text:
Massive account suspensions
Hundreds of Bioacoustics Stack Exchange users received the following private message that announced the suspension of their account:

Hello,
We’re writing from the Stack Exchange Community Management Team
with respect to your account. As you are likely aware, during the
“Commitment” phase of the Area 51 process, we require that proposals
receive at least 100 committers who have 200 reputation across the
network.
You may not be aware that we have certain network-wide
policies that govern the voting systems on Stack Exchange. First among
these is the principle: “Vote for the post, not the person.”
Historically, we have interpreted this to mean that the posts you vote
on should be discovered organically — not biased for or against any
specific person. This policy captures a broad spectrum of behaviors.
The following are examples of voting practices that violate Stack
Exchange network policies:
Voting repeatedly for a user by discovering
posts through their profile.
Voting for posts you are directly linked to > elsewhere (e.g., in Slack or by email)
Deliberately voting in
order to circumvent Stack Exchange system restrictions. For example,
voting for a user’s posts only so that the user gains the privilege to
comment.
Creating additional accounts (“sockpuppets”) to upvote one’s
own posts.
Actively soliciting votes that do any of the above.
Recently, we discovered a series of votes between committers to the
Bioacoustics Area 51 proposal that appeared to violate our network
policies. In this specific case, with the votes in question removed,
the Bioacoustics Area 51 proposal would not have launched when it did:
these voting violations materially changed the outcome of the
proposal.
We take this issue very seriously: attempts to circumvent
the Area 51 process by voting for other specific users across the
network is a violation of multiple core Stack Exchange policies.
As a
result of your active participation in these voting practices, your
account has been suspended network-wide for 7 days. While you’re
suspended, your reputation will show as 1 but will be restored once
the suspension ends. And, once the suspension ends, for the most part,
you may return to the site and participate as normal.
However, Stack
Exchange does not allow users who have been suspended in the year
preceding an election to become moderators on the network. As a
result, when we open nominations for the Bioacoustics election, you
will no longer be eligible to nominate yourself in this election.
Although this notice is quite serious, we hope this message does not
discourage you from contributing to Bioacoustics Stack Exchange in the
future — in compliance with our voting policies.
We appreciate and
respect your enthusiasm for contributing to the Stack Exchange
network. During the course of our investigation, we discovered a
significant number of training and guidance materials for folks in
your field to help them grow familiar with the Stack Exchange format.
We commend this work and have very real respect for the time and
energy you’ve put into building this site.
We look forward to your
future contributions to the Stack Exchange network.
Thanks, Stack
Exchange Community Management Team

I write this message on behalf of many of them in addition to just myself. We totally understand that SE sometimes has to suspend accounts but here it seems that SE has suddenly over-reacted. The way SE decided to suspend hundreds of users is quite obscure but I believe SE may have trusted the quality of their detection algorithm too much? SE did not providing any evidence or examples of how suspended users violated the CoC. By not giving users detailed knowledge on how they broke the rules, how are they supposed to course correct? Additionally, this mass suspension action, which has no mechanism for users to appeal, is unfriendly and we have lost many users who were using the site in good faith but are now turned off by this and leaving the site.
Organizing ourselves in our small community to promote and energize a Beta site does not mean we want to cheat. On one hand, 1) SE pushes us to vote as much as possible to reach the metric requirements, 2) SE awards us when we vote more (e.g. Vox Populi badge), and on the other hand, SE suspends our account WITHOUT ANY WARNING (at least as far as I am concerned) when we apparently upvote too often for the same persons. Many other reasons other than "cheating" can explain that, including the fact that 2 members may share common issues/knowledge that will logically lead to inter-votes. In any case, we don't vote for persons, we vote for the quality of individual posts.
I think that SE is at least as responsible as the Bioacoustics members for what it is going on, however, unfortunately, they put all the responsibilities on the members. A warning could be far more efficient than a direct suspension, which will discourage many of us. For instance, SE suspended 5 (and most active) editors out of 6 (https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&filter=all)!
Last but not least, SE did this in the middle of a moderator election which they then cancelled...
As far as we are all concerned, I think this sudden "authoritarian" response is not respectful to the amount of work all of us have put in during the last few months. We would appreciate explicit evidence and documentation that warranted this behavior and how best to move forward in regaining users we have lost from this unfair action.

Totally agree, @Carly. 100% behind this. We have little transparency and a strong, clever, and giving community. All of this drama is such a confusing distraction.

@NikeDattani that might 'seem' humorous - but that's ... a rather serious accusation. I'd note this post was linked on main meta, and its a much more honest and direct response than we'd get. The community team has a stake in the network's constituent sites succeeding, as much as us random SE denizens.

Right now no one from the Bioacoustics can vote or post because of their accounts being suspended....there would be dozens more upvotes. Convenient, I agree.

A warning could be far more efficient than a direct suspension, which will discourage many of us. – As a moderator of one of the affected sites, I would like to comment on this: As early as April, we noticed problematic coordinated activities from a dozen people (who turned out to be Bioacoustics supporters). They all received warnings/suspensions or other clear signals such as post deletions, some of them twice. Naturally, we could only warn those whom we knew to be involved, but plenty of people were warned and had ample time to share their experience.

Not everyone received a warning before their suspension, I've talked to some people who did not.

Yep, I was suspended for "activities not on this site", with no warning. My last SE action outside of this forum was a single vote on march 28, and an answer on Aug 10, 2021.
Peculiar to have that as grounds for suspension. Seems someone at SE just presses "ctrl+a" and then hit "suspend".

@Rasmus that is super frustrating and it seems like you may be a good candidate to appeal, if you are willing to go through that process - this post has a link to the "Contact Us" form where you can appeal

I want to start by highlighting a bit you quoted from the mod message users were sent:

We appreciate and respect your enthusiasm for contributing to the Stack Exchange network. During the course of our investigation, we discovered a significant number of training and guidance materials for folks in your field to help them grow familiar with the Stack Exchange format. We commend this work and have very real respect for the time and energy you’ve put into building this site.
We look forward to your future contributions to the Stack Exchange network.

The Community Management Team fully appreciates the level of involvement and effort needed to get a new community off the ground, and to go through the Area 51 process. As mentioned in the mod message, we also appreciate that you put effort into getting new folks acquainted with the Stack Exchange platform and how it works. This situation is in no way ideal for any of the parties involved, and it gives us no pleasure to have to take such widespread enforcement action affecting such a big portion of the folks who’ve established themselves as a core part of this community.
We completely understand that this situation is frustrating, causes confusion, and is a heavy blow for this community. We also recognize that these actions may make parts of the community feel unappreciated, and that your efforts to establish a successful community may feel like they are going to waste. The actions undertaken by the Community Management Team in this instance were not taken lightly — in fact, the reason the election was canceled was precisely so we could take the time to fully investigate the circumstances surrounding the issues we’d found, so the results of that investigation could fully inform any actions we’d need to take.
Clarifying the moderator message
Given the confusion expressed by many of the users who’ve responded to messages they were sent, we would like to clarify one critical point with regards to the nature of the infringing voting behaviors. To clarify: the problematic votes were not cast on this site, but rather on other sites on the Stack Exchange network. It is not abnormal that, in the early stages of a new site, a lot of cross-voting takes place between the most engaged users — especially given the site’s success depends on that. What is abnormal and problematic, however, is to coordinate handing out votes with the explicit intention of meeting reputation-based privilege thresholds, in an attempt to aid the proposal’s progression through the Area 51 stages — and the evidence we’ve uncovered clearly demonstrates that this behavior took place.
One additional clarification - the number of users suspended does not number in the hundreds. In total, we took around 90 actions - around 70 suspensions, and 20 warnings.
The story – or, the parts we can share
We recognize that in the absence of complete information, it can be frustrating to understand what’s happening. We have an obligation to protect user privacy, but here’s the part of the story we can share.
Some time ago, multiple moderation teams across the Stack Exchange network brought an irregular voting issue to our attention. These irregular votes were disruptive to normal activities on their sites. It’s typical for moderators to call our attention to issues like this when they lack the tools to investigate fully on-site — such as when irregular voting spans many sites on the network. Moderators only have insight into voting patterns on their own sites. The need for a more wide-ranging investigation and the potential need for action across multiple sites necessarily involved the Community Management Team.
Once the investigation concluded, we issued suspensions where the number of involved votes was significant, and we issued warnings where the number of votes was minor. None of these actions was undertaken by automated systems, nor detected by automatic algorithms. To further ensure that the enforcement actions were correctly taken, we had multiple Community Managers from the team involved, cross-checking and validating each others’ work, up to and including the involvement of our VP of Community. We are confident in the outcome of this investigation, but because the number of involved users is high, it is possible that some users may have received a message erroneously — however, we expect this number (if any) to be very small.
The Community Management Team is fully aware of these actions’ potential impacts on this community’s health and chances of success, and we carefully weighed the balance of harms to find a sensible path forward. Given the evidence we uncovered during our investigation, we feel that the actions taken were proportional to the offense, and that we have followed typical moderation guidance on Stack Exchange.
Finally, a couple of notes: it is a general policy on the Stack Exchange to not debate individual user suspensions publicly on Meta, especially when the involved users are still suspended and cannot take part in the conversation. Additionally, while we understand the concerns surrounding transparency in this situation, pointing users who violated rules to the exact votes that broke the rules is not something we usually do. Unfortunately, this means follow-up questions to the effect of “can you show me the votes that caused my message/suspension?” are likely to stay unresponded-to, both in the moderator message and in public.
Where this community goes from here
We know that this can be overwhelming and could be demoralizing. But with all that being said, please remember that all is not lost. To highlight another bit of the quoted text you posted:

Although this notice is quite serious, we hope this message does not discourage you from contributing to Bioacoustics Stack Exchange in the future — in compliance with our voting policies.

This was written sincerely! We recognize some will be put off and driven away by this situation, but that is not the intention of our actions. The goal of any message or suspension is to provoke change; not to punish. Such actions exist to provide the gentlest appropriate correction that we believe can remit the situation, while remaining consistent with prior similar interventions (where they exist) and staying true to the spirit of the rules. Stack Exchange does not hold grudges, nor do we keep public records of suspensions — we know that past offenders can turn into healthy contributors to our communities, and, indeed, have instances where folks who’ve been suspended have later become moderators somewhere on the network. In one week’s time, we hope the vast majority of the users who were suspended do return to the site and continue to contribute, bearing this guidance in mind.
We still plan to hold an election to find your inaugural moderators — stay tuned for an announcement early next week — and we are confident this community can still be healthy and thrive. While the users suspended will not be able to run in this election, there are still many viable election candidates within the community who we hope will nominate themselves for the position. The success of this site rests in the outcome of that election, and at least 3 moderators are required for it to be considered a success — for that reason, we encourage anyone who is eligible to nominate for the position once the new election date is set and nominations are open.

As mentioned in the messages and in the post, the aim of our actions was not to discourage further participation — we understand our actions cause frustration, and although they were not an easy decision to come to, they were the ones the circumstances and evidence led us to take.

@JamieMacaulay You're correct that it hasn't happened since the site launched, but these votes occurred weeks before the suspensions were issued, and had a negative impact on many sites across the network. That negative impact does not evaporate just because the site ultimately launched and the impetus to vote illegitimately disappeared. So our response is ultimately protective of the network as a whole. Suspensions are often issued to ask users to step back for a bit and re-evaluate how they engage with the site, particularly when it is causing problems network-wide.

@JamieMacaulay I think that is an unfair characterization. The CMs very much want this site to succeed. I understand the sentiment that wants to attribute a malicious motive to the suspensions, but I think nothing is further from the truth. StackExchange could freely delete this site or any accounts if they wanted you to leave. They acted in response to a very large voting network without which this site might not exist, yet they keep staff resources supporting this site. Suspensions without warning are rare here; that indicates the severity of the offense, not the callousness of staff.

Fraudulent voting broke the step where a proposal is supposed to backed by users with familiarity with how SE works, by asking or answering questions around the network. Instead, a bunch of new people brought to SE by this proposal had their first experience gaining reputation through fraudulent voting. This was likely a confusing arrival to other sites on the network, where users had their reputation gains reversed or content deleted for fraud.

I do not understand an argument that because candidates for moderator were involved, somehow SE should have taken a lighter approach. Moderators are trusted with private user data and with a lot of responsibility in setting the direction of a site. They are often expected to make decisions specifically when a clear written guideline is not available. As JNat points out, there are many potential candidates in this community that were not suspended.

@BryanKrause "I understand the sentiment that wants to attribute a malicious motive to the suspensions" I have not read this anywhere. This bumbled situation arose because the investigation into the fraudulent votes  began during the election process. At least that is my impression. If the investigation had already been in process before the election began nobody among the staff would have allowed the nomination phase to go underway.

The investigation and the suspensions should have concluded before 5 users volunteered.  It didn't happen because someone at SE finally woke up to the fact that several mods across the network had informed the team, months earlier, that something was not quite right with number of votes being cast in their sites. Community managers need to be updated on a regular basis, moderators across the network need to insist that the team responds sooner not later to any concerns raised.

The breakdown of communication between sites that are outside the big five–Stack Overflow, SuperUser, Unix & Linux, Ask Ubuntu, and Mathematics, and the team of CMs is nothing new. There are too many sites and too few CMs, and CMs who rarely if ever participate on the smaller meta sites. They probably don't have time, but it means that when something does happen, users on smaller sites will view them as uncaring strangers.

But the fact remains that there was no warning to the suspended (me one of them). With no examples given, and no warnings when supposedly breaking rules, it leaves us no way to learn what was done wrong.
I note the sentence:
"To clarify: the problematic votes were not cast on this site, but rather on other sites on the Stack Exchange network."
To my best knowledge my only activity on SE was on this site during this period (since Aug 10 2021), so being suspended because of activity not on this site seems puzzling, if not down-right a lie.

@Rasmus From this post: "What is abnormal and problematic, however, is to coordinate handing out votes with the explicit intention of meeting reputation-based privilege thresholds, in an attempt to aid the proposal’s progression through the Area 51 stages".

@Rasmus From the mod message posted in the question here: "Voting repeatedly for a user by discovering posts through their profile. ... Voting for posts you are directly linked to > elsewhere (e.g., in Slack or by email) ...
Deliberately voting in order to circumvent Stack Exchange system restrictions. For example, voting for a user’s posts only so that the user gains the privilege to comment. ...
Creating additional accounts (“sockpuppets”) to upvote one’s own posts. ...
Actively soliciting votes that do any of the above."

Since this whole thing was about votes occurring in order to boost this Area51 proposal prior to it reaching Beta, the offending activity certainly occurred before the narrow recent window you're talking about.

@BryanKrause Again, I have not participated in any of those activities. Pre the bioacoustics beta my last activity was last summer, but they still suspended me (and others I belive). Hence, the point stands, we were suspended with no warning for not having done anything (I've been on SE for ~6 years with no suspensions).

@Rasmus You can possibly reply to the message and ask for clarification, though the staff isn't going to discuss your case publicly here per policy and as JNat already mentioned they don't typically point to specific votes. As they've described, this wasn't an automated or capricious action but something carefully studied where patterns emerged. Suspensions only went to accounts with the most evidence, others with lesser involvement were only warned.

@Rasmus as an outsider without knowing any details and reasons, I'd assume the suspension is related to the -200 rep voting correction on your SO profile. Whether it's related to this case or not, who knows but the staff.

@AndrewT. I saw that too and that makes sense, except Rasmus only received 3 upvotes (30 rep points) since the start of the year/when this proposal was in the commitment phase.

@AndrewT. that -200 was because of my suspension (that's the reason given on my account) and thus not the cause of it. Also this is not because of my actions, but because others have voted on my contributions. See: https://stackoverflow.com/help/serial-voting-reversed

@Rasmus Based entirely on public information: The -200 voting corrected reversal on your SO account on 2022-08-26 had nothing to do with your suspension for this issue. The suspensions for the issues here were applied prior to 2022-08-19 (this question's date). Your reversal was 7+ days later. Your voting correction was for serial voting to your account in 2018 (only possibility) by at least 5 other users. >= 5 accounts is known because there were 5 sets of serial votes all on 4 posts. 5 votes on each of 4 posts requires >= 5 users, which tracks as 5 votes * 4 posts * 10 rep = 200 rep.

@Rasmus You appear to have misunderstood the page you linked to. Users are not suspended for nor at fault for being the target of serial voting, unless they participated in getting the votes (e.g. created sockpuppet accounts to upvote their own posts). You've mentioned one suspension for the reason described in the question here, which was not because of that voting correction/reversal. Presuming you have no other, more recent suspension or moderator message, then I'd assume you were merely the target of the voting and without fault.

@Makyen thanks for the correction, but this leaves me even more confused in regards to the suspension.

@Rasmus To my best knowledge my only activity on SE was on this site during this period (since Aug 10 2021), so being suspended because of activity not on this site seems puzzling If your activity was this limited, it's possible your suspension was inappropriate especially if you received no prior warning. Staff do make mistakes, so it's worth spending some time composing an email and explaining in detail (include links etc.) why you think an error was committed when your account was suspended.  https://bioacoustics.meta.stackexchange.com/contact

@Rasmus if you do appeal, please let is know if it is successful (if you are comfortable with that) here or over on that chat

Hi, I have appealed and I'm waiting for a response. Happy to share results of the appeal (unless asked not to by moderators)

(1/2) From SE:
"... we included some data from the 2018 attempt to launch the Bioacoustics proposal, where similar targeted voting occurred. [...] there haven’t been any targeted votes for your account since that proposal. However, because the voting that took place in 2018 passed the threshold against which we evaluated suspensions for the current proposal, your account was included in this group of suspensions due to the votes from 2018. Additionally, those votes elevated your account over the reputation requirement needed for the current proposal to advance past the Commitment phase."

(2/2)  No concrete examples were given to me, and as far as I can see from my past activities, I had no activities in 2018, nor have I ever received a warning. Maybe area 51 activity is not shown, but regardless, I have asked them to provide more details, as I do not remember engaging in "targeted" voting at any time (it's 5 years ago!).

@Rasmus thanks for sharing. It seems to me like you may have been the recipient of targeted voting but you did not yourself do that or break that part of the code of conduct (an innocent bystander of sorts). I was part of the proposal in 2018 but it was much less organized in that first attempt so I don't remember any sort of targeted voting efforts (nor do I remember you from it or know you outside of SE, if that makes you feel any better!)

Their reply to me asking for clarification and lack of warning: "Our investigation found that the actions in question did not fit the definition of organic voting but were systematic in nature, and therefore were deemed as targeted."


text:
2024 Community Moderator Election Results
Bioacoustics's Moderator election #5 has come to a close. Since there were not enough candidates for a competitive election, we simply appointed the candidates who nominated themselves:

They will be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
Also, please join me in thanking the following user, who will be stepping down as moderator:

Thanks to everyone for their help (past, present, and future!)

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Enable MathJax for rendering mathematical equations
This mostly scientific site will certainly contain a lot of questions and answers with mathematical formulae. Can we have MathJax enabled here like on similar Signal Processing?
When enabled this will render as a formula:
$$\sum_{i=0}^n i^2 = \frac{(n^2+n)(2n+1)}{6}$$
Here is the code to create the formula:
$$\sum_{i=0}^n i^2 = \frac{(n^2+n)(2n+1)}{6}$$

This will be rendered as follows:

See MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference.

I can see your MathJax perfectly fine https://i.sstatic.net/Gb7H1.png :p

@TheSimpliFire maybe it was enabled recently? I do not see it yet. Probably it needs time to pass through caches.

I do not see the equation rendered as in @thesimplifire png

@selene It turns out I had enabled https://www.math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html

Currently facing the same problem. Unable to see the latex style equation formatting. Stuff just appears as is between the $$.

could we have a feedback from the SE staff on this feature request please? @V2Blast

@JNat or someone else from SE - how do we get this enabled?

For future reference, moderators (or staff) can add the [status-review] tag to the question (as you have now) to escalate it for staff attention, per this process described on MSE: What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?

This seems to be an intentional choice, apparently due to the computational load of running such formatters? (thread on all MathJax supported SEs)
On second thoughts, I'm not that sure if the BioAc SE will ever need as much math notation after all - even though it would be nice oc. Some of the solutions to overcome the lack of math notation are in this QA thread: LaTeX on Stack Overflow?
Change of mind EDIT:
On 'third thought' enabling math formatting would actually be awesome. As pointed out by some of you, even simple formulas are a pain to read without notation, and it seems like I'd overlooked the frequency with which we use them!!

"also not seen on other SEs",  There are sites on the SE network using MathJax.

True, there are other SEs with math notation enabled. Seems that the default is to disable the feature - current edit clarifies that.

Yes, it is intentional that it is disabled by default. From the page: MathJax increases page load times drastically, so it's only supported on sites that have demonstrated a serious need for it. --- To explain it: the main concern is load time in the web browser which is increased because of loading an running an additional JavaScript code. The answer on There is ... no reason why ... MathJax shouldn't be enabled ... shows increase of load time about 20 % on the first visit on the site. Subsequent visits will be faster.

I would rather guess that none of the Stack Exchange staff did not notice this request yet. I am guessing no-one of this community members is in contact with the Stack Exchange staff? --- I would guess that here we can expect similar amount of mathematics as on these SE sites which already have MathJax enabled: Bioinformatics, Biology, Signal Processing.

I would also vote to have equations (latex style) be enabled. If a picture says 1000 words, an equation says 1000 pictures

@pabouk-Ukrainestaystrong None of the original organizers, that I know of, are in contact with the SE staff but I'll reach out to Shannon R (the original proposer) and see if she is. Otherwise, I agree that it might take a little time for the SE staff to get these sorts of changes implemented, but keep the suggestions and discussion happening here on the Meta site!

I am not sure of exactly how one should express their support to this feature being implemented apart from upvoting this post (which of course I did). I have been a member of other SE pages that make use of MathJax (such as Physics and Signal Processing) and it is an integral part of many posts (as well as edits that many - including me - people propose on posts for readability reasons). I believe this should be enabled to each and every SE pages that have to do with any kind of scientific field/topic (such as this one).

@ZaellixA: Moderators (or staff) can add the [status-review] tag to the question (as they have now) to escalate it for staff attention, per this process described on MSE: What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them? That'll create an internal ticket for the CMs, and we can triage the issue to the relevant CM subteam or other team.

MathJax is now enabled on both the main Bioacoustics site and this meta site.
(If you encounter any issues with using MathJax on the site, please post them as a new question on this meta site.)

I also want to point out that enabling MathJax on the site also adds a "LaTeX" section to the Editing Help page for the site. At the end of that section, you'll see the following link:

Learn more: MathJax help.

By default, this "MathJax help" link points to the URL https://legacy-www.math.harvard.edu/texman/ – but as this MSE post points out, this link can be customized per-site to point to a different URL:

Any site with MathJax enabled can request that a different guide be used for this purpose. Ideally, they'll write one specific to the needs of their community, but if they want to link to Mathematics.SE's guide instead, that's fine too - as long as they don't mind it being specific to Math's needs in some ways (and, obviously, controlled by folks with editing rights on Math's meta).

If this community wants this "MathJax help" link to be customized to point to a different URL, please start a new discussion on this meta site about what URL the link should point to (like this discussion on Cross Validated's Meta). Then, if the community comes to a consensus, the moderators can add the status-review tag to escalate the request for staff attention.

Per suggestion from @JNat, we have flagged this with the "status-review" tag, which escalates the post and alerts SE staff who will then act on it.
More info on that process here.

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


text:
Close vote review queues are not functioning
The question titled, How many names can a dolphin remember? has gotten a close vote which is more than enough to send it to the close vote review queue, however I don't see it in there. I have confirmed this in both regular and incognito browsing mode.
This was the same problem that happened on the last two private beta sites, so therefore I suggest an investigation.

Private beta runs in a special mode. I am just guessing: This could be the reason these review queues are not available? Maybe at this phase only Stack Exchange staff takes care of such tasks?

@pabouk-Ukrainestaystrong Yes private beta has its differences compare to public beta or graduated mode, but this behaviour is an unexpected one.

I only see 1 close vote and we need 5 to close a question. And since we get access to cast close votes are 15 rep most people have that perm so they cant flag questions to go into that queue.

But questions with an (at least 1) active close vote are also sent to the queue for review. (It doesn't matter if it's a close vote or flag it should be in there.) I did some personal testing and I have confirmed this.

Weird since in the help article it says
The Close votes queue includes questions that other users have flagged as needing to be closed.

@Ethan Also in the help center is this "Any post which currently has an active close vote or a close flag will appear in the Close votes review queue." I understand the confusion.

Yep, that's broken but in a different way than last time, heh. Thanks for the report! I'm looking into it.

Fundamentally this turned out to be the same problem as last time, but at least the root cause was different in this case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks again for the report. Scheduled routes should be running on Bioacoustics and its meta now, so you'll see the Close Votes queue populating as expected.


text:
Inaugural election canceled
Due to extraordinary circumstances, the inaugural Bioacoustics election has been canceled. A new election will be scheduled in the coming weeks.
Recently, it has come to the Community Management Team’s attention that certain circumstances surrounding this site’s progress through the Area 51 process were in violation of our policies — and, more importantly, that without these irregular activities, the proposal’s success might have been affected. As a result of a preliminary investigation, the Community Management Team has decided that the best course of action is to cancel the ongoing election, undertake a deeper investigation of the extent of these irregularities, and schedule a new election once we’ve assessed the impact of those irregular activities and taken the appropriate corrective measures.
We plan to schedule a new election to take place in the coming weeks, but we will keep the community updated and let you know as soon as we have a new date for nominations to open.
We recognize that the original election is quite close to finishing, and we understand that this may cause some confusion and frustration. If you have any questions, please post them as an answer below. Note, however, that we may not be able to fully disclose all the details of the situation at this time, because we have a standing policy to keep the details of user-related incidents private.

The lack of transparency is what is causing the confusion and frustration (not just the suspensions themselves). What is going on?

@Chloe I very much disagree with your complaint about “lack of transparency”. There’s clear communication that a) there have been irregularities, b) these are under investigation, c) further information is promised as soon as possible. I don’t think going into detail or even naming people would be of any benefit. Transparency is good and important, but must still protect the privacy rights of those who may have been involved (-> under investigation), possibly in a misguided attempt to foster the proposal.

Not all details should be made public, especially if more information may hurt someone disproportionately. There will be (in fact, already are) consequences for individuals involved, and while I can understand that you and others would like to have more details to understand better, what’s going on, please let the folks at CM do their job for now, and be patient until there is reliable information available and the necessary decisions are made.

I say that because several colleagues have said that they are confused why their accounts were suspended when they were barely active on it in the first place. They have read your email, and understand what unethical voting entails, and they do not think they have violated any of these.

First, I would like to apologize that our behavior caused so much work for so many people, and we appreciate that you acknowledge the efforts we have taken to rally and educate our community. I believe this is an example of where communication may have resulted in significantly less work and stress for everyone on both sides (SE, Bioacoustics).
Yes, we actively coordinated the education of our inexperienced community to ask/answer/vote on SE and reach 200 points. At times the process felt very much like an insiders’ game where the rules were confusing (at best) for newbies such as us-- but our intent was not to game the system (despite appearances). As has been noted, we are an enthusiastic community– perhaps at times we were too enthusiastic. We do not deny the actions we have been accused of, but our intentions were good (we would not have worked so hard if that were not the case!). I see this as a learning opportunity for our Bioacoustics Community, but also for SE (see here).
So, where do we go from here? Yes, clearly, we need to ensure we have good behavior, but at this point the questions are: (1) How do we (Bioacoustics) move forward? And: (2) Can SE take steps to minimize this behavior in the future?
How do we (Bioacoustics) move forward?
Do we move forward?
As the leader of this effort, I can speak directly to the history of this proposal (the history started in 2018), and I can say that while there are alternatives, I strongly feel that this is the best platform for our needs, and I strongly feel that we can (slowly, surely) build a successful site with active and dedicated community members. It appears from the overall response that SE is willing to allow us to continue our efforts. There have been discussions from our community about moving to a different site, and there are many that are deeply frustrated with our experiences to date, but I would recommend that we continue our efforts to create a Bioacoustics Stack Exchange.
Behavior Change: The intention of the massive suspensions were to encourage change – that is easy enough going forward.  But know that we had very good intentions and were working very hard to teach our community how to use SE – and we were trying to navigate this frustrating process on a timeline. On the one hand we are commended for working hard to reach & educate our community, but we are suspended for too much coordination. Fair enough, as many of us did take it too far– but for newbies such as us, the rules have the transparency of a kaleidoscope.
Electing our own Moderators: Now that our most active and enthusiastic people have been suspended, they are unable to be a moderator for >1 year. We then must either:

Identify alternative moderators from less active or less experienced users (after our community has been severely wounded), or
Use moderators who are not dedicated to our community.

Neither of these choices is in our best interest or will help us succeed, and we are given only a few days to make this happen.
We would like to respectfully request that the Community Moderators help us identify a path forward so that we can consider electing from at least a few of our initial Moderator Nominees.
I’d be happy to elaborate on how we got into this mess– but where we stand now is that we have been crippled at a point in the process where we have a matter of days to rally a wounded community. We are not trying to game the system, we are trying to build a successful site. I hope the moderators will consider our good intentions.
Opportunities to improve SE for communities such as ours
It is clear that Area51 is not meant for communities not already embedded in the Stack Exchange network, but I am encouraged that there may be at least some interest in changing this. Based on my experiences, I have provided suggestions to @JourneymanGeek’s question on on how to better accommodate communities such as ours: How should a new site with a good userbase *outside* the Stack Exchange mainstream get itself bootstrapped?
The problems related to voting were not due solely to the need to garner 100 users with >200 points. These problems stemmed from a frustrating registration process, unclear and confusing expectations, a very limited ability to communicate with the community, and a deadline that sets up good intentioned and dedicated groups such as ours for failure.
We SEE the value of SE for our community, we KNOW we can get there, but please understand what an intensely unnecessarily frustrating process this has been for us so far. We would like to move beyond these frustrations and get to the real work of supporting a successful site.
(Preferably with help rather than obstacles, and preferably with a timeline that is supportive rather than punitive.)

Hi Shannon, thank you sincerely for this post. We'd love to work with you all in order to make this election successful, and we understand that the timeline may be too short if your intent is to rally the community. With this in mind, we'd like to propose that we defer the election until the community indicates that you all feel ready for an election. Once that happens then we can schedule it for a date that's as early as possible. However, the latest date we can start the election is Monday, November 7th.

If this sounds good to you, please split the request for an election deferral off into its own post, so the community has better visibility and a chance to discuss the issue on-site / express approval. (It seems like you've had this conversation elsewhere, which is good, though there needs to be a conversation on Bioacoustics Meta to help build assent here and make sure all members have a voice. We would also like to be able to participate in the conversation, as well.)

If the community agrees, we can commit now to a deferral until the community indicates readiness (or until Nov 7th, whichever is sooner). This will both allow time for users to request internal reviews of their suspensions as needed, and allow time for you all to coordinate about a path forward. Please let me know if there are questions we can answer, or further ways we can help.

@Slate This sounds good to me- and I will post a question for others to vote on. Yes, a small group of us retain communications offline, but our preference is to shift all conversations here and use voting & comments to understand the views of our greater community. My post will likely be imperfect and require editing-- warning and thanks in advance for help editing!

No problem at all - looking forward to it! (Edit: for posterity, Shannon's post is now live here.)

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?

Could you please clarify whether or not we should still be inviting new participants to the SE? The link you gave (to "the site's progress") show some Needs work labels, and these are largely about the number of participants. So, I personally don't know whether:

you'd like us to engage more people; or
you'd like us to pause any such activity until after your investigation is complete.

Considering at this point in time they're still planning on having a new election later down the road, I see no problem with trying to engage more people. For now.

(A) I would suggest not to read too much into the Area51 statistics and "site's progress" or "Needs Work", even though JNat gave you a link to the Area51 page. Those progress indicators are almost a decade out of date. Sites no longer need 10 questions/day to graduate, and Bioacoustics is not doing poorly in terms of number of participants. You can simply look at other new sites and their number of users as a function of time on the Waybackmachine. (B) Considering that it seems that the site might get shut down, I'd be hesitant to invite people as it could be bad for your reputation.

Minor clarification note: closing down the site is not the desired outcome for the Community Management Team, and we still plan to hold a moderator election — the success of which might dictate the site's future. As such, while we can't guarantee that the site will be successful at this point, we also don't have any issues with inviting more users at this point.

If it is discovered that the site should not of made it through Area 51 with out this activity what will happen? Did the site shut down? Or will it stay up since there is a good amount of activity?

Will we be able to download the "results" of the election? Or can we not do that if the election failed or was canceled?

(1) JNat's post explicitly says that they have to "undertake a deeper investigation of the extent of these irregularities" before deciding what's going to happen. I think we better let them do that and not expect answers that they're not yet ready to provide, while they're still investigating the extent of the damage. (2) The election has been cancelled, so I would not think that there will be a "result".

Regarding 1: I can only speculate here, but among the main reasons for the entire Area 51 process is to avoid the work and disappointment of launching (and shutting down) a site that has not gathered a sufficiently big and active community or never will. In that respect, almost all the potential damage has already been done, except that from shutting down the site. Sending the site back to Area 51 would not improve things – on the contrary, it would dismantle whatever community you have. Thus, from SE’s perspective it makes sense to wait and see whether the site works out.

Nike's comment is correct on both counts, and pretty much what I would've responded with.


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Removing tags on a post without questioning if they are necessary
So some of my tags got removed on a post, and I think we should really ask why there may be repeat-seeming tags.  In this example, the user kept flight-calls but removed night-flight-call and nfc.
Here's the thing: all NFCs are flight calls but but not all flight calls are NFC. They need a different distinction. Also, NFC is a very common shortening of nocturnal flight call.
I added all tags because the NFC community is HUGE and I want them to be able to easily search our site and find something relevant.
I also don't see the harm in having multiple tags to find relevant information. Thoughts? I can see how this may be applicable as we get more hobbyists to use the site.
UPDATE
Ok, the feeling I'm getting is that we can leave all of the tags for now, and then perhaps delete nfc down the line, especially if it overlaps with another term in bioacoustics. That, or we link them via synonymous tags.

"NFC" is clearly redundant with "nocturnal-flight-call".  Assuming NFC has no other meanings within the bioacoustics community, that's a clear case for setting up a tag synonym.

I can agree that both are not necessary! :)

To start, apologies for the dumbness
The user who deleted the tags was me, and I'm a rather unexperienced SE noob doing potentially dumb things without thinking too far into the future on the community consequences - apologies!. (In the meanwhile the tags have been restored).
I remember reading (link) that it's important to not introduce new tags and so was attempting to practice this (and clearly leaping before looking!).
The broad motivation behind the original deletion was to keep the number of unique tags low and general (as pointed out night-flight-call is a type of flight-call).
On making new tags
The point on the community size is a great one to consider going ahead.
Another point (in the opposite direction) is to make a new tag only if it isn't somehow covered by a pre-existing tag. Essentially to always use 'common-denominator' tags, rather than making more and more specialised tags.
On synonymous tags
About synonymous tags like nfc and night-flight-calls, I'm still on the fence about if it can be a good thing to grow the list so early on. Background reading (will try to find the link later) says SE is capable of finding very specific things without the need for a pre-existing tag because searches also look at the actual text content.
Also, each question only gets 5 tags. Not sure if  degeneracy in tags (full-word and acronym) increases 'searchability' of the question. In the interest of getting more users to a question, it may be better to include unique tags that convey slightly different aspects of the question.
When and if more users do introduce synonymous tags - it can be handled however. Having read up more on synonymous tags - degeneracy in tags can be handled at a later point to make sure users searching for tags will automatically find all synonymous ones.
Edit: now am on the fence about synonymous tags.

I suck at tag making so apologies to my future deleters. Haha.

These are all really good points! Thank you for such a thoughtful answer. I think I'd be in favor of keeping nocturnal flight call over NFC, as abbreviations can overlap and become confusing.

I'm glad to be seeing the active discussion of tags because it means we have more engagement! I think this will be a critical area to be discussed here on the Meta moving forward.
At the Beta stage, anyone can create a tag (only 1 reputation point required). This is very different from, say, Stack Overflow where you must have 1500 rep points to create tags.
I would suggest that we let tags get created "unrestricted" at this point, with our general small community size and budding scope, and then work on proposing synonymous tags down the line as we start to see overlap. Here is the BioAcSE-specific help page on tag synonyms that I found very useful: https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/suggest-tag-synonyms In this particular case, for example, NFC would be linked to nocturnal-flight-calls (or inverse).
The nice thing with the way synonymous tags get created is that it isn't just reputation points - a user has to have sufficient votes within a tag, proving experience in that particular tag, to be able to propose synonyms which I think will help us keep the tags we need, and streamline where we can!


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Embedding SoundCloud - Can we do it? How to do it? Do we want it?
I noticed on a few other SE sites (e.g., Video Production and Music Practice and Theory) that they can include a link to a publicly available SoundCloud track (and YouTube, potentially), and it will be rendered with an embedded player. Given the nature of our SE, this would be a very relevant tool.
Assuming that it was a universal feature, I tried to do it for the Bioacoustics Beta site, but it still shows as a url/link. Does anyone know how we can do this? Do we need to request this feature from someone at SE?

I added "do we want it" to the title of this question to hopefully encourage other users to see this question and interact with it to show interest in adding this feature!

I was hoping one of the SE moderators would provide an explanation, but from what I can see:

If a site allows code snippet it can be done, see 2nd answer here.
I think we can put in a request on meta.stackexchange.com as they did here for Audio.SE and Music.SE?

It may be that we first need to graduate to a public beta before this will be considered (fair enough), but if it is possible (and it is), then it would be incredibly valuable for our site.
I hope some moderators can provide input?

For something specific to a particular site like this issue, a request on this Meta site would actually be more appropriate. (This question is already sufficient for that.) If there's consensus from the community that this should be enabled for the site (and it's a request that is something we can do), then the site mods can escalate it to CMs/staff by adding the [status-review] tag to the Meta post... Or that's what I would recommend on a site that has mods, anyway. Since this site's in private beta and doesn't yet have mods, we'd probably suggest waiting until pro-tem mods are elected.

Thank you for the guidance! We will revisit this at Public Beta.


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How to decide when a topic/question should be made into a community wiki?
I was trying to learn a bit more about community wikis (see help doc here) and it seems like several of the questions asked on Bioacoustics SE at this stage may be really well suited to a community wiki. To summarize - a community wiki is an answer that no one gets reputation points for, and anyone can edit. We already have an example one here:
'Foundational Literature' in Terrestrial Bioacoustics. What do users think?
I see two question types that might make good wikis:
(1) Questions about how to do some particular thing, that may have several possible answers because you can use different programs, etc. A few examples:

Easy way to split .wav files

Software for calculating long-term spectral averages

(2) Questions that ask about "standards" or conventions such as

Are there conventions for describing the visual representation of
sounds on a spectrogram (i.e. names for shape patterns)?

Edit:
Just putting a link to this question here as it seems like another good candidate for a community wiki
Bioacoustics conferences question

Maybe it is too early at the beginning of beta phase? Now it is certainly good when many users get points for good questions.

Relevant FAQ on MSE: What are "Community Wiki" posts? In general, there's little reason to use community-wiki status on most posts. It only really makes sense to apply it when you're dealing with something like a canonical Q&A that's intended to be openly editable by everyone – and specifically, edited often to keep it up to date. (See Mark's answer below.)

Even if a post is not made community-wiki, users without the ability to edit others' posts directly can usually suggest an edit. (The one exception I know of is on Meta sites, where users without that privilege can't edit others' posts at all – they can only edit posts they didn't write if the post has community-wiki status applied to it. This is usually done mainly for FAQs about the site/its policies, where the question and answer are meant to represent the consensus of the community rather than any one user's opinion.)

To discuss how to change a post into a wiki, in practice, see the other selene's post here

Others threads which could benefit from a wiki (because they will be kept being updated forever): Holistic intro to Bioacoustics, Bioacoustics in audio-art performances, What software to downsample large audio file

@Noil Would it help to have a meta post for each one of these questions you flagged here, so that we can tag them accordingly and sort of make a "to-do" list to have the moderators conver them? I'm happy to help tackle editing once they are converted to a CW. In that case we could also have post-specific discussion in case someone had a strong argument AGAINST converting any of the suggestions.

@selene Do you mean to add posts in this thread? Another possibility would be to flag these post for moderator's attention (built-in flag option), and then if they are flagged by several people, moderators can decide whether or not it is worth turning them into a wiki, which is maybe the standard way to do so in SE?

@Noil I was proposing a separate meta post per each main SE candidate CW question, but yes, flagging would be good too! Maybe we should ask the moderators what they prefer...I tried tagging them here but since they aren't in this thread that didn't work but maybe we can ping them on the chat.

This is a really great idea that we should may be push more.
The main criteria should be if the question is of very broad interest (an admittedly vague term!). The terrestrial literature list + split wave files is indeed a great set of examples.
However I do agree w @pabouk, it may be best to wait it out a bit and let people's time reflect directly to points first before we suggest that member's points are 'donated' to wiki answers.

Based on my experience on other sites, there are two situations where "community wiki" works well:

Questions where many people have part of the answer, but nobody has the entire answer.  An example of this would be Seasoned Advice's list of cooking terms in various languages.
Canonical answers, where people frequently ask minor variations of the same question.  Again from Seasoned Advice, the canonical food-safety question.

I think this discussion was sparked because I Community Wiki'd this question. As I mentioned in the comment I left upon doing that:

I've made this post a Community Wiki because it is a 'list of X' type of question that contains enough value to avoid deletion. That being said, these types of questions are some times maintained on Meta, rather than the main site — see an example on Japanese Language.

If you've read through the Help Center, at some point you'll have stumbled upon What types of questions should I avoid asking?, one of which are questions where:

every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”

That means that, for that question, I could either have closed it as off-topic because it does not adhere to the format our platform allows, or, since it had some value, I converted it to a Community Wiki (CW) with the intention that y'all do some clean-up on it and make maintaining that list a community effort. I even pointed to an example elsewhere on the network of how that's done, in case y'all needed some pointers, and further mentioned that some sites keep these on their Metas because they're generally considered off-topic for the main site but still have some value as FAQ-type questions.
Maybe I shoulda been clearer about the expectations around the question, so apologies for that.
As Grace Note wrote one this blog post about CW a while back:

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

I recommend reading through the whole article, but essentially the quote above explains the general use-case for CWs: 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.

Perhaps we can identify questions we think might be worth of consideration as wiki (as a comment on that question), and we can vote up on that comment if we agree with it. If we disagree-- then we can add a comment that we DO NOT think it should be a wiki (and why). Then people can choose to vote on the either the comment to WIKI or on the comment to NOT WIKI.

Something that could be taken into consideration to decide when a thread should be changed to a wiki:

Reputation earned for [deleted] posts with a score of 3 or higher, and where the [deleted] post has been visible on the site for at least 60 days, is retained

(from this Meta response)
So I would suggest either:

move to a wiki quickly after a question has been asked
or wait for 60 days for old posts to be changed to wiki

It's good that you're expressing concern for people "losing" their reputation points, and trying to avoid that, but to me this feels like being too careful. I think "move to a wiki quickly" is a good suggestion, but otherwise I don't think we should be too fragile about accumulated points. We don't plan to use the moderator "convert to wiki" option frequently, I think; it shouldn't have much impact on people's points.

I agree with @DanStowell that the points lost shouldn't be a primary concern. To me, the conversion to a wiki is worth me losing any possible points, but that is just my opinion and interest in the site (I want points to be able to help run the site but don't need to have the most!)

Now that there is a moderation team in place and the community understands a bit more about wiki's, that we will be more proactive with new posts that are potential wiki's, but this is obviously not possible with questions that were asked months ago, in private beta, etc. So yes moving forward, we'll go with option 1, but the debate is more so about how to retroactively deal with previous posts. All of them do happen to be 60 days old, for what it's worth.

@CarlyBatist maybe you and the other mods can discuss here or over on chat - what would be your preferred approach to us flagging or listing or working through the older posts that make sense to convert? See noil and my comments below the initial question. I couldn't ping you up there.


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How should we handle 'networking’ type questions - are they on or off topic?
I think the below question warrants some discussion about it's fit within Bioacoustics Stack Exchange. There is the start of some discussion in the comments but I thought it might be better to ask it here for future reference (Thanks for starting that discussion @Amandine)

Is there any bioacoustics research team(s) in New York City (USA)?
I'm a science journalist in New York City (USA) interested in
reporting on bioacoustics research. Does anyone know of (or do!) any
bioacoustic research in or near New York City (~3-hr drive)?

This question is what I might categorize as an ‘networking’ type of question (why I added the 'outreach' tag…but see edit below, going to remove it) and it's purpose seems more to make connections with particular people for a very specific purpose, rather than a Q/A that would be useful to a broader audience in the future. Because of this I would lean towards it being off-topic for BSE.
However, it received some good answers, that have received some upvotes. So maybe it is something the community sees a need for.
My questions are:
(1) Should this type of question be allowed?
(2a) if YES - is the tag 'outreach' good or should we come up with some other way of identifying these questions as different from maybe more technical questions that have a clear specific answer. Should these types of questions immediately become community wikis (maybe tied to this discussion) or no because answers may change over time and the info may be "old news" years in the future.
(2b) if NO - how should we respectfully, and kindly, respond. Should we point the asker to other resources or have some text that we can use when closing the question that does not discourage future participation on BSE but fully explains why their question was closed.
EDIT:
I removed the text referring to this as an ‘outreach’ question because that is more broad of a category than I wanted to cover in this question. Instead I called it a 'networking' type question.

answers can be updated over time as well to address slight modifications-- but if a question is really subject to what is going on at one point in time-- that doesn't fit as well into this Q&A type standard.

I think the good answers are more reflective of how our community works (we like to help!), rather than the appropriateness of question for the stack exchange platform.

For specific networking questions, I would recommend that these be considered 'Off Topic', and we can create a 'standard' response that would guide them to another platform for that search.
For example:

Thank you for your interest in Bioacoustics. Your question is
considered 'off topic' for this Stack Exchange and will be closed.
Consider wildlabs.net for this type of inquiry (For More info, see:
How should we handle 'networking’ type questions - are they on or off topic?)

I’ll update the question to follow how you clarified because yes…outreach could mean a lot of things! There are already some other questions on here about k12 resources etc.

Is networking a better category label?

Yes! Networking is more specific-- and I think it is helpful to focus on specific types of questions.  If you edit yours, I'll edit mine to reflect that change

We could redirect these kinds of questions to a wiki (to be created) which would be a directory of bioacoustics teams per country/city.

The WILDLABS member directory is a good place to start for that sort of thing

I posted this as a comment on the actual post itself, but this would be a good post for WILDLABS! A good example of the kind of thing that would lend itself more to a WILDLABS post than BSE :)

I agree! And like how Shannon added it I her suggested text above!

Wow I totally missed that Shannon had already written that into the language (face palm) lol. Thanks for pointing out!

Haha I’m glad we are just all thinking alike :)!

I posted the question! Thanks for this discussion, and I totally agree. In my original post I actually asked for it to be removed if it was outside the scope of the SE (I believe that was removed in another person’s edits). What is the best way to “close” the post? I could delete it or edit the body or whatever people think is best!

Zoe-- I think we will delete your post-- but it is also temporarily serving as an example for us to decide how to approach questions like this. We are new to this, so these 'case studies' help us figure things out! We will delete soon (in the interim, you can take the answers you have, or reach out to wildlabs.net for more contacts).  Thanks!

Thanks, Shannon! I’ve made note of the answers. Delete away!

@ZoeGrueskin seconding Shannon's thoughts here. I did initially see your bit about deleting before it was edited but do think it is a useful example and really appreciate you joining!

Welcome to RPG.SE! Take the [tour] if you haven't already, and check out the [help] for more guidance (including on how to close and/or delete posts, and when users should do so). :)

Yes sorry I did not see this post before. I suggested to close this question but I agree that a redirection is better!


text:
What can one do when moderators delete answers, even if they received significant votes?
I would like to receive comments on recent deletion activity of one of the moderators.
IMHO, copying answers into a Wiki should not justify deletion of the original answer, especially if they received a large number of votes.
At least in one occasion the copying distorted also the context of an answer (see edit below).
It is fine to create a Wiki using Information in other answers, but original answers should be kept and referred to in the Wiki.
Question: What happens to the votes if answer is deleted by moderators? Is this a desired activity of moderators?
Edit: Concerning distortion: I know it can be edited but the second last bullet (as of now) in here reads

I just noticed someone was from Ocean Science Analytics
(https://www.oceanscienceanalytics.com/our-services), which I had
never heard of before.

This and in particular the "I" makes only sense in the original answer and not in a Wiki. If you delete this sentence from Wiki you remove a significant part of the original answer (flagging that this particular source is worth looking into, which I did after reading this answer). So best to keep answer AND selected information in Wiki

I don't know if this is an official answer so will put here - but anecdotally, I deleted my own answer to the jobs question after adding it to the wiki and my reputation did not change (if that is what you were asking about what happens to the votes?)

Could you link to where the distortion was so maybe we can fix it as well. I agree this is a good discussion to have and suggest following @noil post below to discuss over on the wiki discussions but want to make sure we don't lose anything valuable in the process!

@selene I was wondering the same and I found this Meta answer which says that in case of deleted posts, "Reputation earned for posts with a score of 3 or higher, and where the post has been visible on the site for at least 60 days, is retained". In the Bioacoustics wiki we are talking about, all responses meet these requirements, so no reputation scores are removed. This is something that could be considered when deciding to move a thread to a wiki style, i.e. potentially wait for 60days.

I would recommend reading through my answers here and here for a better understanding of the purpose of CWs. I think there is a misunderstanding of the point of this feature: what is the point of keeping an ever-growing list of answers and compiling them into a single answer?

I agree with @JNat, it seems redundant to have the same information in 2 different places on a post. Moving forward we can be more pro-active about changing potential questions into wiki's from the beginning so we don't run into this problem. But our issue now is with previous posts we are dealing with retroactively, like the jobs post you are talking about here.

I'll also add that I've edited that bullet-point in the wiki answer you noted was distorted (taking out the 'I', etc.)

I would suggest the following process:

Discussing the general issue by posting an answer to these bioacoustics.meta questions as I think it is related:

How to decide when a question should become a Wiki
How to change it to a Wiki, in practice

Editing the Wiki to correct the potential distortion. To do so, one needs to have access to the deleted post which is possible for the author of the deleted post or for somebody with ≥2k points

According to the discussion conclusions on Meta, possibly asking to reopen the deleted post (also requires a certain number of points to do so) by flagging the post and choose the appropriate option. If many ask to do so, then moderators should look at it I guess.

sounds good to me. I'm a bit puzzled by the two links that you've given in this answer - they don't seem to go to the right targets. "How to decide" links to something about deleting posts (not about wikis); "How to change it to a wiki" links to the post itself. Is that as intended?

Thanks, there were unrelated indeed! dont know what happened. Corrected now!

I've just "un-deleted" the answers to that post for now, until we come to a resolution on how best to proceed!
EDIT: I've edited that bullet-point in the wiki answer you noted was distorted.
The new moderators are still in the process of figuring out what to do with these potential-wiki-type questions/answers, and we had been told by SE staff to compile all answers into 1 answer that was then turned into a wiki.
However, if that is not the way the BSE community wants to proceed we are happy to have a different protocol for dealing with these kinds of informational Q&A's.

Is there a way to freeze the pre-wiki answers encouraging new entries to be placed in the wiki?

@WMXZ ah, this is a good suggestion - indeed there's an option to "Lock" answers. Shall we do it that way? Does that look good, i.e. clear, non-confusing, non-offputting?

What do you mean by "lock" or "freeze"? As in the answers couldn't be editable? Or wouldn't be able to receive votes anymore? Or just that the wiki answer could be pinned to the top with other previous answers below?

@CarlyBatist info on locked posts:  https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/22228/what-is-a-locked-post. I think this means both answers or questions can be locked and they have different outcomes. I haven't been able to find if a CW is locked if that means no more edits allowed (which would defeat the purpose of a CW :)

@DanStowell is this a different type of lock option you have (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381491/remove-wiki-answer-lock-option-on-answers-because-its-misleading) That to me seems like it might do what we need - each existing answer could be locked, but the question can remain open, and the wiki answer can remain editable.


text:
moving from Meta to Beta
It seems easy to go from Beta to Meta. But I'm wasting a lot of time to find an easy way to return to Beta.
Would it be possible to have a button that allows fast return to Beta (or what it will be in future)?

I had the same frustration and just recently figured this out so thanks for asking this!

@JNat why was status-completed added?

The fastest way I know if is to click on the "three part bubble" on the very top right of the Meta page, which opens a drop down menu, then click "Bioacoustics" on the top row and you'll be taken back to the main page.

If you're into keyboard shortcuts, here's how you can use 'em:

You can switch to the meta site (and vice versa) with no clicks at
all, using keyboard shortcuts:

From your profile settings,
enable keyboard shortcuts.

From anywhere on the site, you can easily go to the meta site (and vice versa) using G+M.

Here's a demonstration of this method on Super User:

(From my answer to Could we go to the meta sites more quickly? on Meta Stack Exchange)


text:
When should the moderator election be?
UPDATE: The election has been scheduled to start on September 26th, as per the highest-scoring proposal here.

Since enough people have expressed interest in running in the inaugural election, we have been discussing when the election should start in the election chat room. We have been thinking of starting the nomination period on September 26 (concluding  Oct 11), October 17 (concluding Nov 1), or later and we still want to hear more people's opinions. Typically the nomination period will last one week, followed by voting for another week.
Vote UP the answer post you agree with the date (Vote DOWN only if you strongly disagree, and provide some reasoning for the disagreement if you can) or provide an alternative answer with a new date and why for others to vote for it.
You can also chat about it in the chat room linked above.
Click "FOLLOW" below this question if you want to receive a notification when a new answer is posted.

Note: Since elections in the Stack Exchange network always start on Mondays and conclude on Tuesdays, that puts some limitations on the dates we can choose from. Additionally, the date needs to account for potential holidays, as well as the general election calendar for the rest of the network, since CM oversight is required. Hence the proposed dates.

Considering it is already September, I do not know whether an October election is even possible. I have alerted the CM responsible for elections to keep an eye on this post in the next week, maybe they can share more about the possibilities.

September 26 (concluding Oct 11)

+1 (I can't vote for my post)

October 17 (concluding November 1)

Second Oct 1!
We should maybe also do a separate Meta post as a final call for nominations?
EDIT: @JNat said that elections have to start on a Monday, so re-doing my answer for September 26!

Good idea. Let me ask in chat.

I think last we left in the chat yes, a meta post on nominations probably wouldn't hurt. One argument for waiting until the election's nomination phase starts is that it will ping all users and inform them about the election so that might attract more folks. But we could just refer to the existing call.

I'm fine with doing either!


text:
The Badges are not being awarded
It's been 11 hours after the site came out and up to now the badges are not being awarded to the users (Please ignore the informed badge that's a different case in this case).
For example the badges, Autobiography,
Supporter, and Teacher should of been rewarded hours ago.

Does this issue still persist?

I was just awarded a bunch of badges...thinking y'all fixed it? It did persist up until yesterday.

I’m voting to close this question because the issue has since been resolved

@Ethan is that the normal procedure on meta, or does staff usually add a tag saying that it has been resolved?

@selene I completely forgot about the tags. A staff member shout add the [tag:status-completed] tag.


text:
2022 Community Moderator Election
The 2022 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.


text:
2022 Community Moderator Election
The 2022 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://bioacoustics.stackexchange.com/election/3
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election. You can also ask in the election chat room.


text:
Inaugural Pro-Tempore Moderator election kicking off September 26!
Summary: Bioacoustics Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for an election on September 26th to pick your inaugural pro-tempore moderators.
Since it looks like there's a consensus on when the inaugural election can open for nominations, I'm here to announce that it has officially been scheduled!
As a reminder, back in 2015, we established that having active moderators was one of the only active requirements for keeping sites around in the Stack Exchange network:

If there's enough moderation for a public beta site to consistently remain free of spam, for flags to be cleared, and for our Code of Conduct to be upheld, your site will remain open. However, if community leaders drop off, flags sit without being addressed, and we can’t find any suitable volunteers to step forward, the site gets closed.

Without a successful first election that results in 3 users being appointed as moderators, the site will not be able to progress, and will instead be shut down. As such, having a successful first election is a very important step for a budding community such as Bioacoustics.
Most of the details surrounding elections were explained previously, but as a reminder, here's what the timeline looks like.
The timeline:

Starting on September 26, users can nominate themselves on the election page. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)

On October 3, if there are 4 or more candidates, the election will move into the voting phase. If not, I'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period, there are 3 candidates, I'll simply appoint the candidates. (Bear in mind, users who have been suspended in the last year are not eligible to run and may be removed.)

If there are still fewer than 3 candidates at the end of the nomination period even after it is extended, the election will be considered a failure, and the site will be shut down.

If the election moves into the voting phase, I'll announce the results on meta on October 11 (or October 18, if we need to extend the nomination period).

We recognize that the circumstances surrounding this election are uncommon, but I want to reiterate what I've said numerous times over the past weeks: there are many viable election candidates within this community who we hope will nominate themselves for the position — at least 4 of whom have expressed interest in doing so. The Community Team is confident that this community can be healthy and thrive.
The success of this site rests on the outcome of that election, and at least 3 moderators are required for it to be considered a success — for that reason, we encourage anyone who is eligible to nominate for the position once the nominations are open.
If you have any questions about the process, please ask them in an answer below.

The nomination period is only extended if we don't have 4 candidates right?

If you have fewer than 4 candidates, to be precise, @Ethan.


text:
2022: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Bioacoustics over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Answer flags handled
22
20

Answers flagged
0
42

Comment flags handled
8
4

Comments deleted⁷
9
74

Comments flagged
1
11

Comments undeleted
2
0

Posts bumped
0
3

Posts deleted⁶
13
31

Posts locked
4
3

Posts undeleted
6
4

Posts unlocked
1
0

Question flags handled⁵
7
4

Questions closed
3
7

Questions flagged⁵
0
15

Tag synonyms proposed
0
3

Tags merged
2
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue
0
40

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue
0
106

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue
0
44

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue
0
7

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue
0
11

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue
5
133

Users contacted
84
0

Users suspended²
1
66

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Bioacoustics without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^

So the "massive" suspensions issued by CMs which led to the delayed election, were counted as being done by the "community"?

Poked a dev to investigate how the query is categorizing these, and will see if there's anything to be fixed for next year.


text:
New dates for inaugural Pro-Tempore Moderator Election
Summary: Bioacoustics Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for an election on August 29th to pick your inaugural pro-tempore moderators.
Back in 2015, we established that having active moderators was one of the only active requirements for keeping sites around in the Stack Exchange network:

If there's enough moderation for a public beta site to consistently remain free of spam, for flags to be cleared, and for our Code of Conduct to be upheld, your site will remain open. However, if community leaders drop off, flags sit without being addressed, and we can’t find any suitable volunteers to step forward, the site gets closed.

Without a successful first election that results in 3 users being appointed as moderators, the site will not be able to progress, and will instead be shut down. As such, having a successful first election is a very important step for a budding community such as Bioacoustics.
Most of the details surrounding elections were explained when I announced the first attempt at an election about a month ago. As you are likely aware, that election had to be canceled due to extraordinary circumstances, which were later explained in this Meta post. As such, this post will mostly go over the timeline for the election.
The timeline:

Starting on August 29, users can nominate themselves on the election page. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)

On September 5, if there are 4 or more candidates, the election will move into the voting phase. If not, I'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period, there are 3 candidates, I'll simply appoint the candidates. (Bear in mind, users who have been suspended in the last year are not eligible to run and may be removed.)

If there are less than 3 candidates at the end of the nomination period (or its extension), the election will be considered a failure, and the site will be shut down.

If the election moves into the voting phase, I'll announce the results on meta on September 13 (or September 20, if we need to extend the nomination period).

We recognize that the circumstances surrounding this election are uncommon, but I want to reiterate what I said last week: There are many viable election candidates within this community who we hope will nominate themselves for the position. The Community Team is confident that this community can still be healthy and thrive.
The success of this site rests on the outcome of that election, and at least 3 moderators are required for it to be considered a success — for that reason, we encourage anyone who is eligible to nominate for the position once the nominations are open.
If you have any questions about the process, please ask them in an answer below.

What a welcoming warm invitation for users to nominate themselves to moderate a site that appears to be doomed, thanks to the mishandling of this situation, users might not have the same enthusiasm as they did 10 days ago. A sensible measure would have been to wait at least a month, regain the trust of the community and give yourselves the time to carefully evaluate each user affected by the suspension, and allow each user the possibility for them to defend themselves. No. Instead the ship must sail even if the crew is half absent and many its officers are in jail.

thanks @Mari-LouA, indeed we (70 users according to SE) have not been able to respond yet as the 7-day suspensions have just been ending now. This includes: 4 out of 5 candidates of the cancelled moderator election; 5 out of 6 editors; most of the active users since the site activity has dropped from ~5 to 0.3 questions a week during the 7-day suspensions. This is a somehow strange practice! As far I'm concerned, I got no warning before the suspension.

I've talked to many folks who did not receive any warnings before their suspensions.

Just to address a prominent concern...
The site is not, at this point in time, inherently doomed or destined for closure. We keep an eye on community health metrics as a routine part of starting up a new site, and honestly, the signs are mixed, but modestly positive overall. That's frankly impressive given the volume of users that have not been able to participate over the last week. Here are some examples:
Daily actors on the site:

The red line in this image denotes August 18th, the day the suspensions were issued.
It's typical during a site's launch for activity to start high and slowly fall off to a healthy baseline over the following 3-4 months. This chart does show that there was a dip in activity following the suspensions, but it's not such a stark drop in activity when compared to the normal 'settling-in' phase of a new site. In fact, while there was a low period shortly following the suspensions, the number of actors to the site seems to still be equilibrating, which is overall a possible positive sign.
Posts per day on the site:

The red line in this image denotes August 18th, the day the suspensions were issued.
While it's obvious from this chart that the suspensions had an impact on the site's overall post count, it also makes clear that it's difficult to determine exactly what that impact was. The day the site went from Private Beta to Public Beta, there was a significant bump in activity, but ultimately the site seems to have been settling into a much slower routine. It's also worth noting, we also have many healthy sites on-network that see fewer posts than this site currently does.

In the long-run, will this series of suspensions have an outsize impact on the health of the site? Given the signs we can currently see, I'd personally consider it to be a dubious claim. Of course, there's no forecasting months or years into the future. But I suspect that if this site can find folks willing to moderate it, we will, in the long-run, be looking at a healthy site to come.
A word of advice: focus for now on trying to make sure the election is successful. I'm convinced this site can make it through this rough spot, and that this situation is far from unrecoverable. To ensure the future success of the site, though, we need to ensure y'all have a healthy complement of moderators: folks who can start to handle flags, lead discussions around site scope, and aid the site in forming good long-term quality standards.

Interesting. How is a "Daily actors" defined?

@Noil Any user who did one of the following on that day: Comment, vote, flag/close vote, post, review, or edit. (Other actions don't count as activity for the purposes of this graph.)

Before declaring the patient is alive and well, I would wait to see how many of the 70 suspended users return to regular activity.

For the graphs, you should also consider that during the first week in August there was the Biennial Marine Mammal Conference were most underwater bioacousticians were focused. So, the 1-8 August count could easily be higher, which makes the drop after 18 August (removing most underwater bioacousticians) significant.


text:
Leaving Private Beta, and Initial Pro-Tem Moderator Election!
Congratulations! You've met the participation and engagement expectations for an active private beta site, and will be moving into public beta on July 26, 2022!
We were worried for the first week or so there, but after posting some clear guidance to assist y'all in making sure this site grew into a healthy and successful community, we were happy to see a surge in activity and Meta discussions! ^_^
As we’re getting ready to wrap up the private beta for Bioacoustics Stack Exchange, that means it’s time to start thinking about what comes next: the election to choose your first pro-tem moderators.
What does it take to be a Moderator?
Prior to 2018, pro-tem moderators were picked by staff, and the Community Management team would look for users who:

Have a reasonably high reputation score to indicate active, consistent participation.
Show an interest in their meta’s community-building activities.
Lead by example, showing patience and respect for their fellow community members in everything they write.
Exhibit those intangible traits discussed in A Theory of Moderation.
Have an eye for content that should be flagged, closed or removed and act on that within the expectations of the community and Stack Exchange generally.

Electing your moderators
In 2018, however, we started experimenting with hosting elections for beta sites to choose their pro-tem moderators, in addition to the community-elected moderators in sites not in Beta, in the rest of the network. The process is mostly the same, but if you’re interested in the full details, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange.
In accordance with that, I’m here today to announce this site’s first pro-tem election and invite users interested in nominating to state their intention to do so here. Additionally, if you feel someone would be a good fit as a moderator on this site, feel free to use an answer to this question to support them and encourage them to run.
The pool of nominees that the community can choose from will hopefully bring a good mix of skills to the table: folks who are experienced in the SE network, folks are who good subject-matter experts, folks who are skilled at community building, etc.
The timeline:

Starting on 1 August, users can nominate themselves on the election page. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)

On 8 August, if there are 4 or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period there are still less than 4 candidates, I'll simply appoint the candidates. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination.)

If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on 16 August (or 23 August, if we need to extend the nomination period).

NOTE:

This is not an official election nomination thread. It’s just a space to get some conversation about potential nominees going and a notion of who would be willing to step up, so you don't have to put up your whole election nomination here.

If you have any questions about the process, please ask them in an answer below.

Yay! I am assuming the text about Parity the Substrate company doesn't apply to us. Is there anything similar you are concerned about with our site?

@selene: You are correct – I assume JNat just forgot to take that part out when they copied the text over from the corresponding post on Substrate's Meta... I've edited it out now :)

V2Blast is correct, @selene — I overlooked areas of the post I thought only had boilerplate text, oops!

How many are you expecting will be elected? --- Ah, I see that the page says "3". (I would have expected a bit more)

I think @noil, @thejasvi, and @Shannon would all make great moderators.
All three are active on the site and on Meta, are excellent subject matter experts, and are an supportive community members!

Note that while folks can encourage others to join, they'll need to actually nominate themselves when the election starts in order to be a candidate. (In other words: While you can informally "nominate" others by encouraging them to run or saying they'd make a good mod, they'll need to be willing to nominate themselves in order for them to actually be considered a candidate in the election.) You might know this already, but I just wanted to clarify that. So on that note... If you want to say "these people would make good mods", you may want to edit your answer to explain why you think so :)

Ah ok, I totally missed the first part of that when reading through. Thank you for clarifying!

What about Selene ? Their active on the main site and meta.

Aside from agreeing with @selene's nominations (@Noil, @Shannon + I'd be happy to stand for election too) , I also think the following would be great moderators considering their topic expertise, and general manner interaction with community members and Meta discussions so far (pls forgive my poor summaries of research fields, and correct if needed).

@selene (cetacean acoustics, aquatic field biologist)
@Jamie Macaulay (cetacean acoustics, dev in a popularly used software)
@Carly Batist (primate + terrestrial acoustics, passive monitoring)

FWIW, I will only put my name in the hat if there are not enough people. I have a list of other ways I hope to strengthen this community, but will step up if needed.