Uh, so I’m kinda concerned about a user’s mental state. I raised a custom flag on an answer but am hoping a mod will see this.
By mental state I mean I’m afraid the user is just not in a good place and is reacting badly to moderation. I dunno how a personal issue like that might enter in, but the user is...erratic.
@Bart there were a stories about a guy who used his real name as a nick on SO. Stories told that he had a mighty power , a power to mow down cities and countries. The power of an hammer!
@DavidA A certain method seems to be offered on SuperUser.SE, where you'd not risk any loss of data. There are related questions in the right side column.
@M.A.R. speaking of the wolf in sheep clothing. I had just been refunded some rep points because user deleted (or been forced to delete) their account. I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand, some users react badly on modship and on other hand some privileged users did abuse their power.
I hope this will just trim the fat and leave the meat solid, but one can argue (since it is private) that both good and bad users could leave this site.
Sure deletion is an part of an process of community maturing and focusing on some goal, but my idealistic bottom can not but fear of misuse (as there was an misuse of privilege in SO users ). I just think that driving people away don't help the community.
@Danilo Really? User deletion can be done by the user itself and in that process you lose the votes that were casted by them on your posts. Hardly call that a sign of abuse.
I don't think it is a sign of abuse. Perhaps I wasn't clear, I fear that in the future the deletion can be used in abusive manner.
For example , privileges were meant (as I understand it) as an incentive. But suddenly you (general you) had many users who abused that privilege in personal manner.
Deletion is an powerful tool, you can use it to show discontent, to punish abusers with no sense of overall improvement, and to forcefully do a clean up like Stalin.
Danilo, a good general practice in English is to avoid comparing anything to Hitler, Stalin, or generally bringing them up unless you’re discussing history. =)
On the other hand, @Danilo, I lost 100 or so rep today because a user was deleted. Sometimes you gain, sometimes you lose. It's not realistic to enumerate all the votes a user has cast and figure who'll gain and who'll lose, and use that as a tool for abuse.
@JonHarper I understand that those two dudes are an taboo subject. But on historical aspect there wasn't such clear oppression of opinions and on that scale (that is comparable to internet society) till those two dudes.
@ArtOfCode ArtOfCode, Sure in hypothetical example of such massive abuse, immediate hits mean much less if someone thins the ranks. Long term benefits are larger than short term losses.
@Danilo I see your point, but the cultural norm in most of the Commonwealth nations and USA is to avoid those two examples, lest one be accused of overreacting.
@JonHarper differences in Balkan languages are mostly like Welsh , Scottish and Irish to common London English. Honestly most of tourists are hindered by Cyrillic most of all than pronunciation. But it can be harsh, hard consonants, lots of vowels and people don't open their mouth when they speak.
And not to mention all religious oppression that happened in the 90s.
Ok, well there are a lot of tourists who took a challenge trying to speak Serbian. So short google search should do the trick. And I will try to be more ... well mannered in future.
I understand @user58, even as a joke it seems I went to far. I am not accustomed yet to be careful on everyone feeling when joking. I didn't link the url again since I don't want to bother anyone who isn't interested in that kind of thing.
regarding this meta.stackexchange.com/questions/337412/… do you think it would be useful to show users who have closed questions as dupes statistics about how many / which were reopened, as were found out to be not dupes?
@user1306322 somewhere out there, there's a question that's a potential duplicate that hasn't been closed yet. This greatly upsets some people.
Personally, I find questions with edits and answers many years after being asked to be really annoying to parse because you have to pay close attention to every timestamp.
@DavidA Sure. Some people will select dupe targets that aren't a great match for the new question. Or the target is way too technical or complicated for the new OP's use case or skill level. Closing dupes is important, but it's worse than useless if it's not done with care & consideration.