@alexolut or @Suvitruf Would one of you mind posting a Russian-translated version of this question on ru.meta.stackoverflow.com? I want an official answer from staff, because the current answer doesn't discuss the Physics site, and I want to know what the current plans are.
4 back and forth messages are quite a lot, especially if they do actually continue the discussion in chat (which means the discussion was probably more of a discussion and less clarifying things), although I guess mods might have better things to do.
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog I don't know... if they were closed... but that doesn't mean that a new one would be left open. We have lots of old SO meta questions from before the split that we don't close because.
Its a pain in the rear to go "Maybe you need more resources" when you mean "You guys might want to expand the CM team" when you're like "I'd love that job" ;)
I just folded the laundry, now I'm re-reading some faq posts I've written for IPS, and after that I'm afraid I'll have to do some work-related stuff :( But then it's gaming, reading and crochet for the rest of the weekend :D
The "new election system" MSE post seems making so much sense... given from monitoring election tag on per-site child meta, many argued "election should be done regularly" and "should mod for life?".... and~ the idea of mod went missing for a year.
@Somewhat Hmmm. It seems to making sense, but there still is something I feel will be a problem that I can't quite put my finger on.
I've already upvoted a lot of the answers there, I think one of them probably already puts that feeling into words but I haven't realised which one yet :P
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog Nicolas can answer in english in you question on MSE. He was responsible for migration of hashcode. And also he is a creator of it.
And well, lets say I got hired - I'd scale back modding SU, no matter how much I love the community, simply cause I'd like my replacement, and the other mods to grow as mods and not rely on me so much.
Speaking of closed sites, is there a reason why the team chooses to break all old links when a site gets closed? Why not just keep all the links alive, but keep the site "read-only" and put up clear notices that the site has been closed and is no longer accepting new contributions? (That's what's done for closed Wikimedia projects.)
It's possible to put sites in read-only mode; it's often done during server maintenance.
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog I guess there might be problems with stuff that needed flagging but wasn't flagged because the site was already dead for a while
unless they did what they did with the old blogs, and converted everything into a set of static pages, I'd guess that any new change might break stuff and create extra work
The same could also be done for SO Documentation: keep all the links alive but put up clear notices saying that Documentation has been closed and is no longer accepting contributions
When a beta site is closed, the questions that can be migrated are given to other sites. But what about the questions that aren't relevant on other sites?
Let's say you have a question, that was fairly high voted, and has an accepted answer. That question may be useful to someone else in the fu...
There are some substantial unintended side-effects that would make this somewhat undesirable.
It doesn't make the Internet better
We have a very ambitious company goal: "Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions." Even the content worth saving has pretty much peak...
That seems canonical ;)
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog in a sense... its not really something that seems 'worth it' for SE.
@JourneymanGeek Yeah, you make a good point: archiving instead of closing sites makes it impossible to use the same URL for a reincarnation of the site
The old site would have to be moved to a different domain, e.g. "ai-old"
Not that the text of a raw URL is particularly useful (at least / especially not when it's on the same site), could almost just replace it with gibberish.
Rant! I just went shopping, and all the women's clothing in the big brand stores consists entirely of stuff you can litterally see through if you hold them up against the light. How am I supposed to stay warm in that this winter?!
I also figured out what's bothering me about the moderator elections post ;) I can't quite grasp which parts are 'these are problems with the current way of doing things that need to be solved because of XYZ' and 'here's my ideas on all the amazing stuff we could do'
I think the only problem I can find in the whole post is 'we have a backlog of inactive mods and not enough people to keep up with it'?
One of the reasons might be that the elected mod turned to be disappointing after wearing their mod hat... (but it's already addressed in "rolling back election is tiring")
@Somewhat So, it seems people are concerned with moderators wearing out... then maybe the question of 'does this site need an additional moderator' needs to be discussed more in the open, instead of waiting for someone to post 'why aren't we having elections'?
user194636
FWIW I think it's mostly about the shortage of CMs and the backlog of stuff to do. Keeping sites busy with constant election drama would cut down the amount of feature requests on main meta 😃
Sure. Either they don't like the current moderators (or a single mod) or they want the mods to be more forceful... which... not what we want in mods. We want mods taking their direction from network policy and site policy decided on by the users.
Or they have some sort of concept that the mods aren't following the policies they want to have upheld, so replacing the mods with new people is a way to shake up site policy...
I actually really do think we should have some sort of minimum activity level for mods... like you say in your post... but that activity shouldn't be the stuff users can see like posting questions/answers... it should be moderation activity - showing up, handling flags, being a part of moderation discussions with the other mods or on meta...
... but I also don't necessarily think that stepping down due to activity (or being asked to step down for activity reasons) should require a moderator to wait for an election to run again... I've never been an elected mod but I'd definitely feel more willing to step down voluntarily when I couldn't stick around if I knew that when things changed in the future I could come back.
If mods are absentee for 6 months, we reach out to them and check in to see if they want to stay on the roster. If we don't get a response or if they want to give up the position, they get their diamond removed.
... But that's part of the time consuming part that Robert's talking about.
Startups was beta... that's the entire point of this post... appointing new mods is time consuming and hard. And we don't generally remove a diamond until we have a replacement.
And the site shuttering is due to the fact we couldn't replace the mods...
The way Wikipedia's policy for inactive administrators is: 1 year of inactivity, procedural removal of tools, can request them back; 3 years of inactivity, must go through the selection process again; 5 years of not performing an admin action, admin bit removed (if not already) and must go through selection process again. That last part was only added very recently.
@Catija They did appoint a replacement for them, but their diamond wasn't removed.
@Catija I think once you've reached the stage of removing inactive mods, a site hopefully has been around long enough to be eligible for pro tempore elections...
@Tinkeringbell Being eligible and having anyone run are two different things. Cooking's last election barely had enough people running to even hold the election and that site has been around for years.
One other thing I've noticed is that many sites which falter a bit on questions per day, but all the other four statistics on the Area 51 page are excellent, don't graduate.
Yeah, people wanting to run are another problem I guess. But I doubt that's solved by Robert's proposal, as that seems to me to invite more elections... So more chances of people not running?
If you have a slot and no one runs... you've got a problem. If you have a slot and only one person - someone with 300 rep and no history on the site at all... that's arguably a bigger problem...
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog The policy is pretty clear that minimum QPD is the most important factor in our consideration.
@Tinkeringbell Yes. If anything, it exacerbates the problem and makes it more likely that a site would be shut down. If an existing mod doesn't show up during the election to nominate and only one or two people nominate, that puts the site at risk of being shut down entirely.
I broached the idea of supplemental moderators, or mods who don't have that much experience on the site or the subject matter but do know the SE model very well. They'd handle things like abuse, vote irregularities, sock puppets, etc. but would be expected to defer to "regular" mods when subject knowledge is needed.
They could serve as mentors to site regulars who don't very well know how to moderate a site but have participated on it contributing a lot of content.
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog You could say that without saying "when we met in person", you know... I feel like you bring that up way, way more often than necessary and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that it makes me uncomfortable.
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog Hmmm. I wouldn't want someone mentoring people on IPS about what makes not an answer there in the review queues if they're not already familiar with the site.
@Somewhat Yeah, so as long as elections without candidates are a problem, it may not be a great idea to talk about re-election (unless people aren't nominating because they really, really hate the current team and don't want to work with them)
Here, have some weird cops... pbs.twimg.com/media/DoRj2svXkAIe48T.jpg:large. Yes, I know that protecting your rump is the main idea of those outfits, but still the jeans and sneakers look a tad ridiculous ;)
Family of prisoners have many questions about prison programs, regulations, life hacks et cetera. This would be good as a deterrent to prison for people who haven't tried prison. This could be a place for prisoners can share their interpersonal skills not common in Interpersonal Skills SE. I unde...
Anyway...on an unrelated note, today was my first time I ever had my hair cut in Austin. So far, I've always been having it cut at home during visits or breaks.
It's been said already that due to the age of Area 51's code base, it will not be affected by the upcoming design changes. However, the Area 51 Discussions site runs on a more modern code base, the same one that powers the rest of the sites.
However, I noticed that in the tracking post, it's not...
@SonictheInclusiveWerehog When you ping me about stuff like that, it feels like you're saying 'You're not doing your job, start doing it". I don't like it. If I had an answer, I'd give you one. Please, don't ping me about stuff until it's been at least a week or it's something critical that needs immediate attention.