28
I don't want to write a eulogy for a friend I hope to still see around the traps, but I do want to thank you for:
setting the stage here for a successful community,
training me up as a moderator,
for giving me so many opportunities to think "Wait a moment. I disagree with Sklivvz. History has shown the odds of me being right in such a situation is remote. ...
20
Wow! I thought your stance on keeping your diamond was more involving cold dead hands, than willing surrender. Your history here is apparent; your name is everywhere. If we were a city there would be a Sklivvz Ave.
A vigilant mod, fair, always acting in good faith, a foundational voice, you've served Skeptics since the beginning. Though we've personally ...
17
Further to @Sklivvz's response:
Please do flag the post as rude or abusive or spam (as appropriate).
Six votes from the community will nuke the question (delete and lock) and ban the IP automatically.
It would be an interesting exercise to look at the data, but I estimate troll and spam posts that manage to get through the automated filtering have a half-...
16
I too see a problem here, but want to add a vital point that you have forgotten. The five of us who voted to reopen it after it was mod hammered closed can now not vote to reopen again, ever. That's status by design.
Meanwhile the mod who closed has infinite close votes. It's a convenient solution for the mod to get it closed eventually and keep it closed....
15
The network-wide suspension was not performed by the moderators of this site. We do not have the power to inflict network-wide suspensions. It was performed by Community Managers working for Stack Overflow, the company. (No, not @Sklivvz, but I don't know who or how many were involved.)
Generally, site suspensions of more than about a week are discussed ...
15
We are aware of the situation. I can not, for reasons you can imagine, discuss what steps we are taking about this person. Rest assured that we hear you and we listened to you.
Thanks for reporting.
10
This is a feature-request. It is worth understanding the status quo.
First, we should understand that genuine, good faith, questions about the Holocaust are not taboo here. We have many examples, including at least one that goes directly to the claims of holocaust deniers:
Has the Holocaust been exaggerated?
That said, Skeptics.SE is not alone in the SE ...
9
I had a look through the edit history and I think the confusion stems from edit number 5 where rob made the text "view the documentary on YouTube" link to the YouTube video rather than having a raw URL after that text. Articuno also heavily edited the question by culling all the speculation so that it focuses strictly on just the notable claim.
Note that ...
9
There is no way of adding a tag to the “list of acceptable tags” as far as I’m aware.
The only way of doing so is adding the tag to an actual question. Oddthinking refused to add the tag to your other question because he – rightly – observed that the other question wasn’t about censorship at all: you had simply misunderstood the editing process.
But as ...
9
I think most of the ISIS questions are getting good-quality answers.
Did Snowden reveal that ISIS is a USA-Israel tactic? has received three answers. One with 20 upvotes and +75 for bounty (unawarded?), one with 5 upvotes and an acception, and one with 3 upvotes from a user with a history of so-so answers
Is ISIS beheading children in Mosul, Iraq? has one ...
8
Further to both Ladadadada's answer, and my private moderator message to you explaining how you could escalate your concerns:
I repeat that I did not edit your post, except to make the title grammatical.
I did post a comment, warning against continuing the edit war. When it continued, I took action to rollback the damage, lock the question and contact you.
...
7
I think this is a special case of what was once called "Too localized." That is to say, the evidence available in determining the answer changes rapidly. What appears to be the correct answer today may be proven wrong by information discovered tomorrow.
Would it therefore be appropriate to put a ban on current events questions? Of course, that would ...
6
Your link to the video has not been removed. It is still there.
What you are trying to do is to include your own reasoning into the question. If you think you already know the answer, then you can answer your own question, that is not prohibited. Otherwise what you call "background information" is in fact irrelevant to the question. The question is "is the ...
6
Your answer wasn't deleted for having downvotes. Your answer was deleted because it didn't answer the question. After edits, it still appeared that you were not going to answer the question. It received flags because it wasn't answering the question ("Not an answer").
The way to dealt with mod-deleted answers is to edit and flag for reinstatement. Not an ...
6
What else can I do?
Nothing. You did what was needed. It was investigated and no evidence of bad-faith has been found so far. If this changes, it will be dealt with.
In addition a comment was posted:
Due to past anti-semitic trolling, a close eye will be kept on this question. - Oddthinking
That should hopefully be enough to indicate that the question ...
5
We generally try to avoid loaded statements in questions. While questions don't have to be entirely sterile and neutral, they also should not be more inflammatory than necessary. One example is that we generally avoid calling something a scam in questions, we edit to focus on whether the specific claims are true. The part about "atheist conspiracy" in your ...
5
There are two parts to this question.
Why was the answer considered opinion?
Much of the original answer wasn't merely saying there was no evidence. It was sharing your take on the claim.
"I'm not sure why anyone would think", "Seems kind of silly", "conspiracy nonsense", "doesn't have to make sense" are all ...
4
Short of deleting the answer, mods do not have this power.
Acceptance of an answer doesn't mean it is factually correct - it means this is the answer that the questioner found most useful. The highest voted answer will (depending on settings) normally be found directly underneath the accepted answer.
This is the approach used across the StackExchange ...
4
I deleted that comment because it was a pseudo answer. I cleaned up a few other comments as well on the same question for other reasons.
Pseudo answers in comments are inherently problematic on our site because they can't be downvoted and they can't really be subject to our usual ways of enforcing references like answers can be. We generally delete pseudo ...
4
I'm starkly against giving any topic special treatment unless there's a good reason to do so. "It's a sensitive topic, denialism is offensive", etc. is special pleading, not a reason to do this.
Technical possibilities aside, I'd be in favor of this if targeting this topic (any topic, really) helped lower spam and trolling posts by a significant amount. We'...
3
When we mods make decisions that get some push-back (or even if we are concerned might get push-back), we contact each other and ask for an independent opinion/review.
Sklivvz did this for these questions, and we have been discussing them.
I did comment on your recent question about inventions - I agree with the closure. Unfortunately, I did so before ...
3
In this comment, Jaydels wrote,
This is what I've taken to calling an "allergic" reaction - where we ban something harmless or useful (like all current events) because they are similar or correlated with an actual threat (questions about which there is no verifiable truth. Some of the most interesting questions are current, and information is most useful ...
3
I was the moderator that removed all three answers. The whole issue was brought up by one moderator in our chat room, that moderator didn't declare which action they favor (deletion was one of the possible actions they brought up). I wrote that I would tend to remove all the answer because they're original research, and later another moderator recommended to ...
3
censorship would be a bad tag, that is the main reason why nobody has added it. The actual issue is moderation or maybe editing. Your meta post is about your disagreement with the way your post was edited and certain moderator actions like locking the post. Those are the kind of tags that would be useful.
Censorship is not a neutral term, you can of course ...
3
Who has the final say over the content of an answer?
All our content is community edited. In this sense no one has the final say. Changes can't be normally prevented, unless we lock the question, and we only do that in exceptional cases.
Handling repeated edits / avoiding edit wars
and
How to handle locked answers
You are free to flag for moderator ...
3
To answer this meta-question, we have to avoid considering whether the deleted answers are "correct", and look to see if they have a substantial argument.
Answer #1
This answer has four parts:
Claim that evolution is not scientific. (Note: Not merely that it is wrong, but it isn't scientific.) Provides no evidence. This section should be removed as ...
3
Moving all the comments to chat was the result of another flag, pointing out that there were a high number of comments on that answer. I believe I also cleared your flag on the answer at the same time.
The comments that I deleted were not discussing the answer, they essentially amounted to the OP telling you to do your own research and you (quite rightly) ...
3
I can mainly speak from personal experience, and what I witness of the other moderators of this site.
I spend perhaps 10-15 hrs per week moderating this site. That is split mostly between handling flags, reading meta posts and chat, cleaning up broken windows - and just reading some great thought inspiring questions and answers.
Can someone explain when ...
3
Welcome to Skeptics.SE. I'd recommend having a read of our Welcome to New Users.
In particular, this section:
Generally, a high-quality Skeptics question will:
Point to a statement that someone well-known has made (or a number of less well-known sources)
Quote from it (a direct quote, not just a paraphrase)
Express some doubt and ask if it is true.
This ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible