use three (for reasons that may be becoming clear now).
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I routinely review every active question.
Old questions become active whenever they're touched by somebody. The "Community" bot often touches old questions that might have some value (because they were upvoted or answered).
I can no longer do this as thoroughly as I used to because there are about 200 new active questions every day. That's why we have ...
11
The moderator gave you the opportunity to clarify your question, so that it would be more likely to be understood by the community. This serves two purposes. First, it helps you personally, because it makes it more likely that you'll receive a useful answer. Second, it serves the community at large, because questions and answers should be useful to a wider ...
11
"See so-and-so's comment" doesn't meet the standard for an answer on our site. Answers should be complete in themselves; for example, if BruceET was to delete his comment, your answer would be useless.
It is usually seen as acceptable to
invite the author of the comment to post as an answer, if you feel it is a complete answer to the question, or
to ...
10
From the help page on comments:
When shouldn't I comment?
Comments are not recommended for any of the following: ...
Compliments which do not add new information ("+1, great answer!"); instead, up-vote it and pay it forward; ...
Your comment did not say "he was correct." The record shows it said (in full)
@LazyCat right.
That is ...
10
In the end it does not matter how many people ran for these positions: two extremely well qualified and respected people won. I am glad to welcome them to the moderator pool. I trust that in future elections we will be equally well served by community volunteers coming forward in this manner.
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(To make sure this gets an answer)
As whuber mentions, there's an automatic mechanism to detect large numbers of edits and flag the moderators (the community bot is a source of a variety of flags of unusual/noteworthy behavior ... including this issue).
We can then take a look and see if the behaviour is a problem or not. For example, someone may tend to ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible