text:
Deferral of inaugural election, and next steps for the Bioacoustics community
SUMMARY: By request of the community, the Community Management team has evaluated and agreed to postpone the election scheduled to start Monday, August 29th. We are now waiting on the Bioacoustics community to signal readiness for an election. Note, however, that we can start an election no later than November 7th, so we’ll run one then if we don’t hear a ready signal.
Based on this community’s consensus on requesting that the election scheduled to start on August 29th be delayed, the Community Management team agrees that doing so would be appropriate, and in this community’s best interest. Thank you all for the active attention paid to the proposal, and for sharing your reasoning in answers there.
We sincerely appreciate the open and honest dialogue about the events that led to this situation, and how we can move past it in a way that best serves this community. It is clear that there is a real community effort to make this site your home, and to learn how to do so in a way that respects the norms of the Stack Exchange network — and the CM Team wants to work with you to make this vision a reality.
So what’s next? What’s the timeline?
As proposed by Slate in comments, we wanna put the ball in your court, given the situation’s unprecedented nature. As such, we will wait until this community explicitly indicates readiness to set a new data for the election.
That being said, we do have calendar constraints (we need to fit an election in the network’s election schedule, and ensure elections don’t heavily collide with major holidays and such), so the latest date for the election to start must be November 7th. By mid-October, if you haven’t requested that a date for the election be set, and there is no ongoing conversation about when that should take place, I’ll come by Meta to get that conversation going.
What about the users who’d nominated in the first election and were suspended? Can they nominate for the new election?
As has been pointed out in various places over the course of the past week, it is standard Stack Exchange policy that users who’ve been suspended are disallowed from nominating in moderator elections for the year following the suspension. For that reason, the users who’ve been suspended will not be able to nominate in the upcoming election.
We do have an appeal and review process for suspension, and these users are allowed to go through it by sending a message via the Contact Us form located at the bottom of every page. If they do so, a Community Manager in the Trust & Safety team, who was uninvolved in the original suspension process, will be assigned to review their suspension details. If an appeal is accepted, then they may become eligible to run in the election — but we should be clear up front that these suspensions already come with concurrence from independent reviewers internally. It’s also worth noting that, due to the high volume of suspension review requests, it may take longer than usual for us to respond to these requests.
Community leaders and moderators
Even if the folks suspended cannot run in the election to become a moderator, it is worth calling out that these folks can still take a central part in shaping the Bioacoustics Stack Exchange community.
Being a moderator means having access to a few more tools than other users, and being part of the team that handles flags that the larger community cannot handle on their own. For this reason, moderators in the Stack Exchange network have historically been referred to as “human exception handlers” — ideally, they do as little as possible, and push most of the moderation to the larger community, who moderate using up- and down-votes, and through actions such as closing questions.
Any user can grow to be an important part of a community, even if they don’t hold the formal position of a moderator. With that in mind, not being a moderator does not, in any way, preclude active members of the community from taking a central role in leading a community. These users can still drive important discussions in Meta, take active roles in policy establishment, and perform many curation activities depending on their privileges on site.
On week 1 of your private beta, I posted some guidance on what you could do to help this site succeed — much of that guidance is still useful for ensure you have a thriving community, so I’d recommend reading through some of it again if you haven’t already. Additionally, if you’re looking for a deeper dive into specific parts of the Stack Exchange system, you can look through the Help Center page as well as the community-curated FAQ on MSE, both of which cover a variety of topics you can explore to get better acquainted with what makes our system special. As mentioned, there are plenty of different ways to contribute to the success of the Bioacoustics community, and I’m sure everyone can find something they enjoy doing.
It is the CMs’ hope that, over the course of the coming month or so, this community is able to generate enough viable candidates to have a successful election that guarantees the continuity of this site. To that effect…
The Community Management team is here to help
I’ve been keeping an eye on this site for a couple of months now, and you may have seen me and other Community Managers around, but we haven’t really taken the time to introduce the Community Management Team, and explain why we’re here and how we can help your community.
So hi! ^_^
I’m JNat, and some of my primary responsibilities include overseeing moderator elections on the SE network, and keeping an eye on sites through their early stages (from overseeing Area 51 proposals, to providing guidance while a site is getting started and doesn’t have mods in place yet) — which is why you’ve been seeing a lot of Meta posts from me. You’ve also prolly seen other folks around, Slate being the most prominent one. She’s been keeping an eye on this community alongside me, and a fantastic help with getting and interpreting data, as well as driving some of the conversations we’ve been seeing on Meta lately.
We’re both part of the Community Engagement and Enablement team, a subteam of the Community Management team that is responsible for providing communities and moderation teams with the support they need. That means we’re here to help your community succeed!
While communities are getting started and don’t have a moderation team in place, it falls on the Community Management team to handle flags and other tasks that would normally fall on the moderation team. During this stage of site growth, we keep a closer eye on the flag queue, the review queues (since there may not be enough users with enough rep to perform reviews), and Meta discussions in general.
Given the proposed course of action for the Bioacoustics community, this means those tasks will need to be undertaken by staff for longer than is usual. It is also uncommon for staff to have to perform these tasks once a site has made it into public beta. For that reason, I feel it would be beneficial for us to keep an open dialogue surrounding moderation during the period of time in which y’all haven’t picked a moderation team yet. To that effect, in addition to keeping a close eye on Meta (which we’ve already been doing) and a more active role in moderation discussions there, members of the CM team will also be in your main chat room for more informal conversations from next week on. It’s my hope that this allows you to have more input into how CMs moderate the site while volunteer moderators haven’t been picked, especially given the fact that CMs are not subject matter experts in the topics of sites on the SE network (for the most part, anyway). At the same time, this can also be a good opportunity for CMs to pass on network-established best practices, as well as any relevant knowledge surrounding the Stack Exchange network’s mores.
Questions, thoughts, dreams, hopes, or fears? Drop ‘em in an answer below, and we’ll do our best to respond! ^_^

Do the CMs or other mods have any suggestions for how to connect with/encourage potential mods?

I mentioned here what are some of the traits CMs generally looked for when considering appointing users as mods. So if you know users on the site that check all/most of those boxes, just talking to them about their interest in the position is the best way to go — chat is a good solution. Since ideally mods are already involved in the community, doing any external outreach doesn't seem like the best solution here. And, obviously, ideally we also don't pester users about the position, nor try to peer pressure them into nominating.

We have enough people willing to nominate for an election to happen! If you want to nominate you still can if you want.

Amandine Gasc expressed interest in nominating here.
Taiki Sakai expressed interest in nominating here.
Carly Batist expressed interest in nominating here
Dan Stowell expressed interest in nominating here

If you are interested in nominating please add yourself to this list. And if you don't have the rep to edit please join the election chat room and tell us that you are planning on nominating so we can add you to the list.
The work is not done. We still need a date for the election. We are currently still thinking about October first but please share your opinion in the election chat linked above.

Has there been any update on when we want elections to happen?

@Ethan created an election specific chat room where we can discuss timing, who might be able/willing to nominate, and any other election specific stuff!

I would be happy to throw my name in for nominating, I'm just worried about time commitments as I'm trying to defend my PhD in the next year (hopefully)... but from other discussions/threads it seems like it won't be an exorbitant amount of work? If so, I'd love to :)
EDIT: sounds like it wouldn't be a crazy workload from what people have been posting in the chat, so happy to nominate myself!

Thanks and I think you would be great...but completely understand your time concern. Over on the chat are several moderators from other SE sites who are kindly sharing their knowledge and experience and they might be able to give you some feedback on what the realistic time commitment is

OP message. On Stack Apps, a very low traffic site, I have to search for things to moderate. Now my fellow mod is Glorfindel so he takes most of the flags so I usually end-up nuking spam profiles, editing wiki's, re-tagging and some occasional reviewing in the 30 minutes I spend per day for moderation duty. I doubt with a crew of 3 you would have to spend a full 30 minutes each day to keep things under control...

They shared some more data about moderating in the chat room. I would recommend joining and ask any more questions there

I was a moderator during my PhD, it was not an appreciable tax on my time. It's impossible to be PhD productive at a high level 24/7, so you'll take breaks either way, I'd rather be on SE than Facebook. I now mod on 4 sites, all small (though more activity than here). The amount of time I spend on moderator tasks in a week across all those sites is less time than I spend on one high quality answer. I spend far more time doing other types of curation that is accessible to everyone. Occasionally, a particular troll or network of cross-voting accounts will take a bit more time.


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Should we request to defer the election of Bioacoustics site moderators?
UPDATE: The Community Team has evaluated and agreed with this request. Read more on this post.

Due to the events of the past week that led to the cancelation of the first moderator election and suspension of multiple users, I would like to pose a question to our Bioacoustics Stack Exchange Community:
Should we request a DEFERRAL of the second attempt at a Moderator Election, scheduled to start August 29th, until a future date when our community is ready and can identify nominees that can help build a successful Bioacoustics Stack Exchange Site?
I ask that our Bioacoustics community (members of this site) show their interest in this deferral with a VOTE UP if you agree and VOTE DOWN if you disagree with this request, as well as answers explaining why you think this would be beneficial or detrimental to the community.

I'd also like to encourage folks to leave answers sharing your reasoning, and how you think the time would help. Voting is important, but reasoning things through in writing is always critical, too!

As a sidenote, this is just a best-practice I've found from years as a user and moderator, but... In general, when trying to establish community consensus, I'd suggest posting the question itself in the form of a question, and then using answers to recommend what should be done. (There can be multiple answers presenting different reasoning for the same course of action, of course.) I suggest this because voting on the question post can affect the visibility of the post on the meta site's front page.

@V2Blast Also because reputation gates voting up and down differently, and more people can vote up than can vote down.

Also true. Jon Ericson's answer to this MSE question about building consensus has some great recommendations on how to construct meta questions to establish a consensus. ...Anyway, I hope y'all find that helpful. :)

I do see one disadvantage with this: this increases the amount of time the Stack Exchange team has to moderate the site, as they have to moderate for the period between site creation and it getting its first moderators. I do have some alternative options which I'll propose in answers.

@gparyani - I know we're all appreciative of your desire to minimize the time that staff invests here (sincerely), and I will admit that this site has certainly been the focus of a disproportionate number of staff hours these last couple of weeks, but luckily, thats' not a metric we track.  If my team invests additional hours to get the site off to a positive course correction, I'm willing to swallow those hours as a necessary part of community building.  So yes, please, keep it in mind, but know that we're not sweating the hours.

Should the status complete tag be added to this since the election was delayed?

@Ethan- the status complete tag is typically used for feature requests, and indicates when theyre completed.  (There's a whole set of "status" tags for use with feature requests or bugs).

Some of us who got suspended for a year to candidate for the moderator election have just received a message saying:

suspensions do have an appeal and review process, and if an appeal is accepted then you may become eligible to run in the election. [...] however, that there is no guarantee that the outcome of the process will be [...] complete in time for the election scheduled to start on August 29th.

Defering the election would allow to make this appeal possible before the election.

Deferring the election will allow newer members that may be interested in nominating themselves time to earn the 300 reputation points required.

We are currently in the middle of prime fieldwork time and summer vacations for many of our northern hemisphere contributors, so a little extra time may be helpful to be inclusive. Given the recent confusion and unexpected changes to our election, I think we need a little more time to discuss moderator eligibility and recruit from among our ranks.

So will people who got suspended be allowed to nominate themselves as moderators (like the original moderator nominees)? I am not seeing a clear answer to that question. Would they have to win an appeal in order to run again? Many people in the community want them to be allowed to run. This is, in fact, what seems to be the biggest sticking point for many users I've spoken to in getting over all this drama - allowing the original moderator nominees to re-run.

There's an SE-wide rule that anyone who was suspended on any site on the network in the year preceding an election is not allowed to run in the election, unless the suspension was in error or was successfully appealed. So yes, they would have to successfully appeal the suspension in order to win.

Moderators have access to a lot of personal and private information of users (possibly very critical when a site is closely linked to a professional community). They're also responsible for guiding the community according to SE standards. If users have been suspended for breaching trust on other sites on the network by not understanding core tenets of SE (like voting for content rather than users), perhaps it should be seen whether others are able to step up. If the site is successful, it will certainly have additional election periods in the future as every site does.

In the meantime, most moderation should really be done by the community - close votes, edits, flags, helpful comments, meta participation, up and down votes. Most diamond moderator work is in handling the occasional edge cases and gray areas.

As I said in a comment:

I do see one disadvantage with this: this increases the amount of time the Stack Exchange team has to moderate the site, as they have to moderate for the period between site creation and it getting its first moderators. I do have some alternative options which I'll propose in answers.

Alternative choice 1:
Use the old method of nominating moderators through a meta nomination thread
Prior to 2017, moderators of beta sites were decided through a question on the site's meta where users could post moderator nominations as answers, and Stack Exchange staff would select moderators from those nominations. For various reasons, I still believe this is a better system than the current method of elections especially when it comes to choosing the site's very first moderators, such as that it allows the Community Team to vet the nominees. However, the two key advantages it would have specifically for this site are:
It allows users to nominate other users, in addition to just themselves.
In a recent post, a Stack Exchange staff member said the following:

There are many viable election candidates within this community who we hope will nominate themselves for the position.

Everything hinges on that one word: hope that those who are suitable moderators will nominate themselves. However, in many past site elections, I've seen that many users who would serve the site well as moderators (as seen by their activity on the site) don't nominate themselves, as they don't believe they would or don't think they're cut out for a moderator position even if they may be (tl;dr they underestimate themselves).
The old nomination process allowed (and encouraged) users to nominate other users, or in other words, publicly state that another user is a good fit for the position. I remember running the initial pro-tem moderator thread for the Software Recommendations site, and at least one user who went on to be selected for the position said they initially didn't feel like they were suitable but changed their mind after seeing that another user nominated them. (They later went on to do great things for the Stack Exchange network; the Charcoal group that fights spam across the network would likely not have continued to exist if they hadn't been nominated.)
If we have lots of users who would be viable election candidates not step up because they don't feel well cut-out for the position, that of course creates a problem for the site's future. Rather than hope they nominate themselves, this process will allow other users to nominate them.
(Of course, the user would have to accept the nomination in order for it to be considered. In the above mentioned Software Recommendations thread, there were many who declined nominations because of time constraints or other reasons. I'm not suggesting changing this.)
There is no reputation requirement for nominees.
It might be possible that many users who would serve the site well as moderators don't have the 300 reputation required to nominate in an election. The old process didn't have a reputation requirement, meaning that such users could still step up.
I remember that two of the three users who went on to become moderators in the Software Recommendations thread I ran didn't have 300 reputation at the time they nominated themselves or got nominated by another user. (One of them is the one I mentioned in the earlier section.)
This would also alleviate concerns that some users who wouldn't be good moderators would just earn the 300 reputation required to nominate without gaining any real experience on the site at all, and would win the election by default if not many others nominated. In the old process, users who clearly didn't have real experience on the site could be picked up by community members or be denied the appointment by Stack Exchange, but this isn't possible with today's pro-tem election system.

This choice would involve canceling the election scheduled for August 29, and instead immediately posting a nomination thread just like in the old days.

I greatly appreciate your ideas based on what is clearly a long history with SE!   But given the events of the past week, many in our community feel even more strongly that we should elect our moderators. The one benefit from this approach that would be helpful to capture are the characteristics that experienced moderators would hone in on to identify successful community moderators (hmmm… a new Meta Q?)

There are 2 main reasons why we moved away from appointing folks in the direction of hosting elections: one of them Shannon identified in the comment above, and has to do with putting it in the hands of the community to chose their moderation team; the other reason is that the old process was way more time consuming for the CM team. You point out that the election system relies on hoping folks nominate, but the old system still relies on folks accepting the position once we offer it to them — and many times, folks wouldn't, and we'd be back at square one, making it a much lengthier process.

It’s not unusual that the community nudges what they consider good candidates to self-nominate. That’s similar to directly nominating someone (old process), but without the issues JNat mentioned.

@JNat First, if few enough people nominate that the nominees win the election by default, then the mod team isn't within the community's hands. The old system wasn't completely out of the community's hands, though: the team would consider votes on the answers when deciding.

You also mention time taken by staff, but back when the old process was in effect there were way more beta launches at a time and yet the team was still willing to go through the longer process. Now that the rate of new betas has gone down by an order of magnitude, and there are more CMs than years ago to split the work, why is time taken by the CMs more of a concern? As well, having to investigate misconduct on the part of a moderator who isn't fit for the role also takes up time, and given that pro-tem elections often result in such mods that time could add up to the same as the old way.

Finally, you imply that almost every mod who wouldn't nominate themselves but gets nominated by another user would decline the position. I argue here that that's not the case, by pointing out that such users are likely to change their mind and clear out any misgivings once someone points out in public that they're suited for the role, they're likelier to accept.

Your comment also doesn't cover the second reason I point out here, the reputation requirement. Also, in addition to the two reasons I mention here which are specifically relevant to this site, I mention some more reasons in a chat conversation. One of those is the ability for the team to vet the candidates.

I understand the thought process surrounding the impostor syndrome bit, @gparyani. From personal experience, though, many times I'd reach out to users to assess their willingness to take on the role, I was met with absolute silence (especially if they were nominated by someone else). So I'm not talking about declining the position, but rather about the fact that a CM would compile a list of candidates, reach out to an initial batch of 3, wait a week for a response, and then if the response was negative or absent, go back to step one — that is a lot of time spent on this.

As I said in a comment:

I do see one disadvantage with this: this increases the amount of time the Stack Exchange team has to moderate the site, as they have to moderate for the period between site creation and it getting its first moderators. I do have some alternative options which I'll propose in answers.

Alternative choice 2:
Run the election as scheduled, but if there are fewer than three nominees, bring in experienced moderators from other sites
Part of what was stated in earlier posts was that if fewer than three moderators nominated in the election, the site would be shut down. The hope of this delay is to increase the chances this won't happen. However, even if this election delay happens as planned, there's still a possibility of that happening.
With this choice, the election would still happen on the originally planned date, but instead of shutting the site down if there aren't enough users who nominate, the team should instead invite experienced moderators from around the network as "supplemental" moderators to fill in the gap. Once some time has passed (preferably a year from the expiration of the mass suspensions so that users who nominated previously - and haven't run into any further trouble since - can nominate), a new election is then held to replace the "supplemental" moderators who would then be expected to resign from their positions.
The primary concern indicated as to why the site would be shut down if fewer than three users nominate is that there wouldn't be enough moderators to prevent the site from turning into a bunch of broken windows. However, having supplemental moderators alleviates this concern.
Of course, I feel like my first alternative option, of having an older-style nomination thread rather than an election, is best, but this option at least allows the site to continue existing and allows the team to continue its plans to hold the election on its original date so they don't have to spend more time moderating this site themselves.

Or, perhaps a ‘mentor’ moderator to help get moderators up to speed (if our moderators are much less experienced)

@Shannon, I've been thinking about mentorship programs for mods for some time.  While we're nowhere near ready to kick such a program off, it's on my radar screen, for sure. Until such time as we do launch a program like that, our temporary solution. is to make members of my team available to your site mods for advice.  We check in with all mod teams regularly and we could certainly increase frequency of that here, if we feel its needed, though I think that would depend on who nominates and is elected.

@Philippe I guess you could find a few potential volunteers for such a mentoring program within the more experienced mods as well. I’d certainly think about it, teaching new mods the ropes and paying forward the guidance I got when I started. And of course there’s always the TL for cross-site counseling.

@Stephie, yeah, my experience at SE so far indicates that there are more than a few mods who are extremely generous with their time and would be happy to help out new mods.  I don't think it needs to be a time-intensive process, but someone willing to throw in a few hours to help new mods could make all the difference.  I need to do a lot more thinking about how to make it work, but I am fond of the idea.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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Tags for water-borne/air-borne/solid-borne acoustics
I believe we should think about 3 (?) tags related to the type of acoustic substrate the question is about, it could help to retrieve and understand questions better. I'm not sure of the best keyboards to use, but we could agree on a set of keyboard to use maybe? Tags cannot have 2 words, except there is an hyphen in-between.
This could be air-born/solid-born/water-born, but they may not be the most widespread expressions in the community (?) so other possibilities could be:

airborne-sounds/vibration/underwater-sounds
airborne-acoustics/surface-acoustics/underwater-acoustics
etc

What do you think?

I think we can eliminate the 'acoustics' part of these tags, since this site will be all about acoustics, and I might suggest simplifying the term (air instead of airborne). If someone is doing vibration in air, they might use both tags.

Maybe air, water, solid? To keep them short and simple

Sounds good to me!

Alternative suggestion for solid: perhaps 'dense' mediums? This is how I often refer to mediums such as compacted earth, wood, etc.

maybe "substrate" instead of solid. It seems to be the term used in vibratory communication ("subtrate-borne vibratory communication")

Great discussion topic.
I’d vote for underwater-acoustics for the water related topics.
Would it be useful to have a separate marine and freshwater tag, or would we want to encourage all ‘water as the medium’ questions to be tagged ‘underwater’?
I also like ‘in-air’ for ‘gas as the medium’ questions but that is just personal preference for how I typically discuss the differences between underwater and in-air environments and so realize that might not be the same for all.
I am not at all familiar with the solid side of things so am curious to hear what folks think.

My vote is for 'underwater' or 'water' (not differentiating marine/fresh), since this is a gradient (where would the poor estuarine folks go?).

From the discussion, the conclusion could be (This is a Wiki, please edit):

air
water
substrate

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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When an answer becomes a community wiki, what do we need to do?
During the private beta, we discussed when/what types of questions should become community wikis (and still being discussed in another bioacoustics.meta thread).
Community wiki answers can be easily edited by anyone, and no one gets reputation points for the answers anymore.
The consensus seemed to be that "list" type questions looking for resources, etc., make sense as community wikis because they will likely need to be updated over time and there isn't necessarily one "right" answer. While these types of questions aren't the goal of SE, at this early point on our site it seems like we are getting a decent number of them, and I do think they are valuable to share (but happy to discuss!).
During private beta we opted to leave those questions as "normal" questions, but now that we are in public beta, it may make sense to start switch a few? My question here was prompted by @JNat making this question about conferences into a community wiki.
Additionally, this one already is from early in private beta: 'Foundational Literature' in Terrestrial Bioacoustics
So, my question is...
Should we go back and combine all the separate answers in the conferences question perhaps grouping by some of our keywords (ecoacoustics, underwater, etc., and more similar to what the linked example from @JNat on the Japanese language site) OR should we just leave it as is with several relatively short and not super organized answers?

For practical consequences of turning into Wiki, this (MSE) post is interesting: What are "Community Wiki" posts?

Should we go back and combine all the separate answers in the conferences question perhaps grouping by some of our keywords (ecoacoustics, underwater, etc., and more similar to what the linked example from @JNat on the Japanese language site) OR should we just leave it as is with several relatively short and not super organized answers?

The latter option you propose goes completely counter to the purpose of Community Wikis (CWs). As I explained here:

if you're gonna have an ever-growing list of answers, none of which is "more correct" than the other, AND the question is definitely on-topic, maybe it's a good candidate to CW.

and quoting Grace Note:

Community wiki is for that rare gem of a post that needs true community collaboration. That’s when community wiki shines.

So the whole point of having CWs is to have a community-maintained list of resources, instead of an ever-growing list of tiny answers. As such, y'all should be collaborating to curate that list, as opposed to leaving small and unorganized answers under those questions. Otherwise, you should maybe consider whether the question is even on-topic given the SE model, and whether it should be kept around. To quote What types of questions should I avoid asking?:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

Thank you @JNat, I agree and would vote FOR turning the example into a CW but wanted to see what others thought. I appreciate your clarity for what SE mods/staff would do in this case!

The Japanese language site example you gave is a good one, I like the table of content in the question post that redirect to answers which each of them corresponds to a sub-topic.
If we choose to do so, should we close all the existing answers to make new ones that correspond to subtopic? This sounds harsh, but probably good for long-term perspective?

That's exactly what I was wondering. That seems like a lot of editing (which we wouldn't want to do long term) but because of the timing of the question with private beta, etc., I was wondering the best way to proceed.

I think the limitation of the comparison w/ the Japanese Language SE is that our site will most likely have a wider variety of questions that might be considered 'wiki-worthy'.


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How to respond to a comment that should be posted as an answer
There is an ongoing debate on partial answers posted in comments here, and it would be helpful to the community to have example responses when a user posts an answer that should be a comment or a comment that should be an answer.
While we continue this debate on the gray area in between clear cases, it is also healthy to identify some agreed upon responses to these situations. Above all, it is critical that we build a welcoming and inclusive community. At the least, we want to adhere to the Stack Exchange Code Of Conduct "Be Nice! Policy" (see here), but I think we can be 'nicer'?
Helpful information to consider:
Meta Post on 'How do Comments Work'?
Biology Meta Post on 'Is there a general list of Help Comments'?
Biology Meta Post on 'What are some good, informative comments I can leave for new users?'
Meta post on 'A guide to moderating comments'
What are some suggested responses to situations where users post comments that should be rephrased as answers, or where they post answers that are more appropriate as comments? (keep within 600 character limit of comments!)

For a comment that should be an answer:
@OP, Your comment would make a useful answer for future users! Please reword as an answer (including citations/links). Comments may be deleted, and even partial answers are helpful! For more info see the FAQ: FAQ for Stack Exchange sites

I have used something along the lines of:
@OP would you mind adding your comment as an answer rather than just a comment? Comments can get buried and as an answer it will be easier for others to find.
I like explaining a bit why (but still keeping it short) but very much like the link and bolding in Shannon's answer!

For what it's worth, I do not think we can bold, link, or other text modifications in a comment. Will add in a slight modification in my response above to add more explanation.

Comments can get not only buried but also deleted. Comments are not meant to be permanent on Stack Exchange. Important information from a comment should go into an answer (new or existing) or question (when the comment improves the question).


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Replace the 'echo-location' tag with 'echolocation'?
The 'echo-location' tag is a typo. To my knowledge, there are no papers which use the word actually. The problem is SE forces you to use 'echo-location' instead. Could we replace the tag with the proper 'echolocation' tag before too many users get sucked into it?

As my first moderator action, I've renamed the echo-location tag to echolocation. It seems to have worked!
https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/echolocation

Did you "merge" the tag?

Yes, that's right

The issue that prevents creating the new tag echolocation is that it "is too similar to" the existing tag echo-location.
Diamond moderators (and staff with diamonds) have the ability to rename tags. While the site does not currently have an elected moderator, it will be an easy enough fix for them after some are elected.
In the meantime, there is no issue with continued usage of the tag as it can be quietly and easily fixed at any time in future (as long as someone reminds them of this).
The other option would be to remove the tag from the only question currently using it, wait for the system to delete the unused tag (at 3:00 UTC), then recreate the tag with the correct spelling.


text:
How will we know the 'progress'/'development' of this Beta SE?
Unlike the Area 51 proposal which had clear phases and progress bars etc. I don't see any kind of markers in the Beta site.
Are there pre-defined criteria in place? The Beta invitation email is pretty vague about what criteria go into promoting the Beta into a full-fledged site and how long the Beta phase lasts for (3-4 weeks vs a few months, both are mentioned in the email).
Knowing the criteria will help organise community efforts.

As this wasn't the main question I'll just put it as a comment, but I think it is also normal for the Beta stage to take a few years even.

Related: How can you help Bioacoustics make it from Private to Public Beta?

The "beta stage" you're referring to, @selene, that can take a few years, is the public beta stage, not the private beta stage — and this site is currently in the latter. The private beta stage takes up to ~4 weeks, after which the site either makes it into public beta, or it doesn't and any new attempts at it will need to go through the Area 51 process from the start again.

@JNat thanks for clarifying!

Some of the main stuff you should be focusing on at this stage of the site is listed on this Meta post I made last week.
Additionally, one of the main things y'all should be focusing on is simply asking and answering questions — as it stands, it doesn't look like you're poised for success, in terms of sheer high-quality question volume. There are some metrics the Community Team uses to assess whether a site will be successful or not, but those aren't put front-and-center like the rest of the Area 51 process (as you mentioned) because the main focus here should be to create good content, and not to reach a specific goalpost.
Obviously, that means that there's always a judgment call from the Community Team as to whether a site makes it to public beta or not, because we need to balance quantitative criteria such as high-quality question numbers and qualitative criteria such as whether there is a core community working on doing curation tasks (such as maintaining tag wikis, editing and closing posts, etc.) and having the discussions that are important for defining community standards for how these tasks should be undertaken. We do this because the alternative makes the process more easily rigged, because folks could simply aim to have X questions with Y answers and a score of Z, instead of focusing on the actual quality of the content, and establishing a core community in the site.

You can refer back to the area51 page for the proposal here: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/126698/bioacoustics and it gives a nice summary of how we are doing and what benchmarks are good, or what we would need to improve.
It isn't super easy to refind that page so I have it bookmarked, but you can access it by going to area51.stackexchange.com, using the search bar to search for "bioacoustics" and clicking the Bioacoustics page in the search results.


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should we be accepting answers sooner than later?
I'm seeing questions with >=2 answers on the SE. The answers seem to be detailed and target the question (a subjective call of course).
Considering we still need many 'well-reputed' members on the Beta, shouldn't we be doing a run on accepting answers (the accepted answer gets +15 points, and upvotes typically follow).

I'm wondering about this too. I've also asked questions to which there are often multiple good answers, and I'm not sure if I should just accept one over another one when multiple answers are good.

It's expected that it will take at least a year to reach the reputation goals for Beta -- the "90 day" timeframe was abandoned long ago.  Trying to push it faster will just cause problems.

Good to remember about accepting the answers!
I tend to wait for some times because seeing an accepted answer may discourage people to give other answers (??).

Considering we still need many 'well-reputed' members on the Beta

It doesnt seem we will get much difficulty to get  the 5 users with +3000pts and the 10 users with +2000ps, but it may be more difficult to get the 150users with +200pts, so seeing a good answer from a user that has less 200pts encourages me to accept it sooner. Also, it will encourage people who are less active on the site to get more involved.

I agree re: waiting a little. You can also change which answer you accept if you find a different one is a more appropriate fit.

The general custom on StackExchange is to wait at least 24 hours before accepting an answer in order to give people in different time zones a chance.

In general, it seems to me that a quick -ish decision on an accepted answer is good. We need more people with lots of points, and an accept is +15 points, and also generates a lot of attention (and its resulting upvotes).
The questioner can always change the best answer if  a better one comes up after all (I've done this a couple of times).


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One line answers
What does the community think of one-line answers with references to potentially relevant literature?
I understand all users are donating their precious time to the community with their activity on the site. Brevity can help maximise the number of questions answered. However, a brief answer (esp. with just a link to other sources) may cause an increased time-sink on the part of all other users who arrive to the question, esp. if the there is no 'elevator-pitch' accompanying the link.
For example, compare:

'This paper link may be useful. The authors solve this problem using Pythagoras' theorem for the 5 banana case which is close to your 4 banana case.'

vs

'This paper link may be useful.'

Essentially, right now, short answers may help the metrics - but in the long run?
This is probably a discussion that has been rehashed several times on various SE's - this one for reference.

I agree with @Jamie that there is likely some context-based variability in what is better, but I do think we should be pushing to have at least some bit of summary or why that paper is appropriate as an answer. Unless that question is my own question and I go digging into those papers, I'm not learning anything from those answers in the moment, although if it's something I may need in the future it's nice to sort of put it in my back pocket for later.
The other thing is...not everyone may have access to all the papers. By adding more context, that can help someone assess how much effort they may need to go into to get access to a particular study. I know I went through a whole process to get an old paper from the library and it ended up not being useful at all...
Maybe we can come up with some standard verbiage to comment (like other questions on Meta have discussed) to encourage the answerer to add a bit more info.

@OP, thanks for sharing the citation and link to the relevant paper. Could you expand a bit or summarize the study to clarify why
that citation is useful for this question?


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Bioacoustics Example Questions from Area51
I see that none of our questions from Area51 (https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/126698/bioacoustics?phase=definition&tab=votes#tab-top) are transferred to the Beta site. Should each author transfer their question manually?

You are right, they are not transferred automatically. This can be done only manually. Users are supposed to create quality questions from the proposals on Area 51.
Technically any user of Bioacoustics can transfer any of the proposals. Some users may not feel it is right if someone else uses their proposal. It is probably best to wait if some good proposals are left neglected.
The most important is to:

Create high quality questions.
Create welcoming atmosphere and not discourage fellow users.

I don't agree. Those questions aren't necessarily supoosed to go on the main site, and we have to be clear that users should not steal other people's questions.

@NikeDattani I did not write that they all should be transferred and I wrote "Technically any user ... can ..." --- You can try to put a recommendation here on meta that only the original author of the question should transfer it here. I do not feel it is right to make some strictly limiting recommendation. Certainly after certain time passes no one should be frowned upon for transferring a neglected question. --- The other answer by anonymous2 is certainly more detailed. I think that one should be accepted instead of mine :)

@NikeDattani I improved my answer.

The fact is that the questions no the definition portion of area51 are not full fleshed out questions. They are ideas of questions which could be asked on the site; essentially, the idea is to make sure that the subject of the proposed site is condusive to a wide enough range of topics that the site will run smoothly and produce lots of good content.
Once the site enters private beta, you can (if you want) take questions from there and ask them here.  Bear in mind that as I mentionned before they will need more fleshing out: what have you looked up so far? What are some details regarding your specific question?


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Credits for images from research papers in SE
Stack exchange publishes the question/answer posts with a credit common license.
In research conference slides, it is very common to use images from papers  provided we add a credit, even if the image cannot be shared officially because of the publisher policy. In papers, we don't hack the figures because it is the publisher's responsibility.
SE does not seem to run actively after any image credit violations.  There are some discussions on Meta about it (eg. here).
Do you think it would be tolerated to add images in our SE site from papers which are protected under a pay-wall (example in my post here) provided on citing the reference correctly? In research, authors are usually happy to see their figures be used if cited and I wonder if the publishers really care about it. In practice, could we just wait for potential complains or should we strictly not use them?

This discussion about posting figures to twitter might be interesting to those interested in this question...although its specific to your OWN figures:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/188239/am-i-allowed-to-post-screenshots-of-tables-figures-of-my-paper-on-twitter

As an author, I would not mind. From a copyright stand point, I think it should be ok because it is all for educational purposes and not for profit? But I am not a publisher :)

I agree with what you say as an author, Selene. One comment, though: Stack Exchange is not an educational institution nor a charity, it's a profit-making business. Thus, for example, it would probably be inappropriate to use images on SE if they are published under a Creative Commons "Non-commercial" licence ... even though the user who posted it is not making a profit! Most academic papers would not have this problem though.

That's really interesting distinction - thanks for pointing it out @DanStowell. So you are saying most academic papers would not have this problem - meaning they wouldn't have an issue with being posted on SE?

Yes, that's right


text:
Casually naming people
Those of us that are working regularly in this field, we know who's behind what. I've seen more than a few comments that are 'so-and-so' is the best person for this or maybe 'whats-their-face' will chim in or 'name-drop', is that you?
While I personally like how friendly our field can be, I wonder because we are trying to have a broad reach if this can be intimidating to fresh and new researchers.  If it comes off as 'clique-y'.
I don't really know what the best answer is. On some level, tagging the best person for the question is really how we get the best knowledge out there.  Thoughts?

You read my mind! I was catching myself doing that the other day and thought, maybe I should use their full name and current title and put a link to their ResearchGate or LinkedIn page.

Great question and I think could have a lot of discussion :)
I agree completely that it could seem clique-y or intimidating to just have constant name dropping. I think assuming the "asker" knows a person, or is comfortable reaching out to that person for more info, is bad practice in that it does not promote accessibility and equity.
I think the easiest approach to counter act this is to keep answers professional and accessible when talking about a person directly in an answer - point directly to a collection of manuscripts, a book chapter, a lab website, any "standing" resource that shows that persons expertise in the area of the question and actually provides the resources the asker needs (and any future person coming to ask the same question!). This will provide so much more back to the community than just a "hey check out so-and-so's papers". While that type of answer can definitely get someone on the right track, but I don't think that fits what constitutes a "good" answer by SE standards and IMO pointing to the correct resources provides the better content that @WMXZ mentions.
I see another potential issue and I think @WMXZ sort of addressed this in his answer - we don't want to assume that someone is ok with having their name or information shared on a public platform like this. I think what he outlined is great - ok to say their name if their username is obvious and they've made it clear who they were previously, but if your colleague isn't on here yet (First...why not!? :) then you would want to be sure to be careful about privacy, etc. I would guess that many academic/published researchers are likely ok with having their papers shared, but we just want to be cognizant of people's personal comfort levels.

I do also not know the answer, but
I would use the real name

If the real name is explicit known
If the post is signed by the real name
If the real name can be easily be deduced and I know the person (I guess this is really the core question in OP, right?)

I would not use the real name

if the real name is not recognized from user-name

IMHO, Content should be more important than formality or anonymity

Great response. I think you are right, especially if their real name is implied by their username.


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What is a tag wiki and how do I add/edit one?
I recently gained the ability to approve tag wiki posts, but I am not sure what these are or where to access them.

When you earned the privilege, the system should've pointed you to this help center page too, which has some useful context.

Relevant FAQ on MSE: What is a tag wiki? How do I write a good one?

A tag wiki is a short blurb describing/defining that particular tag, to guide users in deciding when that tag is appropriate to use on their question.
I found this blog helpful in explaining what and why tags exist.
If you have expertise in a particular tag area, and if you have sufficient reputation points (10 points) you can suggest edits to the tag wiki, and are encouraged to do so if you see a tag wiki is lacking the relevant information.
To do so, click on the "Tags" tab on the left, select a tag (such as "localization") and on the tag page, at the top, it will say the "usage guidance" and if it doesn't exist, click the "help us create it" link to provide a suggested definition.


text:
How is it that a user with a multi-year network-wide suspension was user #3?
We don't even have a page full of users yet:

I understand that Adam was the first user, which makes sense because he's the developer that made the site go live. Henry was the second user to join, which makes sense since Henry is always keen about new beta sites. However user #3 is on a multi-year network-wide ban. How could such a user be aware of the Private Beta? The email was sent out to users that committed to the Area51 proposal, but suspended users can't commit to proposals.

Anyone that follows the goings-on of SE would be able to see that it launched, I imagine. Merely navigating to the newly-created site while logged into an SE account allows you to join the private beta. It seems that Jeremy continues to be interested in newly created sites and was able to join. As soon as he did, the network wide suspension kicked in and applied a suspension on this site.

One has to know that the site went up in order to "merely navigate to the newly-created site". I wonder how someone that was not informed by email could know that the site went up within just minutes.

There's an Area 51 feed for new beta sites that some chatrooms subscribe to. If they also visit various chatrooms that have configured their room's feeds to output new beta sites to them, they may have seen the message that a new site had launched. The feed is pretty quick to report new sites having launched. They wouldn't be able to talk in those chatrooms due to the suspension, but they'd be able to read the messages in the rooms they're in.

Can you name one chatroom that uses that feed? Feeds also take about 15 minutes on average to land in a chatroom.

The announcement on Area 51 Discussions Congratulations to Bioacoustics on completing the Commitment phase! says:

During private beta, the site will not be visible from the rest of the network but may be accessed by visiting the Area 51 proposal or through a link shared by an existing user.

Maybe the user created a new account to join the Bioacoustics proposal and then used the private link to get to the private beta under his primary account.

This seems much more likely than the theory presented in the comments on the question.


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How can you help Bioacoustics make it from Private to Public Beta?
As y'all are aware, the Bioacoustics proposal made its way through the Area 51 definition and commitment phases, and is currently in the private beta phase (since last Tuesday, June 21st). So what's next for this community?
As Catija mentioned in the announcement on Area 51 a couple of weeks back (emphasis mine):

This private beta phase is a really important stepping stone and its success relies on the committers inviting other people from the bioacoustics community to create high quality questions and answers about this subject in order for it to progress from private beta to public beta.
During private beta, the site will not be visible from the rest of the network but may be accessed by visiting the Area 51 proposal or through a link shared by an existing user. If the proposal meets specific activity targets and contains high-quality content, it will go public and be visible from the network as a beta site.

The site that most recently made it out of private beta was the Substrate and Polkadot site, and while they were undergoing that phase, we identified that some parts of our UI don't make it clear to users participating in this phase what types of actions they can take to help this community succeed and make it into the public beta phase. We still haven't had the chance to thoroughly revise all the bits that need to be revised to properly set everyone's expectations, so I thought it'd be beneficial to give you some advice, just like I did for Substrate and Polkadot.
So, firstly, to have all the expectations properly set, I'll quote from what I wrote then, regarding sites making it from private to public beta (emphasis mine for this post):

(...) the email that is sent to users who've committed to the proposal on Area 51 once a site makes it into private beta is (...) very outdated. (...) It makes it seem like all sites that make it into private beta will surely make into public beta, with time being the only thing between one phase and the other — when, in fact, sites that don't perform well in private beta get shut down.

So what can you do to help the Bioacoustics site make it to public Beta?
(the following is copied over from the post linked to above, with edits to links where relevant)

Read through the help center: We have a comprehensive help center with articles explaining how most of our system works. We suggest you go through some of the articles there — especially if you're new to the Stack Exchange network.

Vote early, vote often: Voting is how good content gets recognized, wrong or incoherent content is signaled, and how a community of editors, closers, stewards, and moderators comes into existence in the SE network. Read more in this blog post and in this FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange, and be careful not to engage in voting fraud or sock-puppeting.

Discuss what your site is about on Meta: The Essential Questions of Every Beta is a community-curated revised version of an earlier blog post that lists a few of the most important things new communities should be discussing in Meta. You should be making use of your Meta site to discuss things like:

Are questions about [subject] on- or off-topic?
What should our documentation contain?
How should we tag questions about [subject]?
What's the site's 'elevator pitch'?
How do we promote our site?

Edit, close, or delete content: Sometimes questions or answers need a little tweak, either because they have typos or because they don't quite fit the site's scope without some edits; you should help out by editing those posts. Sometimes questions are beyond being salvageable, though, and you should instead be closing or deleting them.

Invite fellow experts to the site: There's an "invite fellow experts" box on the site's right sidebar – make use of it!

Start building guidance for tags: Tags are an important way to sort content in our sites, and having the proper guidance on how tags should be used is essential to ensure content is properly tagged. Read more here about tagging, and here about providing tag guidance.

We understand that the email may have caused some confusion, and that the situation is not ideal — ideally we would've already fixed the relevant outdated bits — but hope that with the guidance above y'all have all the information you need to help your site succeed.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or feedback, please leave 'em in an answer below!

Maybe you could post your second section  ("So what can you do to help the Bioacoustics site make it to public Beta?") on Area51.meta so that it benefits to all Beta sites: What are the criteria to go from private to public beta?

I'm planning on updating all the relevant documentation, so posting it in a question is likely not necessary (especially 'cause the relevant info is scattered around the site already). I might post an announcement when the changes are rolled out, though, if relevant ;)

Has a general invitation been sent out to bioacoustics-l mailing list? I don't think I saw one

I don't know what "bioacoustics-l mailing list" is meant to be referring to — can you clarify, @DanStowell ?

https://www.mail-archive.com/bioacoustics-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html ---- I think maybe we can do this after the site goes public?

I'm not familiarized with this mailing list, so I wouldn't be able to advise on how to proceed. As mentioned in the original question, you should be inviting experts you think will participate in a way that will help this community grow into a self-sustaining one. I'm not sure if posting to a mailing list is the best way to accomplish that.

@DanStowell With only 25 questions asked at this point, it's very unlikely this site will go public. That's what this question is trying to convey - going public is not guaranteed - y'all have to show us there's interest in this subject enough to make it viable and, as of now, you're not there.

Expanding on Cat's comment here.

The mailing lists are for experts, so those are appropriate for outreach.


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Are frequencies on-topic?
Can we talk about different frequencies of sounds, and pitches, on here? Obviously, different animals can hear different frequencies and pitches so this would be a nice area to explore.
e.g. Can we ask about the different frequencies that an animal makes, and which animals could hear these?

Can you explain or give an example? Thanks!!

@Shannon added!

This sounds on-topic for me-- with the caveat that (1) much of this information is readily accessible online BUT (2) there is a LOT more information than what is readily published (I'm guilty here)!  So, I think the key is to encourage people to first do their homework and then ask the question. A reminder on asking good questions: https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask

Also sounds very on-topic for me. Bioacoustics has a lot to do with the sounds animals make, and also as a result, what sounds they can hear.
It makes sense to talk about both parts of the topic from the basic and conservation science perspectives.


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How many moderators do we want?
I read the text on the moderator election and did not find the answer to how many moderators we are electing.

The election page shows the number of slots the election's being held for — in this case, it's 3:

The default (especially for a new site that's just recently entered Public Beta) is three.
When you see fewer than 3, it's usually because one of the 3 diamond mods was kicked out or chose to resign.  When you see more than 3, it's usually for a busier site, and when the existing mods find the workload to be too much. I haven't seen a site as young as Bioacoustics get the approval from the Community Management team to elect a 4th diamond moderator, but I've only been following these things for the last few years.
I think Artificial Intelligence SE might have been the newest site to have obtained approval for a 4th diamond moderator.

do we NEED to have more than 3 nominations? We currently have more-- but I am wondering if there is any benefit or requirement to having >3 nominations? Thanks for your help!

@Shannon For an election with N spots available, there needs to be N+1 candidates, otherwise the nomination period will be extended so that more people can consider nominating themselves. This is just the SE policy. They want elections to be competitive (i.e. more candidates than open positions).


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Are short phrases OK as a main question?
I'm noticing A LOT of short phrases in the main title that aren't actually specific questions. In order to attract the answers we want, I think we should be encouraging people to write specific questions in the main title. It's tempting to directly edit the question title, but I've been adding comments to encourage good question-asking.
Maybe we need to include more references to the Stack Overflow "How do I ask a good question?" page.

Agreed, and this also applies to big questions that are either lacking context, or should be broken down into multiple specific questions. But perhaps that is another topic

Since your question seems to be primarily about the post title, here's a relevant FAQ on MSE: How do I write a good title?

Echo the feeling here too. I'm also wondering if we can 'lead by example'. This allows a direct 'learning by seeing', rather than waiting and then getting somewhat ambiguous results.
Basically wherever possible, we take action by editing the question and also adding a comment saying the question has been edited for more context?
Riffing off @ASimonis:
The main title has been edited to increase specificity. As it stood, your title was a short phrase that didn't let readers know what information was needed. Please edit further if the current state of the question doesn't capture what was intended. See guide for: "How do I ask a good question"

Is the asker noticed when someone edit their question? I tried to find this answer on meta.stackexchange, but didnot succeed. If they are noticed, maybe we don't need to comment as well about the edit?

Yes. I received a notice in my inbox when someone edited my post.

We can include this in the edit summary and it won't show up as an actual comment

Do you know if the edit summary gets forwarded on to the person when they are alerted to the edit, or is it just stored with the revisions of the question?

Here's some verbage to address these types of questions:
Please edit the main title so it is a specific question. As it stands, your title is a short phrase that doesn't let readers know what information you're looking for.  See guide for: "How do I ask a good question"

I like this. Question: should this be paired with a downvote to encourage the author to edit? Is that too harsh?

Downvote might discourage new users - too much too soon?

The title should do a good job of summarizing the main question. It shouldn't just be a few keywords or just the overall topic you're asking about (e.g. "timestamps"); rather, anyone reading the title should be able to get a sense of the overall question you're asking.
Sometimes, a clearer title may be shorter than an overly long and detailed one. That said, ideally you should be able to write a title that's both descriptive and clear. It doesn't necessarily need to be phrased as a complete sentence/question, but I personally prefer titles to be phrased as questions whenever possible (i.e. unless it makes the title really unwieldy or unclear).
If you see a question by another user with a vague or unclear title, feel free to edit the post to improve it. (That said, you should generally avoid very minor edits; if you're editing a post, you should try to improve the post as much as possible, fixing all errors you see.)

I agree and have noticed that as well. Do you have a bit of standardized text you've been putting in the comments? You could share that here and maybe we can plan to use that in a "moderating" context to try to encourage more complete titles.
EDIT:
For this question on Raven Pro/Raven Lite I just went ahead and edited the title directly. Then added a comment explaining why with a link to the How do I write a good title? MSE post.
I opted to do this because this was a very new user (11 reputation points) so I didn't want to be discouraging with a downvote, but wanted to "show through action" like @Thejasvi suggested and to try to make the change as quickly as possible.
Here is the text I used (the brackets allow the link to be clickable)
I edited the title of your question a bit to make it more detailed/specific and better fit the SE Q/A format. I hope to have maintained the essence of your question, but if not, please comment here or edit back. For more info see: [How do I write a good title?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title)


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Losing reputation due to 'user removed'
After signing in today I noticed that my reputation has gone down 100+ points, it was at 2900 just yesterday. I haven't gotten notifications about questions closed, I've checked recent comments I've made and they haven't been like way downvoted in the past 12 hours. When I go to the reputation page on my account, it says -120 for 'user was removed' and links to this post. Is this the case for if someone was suspended as well? Or people who deactivate their accounts? The post makes it seem like this situation is only for users are forced to leave or have their accounts manually deleted by moderators, but I didn't think BSE had any permanent deletions? I know some people have left BSE after all the recent drama so I didn't know if points would get taken away for votes by people who have chosen to delete their accounts or something. Or are we cool enough to have already attracted spammers..?

I think it is linked with JM having asked for his account to be deleted. He's now referred as "user213" (e.g. here) without any user account profile anymore. As he was quite active on the site, many of us received -X points recently which corresponds to his upvotes of our questions. Maybe some received extra points if he had only downvoted them :-)

While it's a bit of a weird situation since so many of you know each other outside this site, and I don't know that there is a particular rule against using public information to ID deleted users, generally I think it's not good taste to do so. I think most of us realize that nothing is ever truly "deleted" from the internet, of course, but I think it's best to respect a user's privacy to not have their name on their account any more.

@BryanKrause I agree, that's why i used the initials "JM" and not his full former user name. Did you think that "JM" was his full user name or do you mean that i even shouldnt use the initials to make it more anonymous?

Ah, I see - no, I did not think JM was the full user name, but it was enough for me to guess the specific user from my limited interaction here. I had assumed you were using it as a term of familiarity that people would typically know that person by (e.g., maybe it was their name in some other off-site channel) and didn't realize that you had used the initials to try to not fully reveal the person.

Here's a site-wide meta post about this:
What does "user was removed" mean and why did my reputation change because of it?
'User removed' is from an account being deleted, either by choice of the user or deletion due to violations. When a user account is deleted, all their votes are typically invalidated. For voluntary account deletions, there is a manual review step for staff and staff can choose to keep a user's votes in the system even after the account is gone, but this is typically reserved for accounts that have many, many votes and it is decided that the damage to the network is greater than the risk for abuse.
One reason to do this is that users who delete their accounts can certainly come back, and that shouldn't let them vote for things twice just because they deleted the first account.

I know some people have left BSE after all the recent drama so I didn't know if points would get taken away for votes by people who have chosen to delete their accounts or something.

I'd assume this is what happened - someone who voted for 12 of your posts manually deleted their account. Given the timing, this may have been someone upset about the suspensions, but it's not really possible for anyone to know as the system keeps these things private.