What is the function of the "Abandon your question" option when a member has a question moderated for editing?

I agree that the modding has become a bit draconian since Auggie moved on, but I don’t entirely understand the situation that you’re describing.

What exactly is the difference between then and now for abandoned questions? Is it just that you used to be able to visit a question which was labelled “being edited” and now you can’t?

I asked to have a question pulled this week and abandoned it because I want to ask it a different way.

What question was too short?

I recently asked a question about where has Cruiser gone (I noticed his avatar had become a jellyfish instead of his regular picture so I clicked on it to see if he had found his own jellyfish or was it one of those offered to us. Well, I got the Hungry Neptune page. Bye bye Cruiser).
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So I asked a question about it and today I noticed I had a question needs editing with the proviso that questions cannot be attacking jellies not here to defend themselves.

OK. I understand that. But it wasn’t an attack from which Cruiser needed to defend himself. I figured it would become an honorarium to him where we could all praise him.

So I tried to edit it 4 or 5 times and it finally said great work good editing or something like that and led me to believe the question was still alive. But when I look for it it simply no longer exists.

so, goodbye Cruiser, wherever you are!

I fully expect this answer to get removed, too!

I abandoned a question, @dappled_leaves, only to see all versions disappear.

“Describe your hands?”, re-asked as “Care to describe your hands?” Now both absent and unaccounted for, @GloPro.

I expect the question to be removed, @Dan_Lyons. Not because there is anything wrong with it, but because it’s bound to be unpopular with the PTB.

Describe your hands is perfectly adequate. I asked Describe your personality with no issues. Seems the exact same unless someone is counting letters.
I would love to describe my hands.

Hey, I remember the describe your hands question. It was pretty cool because my image of you from your avatar makes me think the complete opposite from how you described your own hands.
(I know it is silly to make any sort of judgement regarding peoples’ looks or personality from their avatars but…)
I think that would have been a fun question.

I’d love to give you the opportunity to describe your hands, @GloPro. [sigh] Go flag your personality Q!

I thought so too, @Dan_Lyons.

May as well say…“ahh, fuck it, I can’t be bothered”

Apparently you cannot take a hint @ibstubro…(jk) Have you pm’d the mods to ask what seems to be the problem?

Well, the Cruiser one would have been modded off because you are not allowed to name a Jelly in the title of a question. Describe your hands is not a question. When you abandon a question, it means you want them to remove it.

But I do agree that some of the modding seems to have been erratic and/or harsh.

I do that sometimes, too, @ucme. But the more I see pure garbage being allowed on here, the more it makes me want to stick to my guns. It’s the old “We only hold you to a standard higher than your own,” Catch 22.

I have paragraphs from the Mods, @Crazydawg.

Every time we have a celebration, a Jelly is mentioned in a positive light, @janbb. I think that was @Dan_Lyons point. He meant to mention Cruiser in a positive light. How is “Describe your personality.” a question, and “Describe your hands?” not. And more importantly, given the receding traffic on Fluther, is it worth modding either? Yes, I abandoned my question, and the mods deleted it. Then they subsequently deleted its replacement without fanfair or notification, which fell within the guidelines but supposedly
was an attempt to ‘circumvent Fluther policies’ that I didn’t know existed. As I said, I did the exact same thing in the past, before Auggie’s retirement, and it was not a problem.

@ibstubro I think the parties are the one exception they make to that rule but agree with your points about the two describe questions and also about the receding traffic in Fluther.

@ibstubro says you

Now I’m confused, @Crazydawg?

@ibstubro You have the paragraphs from the mods, I don’t.

Oh, cripes. @Crazydawg. I can lend you a few. As a matter of fact, you can have them.
Keep that under your hat.

I wonder why the mods have been noticeably silent in this thread.

I suspect that there has been no moderation during this time, @GloPro. Feast or famine?

@ibstubro Since you are asking publicly, I am going to answer publicly. We usually do not do this as a way to maintain privacy for the users, but since you don’t seem to want the privacy, I’ll bite. Sorry to the rest of the mod team if you don’t agree with this.

[Mod says] In the 3 years that I have been a mod, we have never allowed users to simply abandon a question and ask it again. While we understand the down side of having questions go back to their original position after the moderation process, there is no fix for this at this time. This has been discussed in numerous meta questions over the years. When we send a question back for editing, it is suppose to come back to us so we can verify the corrections have been made before it is reposted. When a user simply abandons the question and asks it again, they are bypassing the moderation process, which is not allowed and why your second attempt was removed. While there is no mention of bypassing the moderation process in the guidelines, I have never seen it allowed and was taught (by Auggie) that it is not allowed in my moderator training.

You mentioned being modded for a question being too long and a question being too short. This is because (per the guidelines) question titles must be “clear, concise, and in question form” and “provide enough detail to adequately answer them and/or prompt a good discussion” respectively for the too long and too short issues.

@Dan_Lyons Since you also asked publicly… Questions calling out specific jellies (other than the party questions) are not allowed because while your intention may have been good, the posts that other users make may not (especially in threads about someone leaving). Since that person (the one that left) is not able to defend themself (if necessary), the posts are not allowed. While you may think this should not be an issue, we have had such questions asked before and there were answers like “I’m glad he’s gone” and “good riddance”, which then left to discussion about which other users people wished would have left instead. Because of the negative history, all such mentions (once again, except the party thread) are no longer allowed. I’m sorry this wasn’t adequately explained to you when your question was pulled.

@Seaofclouds If a question is moderated, voluntarily abandoned, then a second, similar, but acceptable question is posted, how is that circumventing the moderation process? Rather, to me, it seems a “fix” for “the down side of having questions go back to their original position after the moderation process.” My question would appear in real time in a form acceptable to the moderators. I have used this process at least a couple of times in the past, with no objection.

How is it that my question “Care to describe your hands?” can simply disappear, yet my question, “What’s a great passive/aggressive line to stop or derail a discussion?” is kicked into permanent moderation limbo, where it is queued for editing, but I’m told that there is no way to edit it for re-posting? How is it that a perfectly good question can be deleted and a (supposedly) irredeemable question just hangs in the air, so that I always have a question for editing, but that I can never edit and refuse to abandon?

As mentioned above, how is “Describe your personality.” a question, and “Describe your hands?” not a question?

My ‘Willing to pay at restaurant?’ was moderated, forcing me to remove ” “enough detail to adequately answer them” i.e. that I did not want a bill divided by the number of diners. If the bill was for $500, and 2 diners ordered off of the appetizer menu, then 2 diners spent $200 each and 2 spent $50. Removing that detail from the question changed the core of the question, irrevocably. And what do I get from the moderator? ‘Eh, yeah, some people don’t read the details before answering, we can’t help that.’ Well, I can by crafting a well thought out and concise question.

And finally, do you believe Fluther is so flush with questions that we need to be discouraging people from asking them? There seems to be a consensus here on that question.
‘Since” we’re discussing this publicly, I’ll refrain from quoting some of the gibberish that’s currently posted and archived.

@Seaofclouds Thanks. I get it.

I liked the passive aggressive question. It was clever and became fun towards the middle. It was very interactive with a lot of jelly participation, and a nice way for some people to blow off some weird pent up aggression going on that week. I thought it chilled everybody out. By the time it was pulled there was no need for a referee or modding, in my opinion.

@ibstubro As I stated about, the reason you can’t simply abandon the question and post a new one is because before the question that was sent for editing is reposted, the mods must review it to be sure the errors have been corrected. It’s the way the system is set up. Failing to edit the question so we can review it and simply asking it as a new question is bypassing the moderation process.

You question about passive aggressive ways to stop a question was pulled for being flame bait. You asked that question after an interaction with another user and even stated that that interaction was the inspiration for the question. Flame bait is against the guidelines and why you were not able to reword the question and resubmit it. If you wish for it to no longer linger as a question for editing, abandon it.

If the hands question was the one you abandoned and then reposted (bypassing the moderation process), it is lost because once you hit abandon the question is gone. You were unable to ask it again at that time because you bypassed the moderation process. Some of the mods were trying to help you with this situation in PMs. If you would like to continue that conversation to come to a solution, I’m more than willing to help out.

It is not a matter of not wanting questions asked at Fluther. It is an issue that the moderators were asked to uphold the standards the Founders set forth for the site and that is what we do. They made the guidelines and we do our best to keep the site how they intended it. I’m sorry that you don’t like their rules for the questions, but we (the mod team) are not able to change the rules the Founders set forth.

Specifically, my question is: How is it that a perfectly good question “Care to describe your hands?” can disappear, yet (according to the moderators) an irredeemable question be placed in my queue for editing, permanently. I don’t want to abandon the question, but you refuse to allow me to ask while at the same time refusing to delete it. Sort of a fascist democracy thing going on there, seems to me.

What, exactly, are your grounds for refusing me permission to as “Care to describe your hands?” If I had abandoned “Describe your hands?” and reposted, “Describe your hands?”, that would be attempting the circumvent the moderation process, in that I asked a flawed question twice. In fact, what I did was circumvent an admitted flaw in Fluther that cannot be address otherwise. How is it that I was able to do this in the past? I get that you can’t simply re-ask the exact same question. I did not.

As mentioned above, how is “Describe your personality.” a question, and “Describe your hands?” not a question?

Why was I forced to dumb down “How much would you pay…” to the point that it ended a Social rather than a General question, as I intended?

I’ve looked in the archives and there’s a fair amount of crap in there. So be it…it’s a lot of the fun of Fluther. Surely you can see how getting say, 3 out of 5 questions moderated is discouraging if not annoying. Anyway, who want to play a game?

If you are not allowed to change the rules set forth by the founders and the asking a new similar question before abandoning the old question is not in the guidelines, then aren’t you actually doing something you just said you aren’t allowed to do?

I understand that you were told it’s an unwritten rule, but I disagree that it circumvents anything. If you have a problem with any question, new, old, related, unrelated, whatever, according to the written guidelines, then you should kick it back to the OP. you should not take it upon yourself to link any question asked, but view each one independently and mod as such. If the old one were allowed to stand then you have two of the same question, which is a modded occurrence. But what you are doing is pulling the original so that it no longer exists and then controlling a future question beyond the scope of the written guidelines.

@ibstubro The passive/aggressive question was sent back with the reason it was pulled. If we deleted it completely, you would not have received a notification of the question being pulled. My sending it back to you, you were give the reason it was pulled. Your other question was deleted completely because it bypassed the moderation process. The issue with your hands question is not that it is not a valid question. It is because there were things that needed to be corrected in your first attempt. That was send back to you for editing and you abandoned it (thus deleting it). You then reposted the question as a new question, which was then deleted for bypassing the moderation process. If you still want to ask that question, we can work that out since it should be clear now that you cannot bypass the moderation process. The issue can easily be resolved.

@GloPro The bypassing the moderation rule was one taught to me in my moderator training. I don’t know why it isn’t specifically written out in the guidelines, but generally speaking, bypassing any rule system is usually not allowed anywhere. This is not a rule the current moderators made up, it is something we were all taught in moderator training. I have no clue when it started, but it’s been around the whole time I’ve been a moderator (which has been 3 years now).

In the issue here, the original question was sent back to the OP for corrections. Rather than making the corrections and sending the question back to the mods for approval and re-submission, the OP abandoned it and asked the same question over again. That is where the problem lies and how it is considered bypassing the moderation process. The question should have come back to the mod team rather than going directly on the site.

As I stated above, the problem is in regards to bypassing the current moderation process. The process is in place so that we can make sure mistakes are corrected. Many times, users post the same question, still with the same mistakes, making additional (unnecessary) work for the mod team to start the whole process over again. The moderation process is in place to ensure that mistakes are corrected before questions are posted on the site for quality purposes. It’s hard to understand the effect that it has unless you see the moderation process on all sides. The moderation process allows an exchange between the OP and the mods. We can discuss the question, make suggestions, and go back and forth until the question is ready for re-submission. Asking a new question loses the comments that were made on the originally posted question.

@GloPro Given that the passive aggressive question was merely a passive aggressive means to piss me off personally, I can’t agree that it “chilled everybody out.” But I suppose my perspective on that question is unique.

Hmmm, you didn’t come around by the end? That’s the tricky thing about PA… I thought everyone starting having fun with it. Why did you take the bait?

I’m not sure what I’m expected to have “come around” to. Nor why I should have been expected to ignore the question.

[mod says] – Please keep it civil, folks. Personal disagreements between individual jellies can be taken to PM.

No one is being uncivil.

@dappled_leaves We never said anyone was being uncivil, just reminding everyone to keep being civil and take any personal disagreements to PM rather than posting them here—before it happens so we don’t have to mod it after it happens.

Oy vey.

Let me get this out of the way, first, @Seaofclouds:
As mentioned above, how is “Describe your personality.” a question, and “Describe your hands?” not a question?

The hands question was send back to me with two options: Edit or Abandon. I abandoned it.
I then asked a different, but similarly worded question that was well within Fluther’s written guidelines. It was pulled without ceremony or notification. This is not the case of the same question being asked twice, but the case that I asked two similarly worded questions, one which in one moderator’s opinion required either editing or (per Fluther’s written rules), abandonment. And, once again I have used this exact same method in the past to modify a moderated question, yet keep it current.

So what you’re telling me is that you, the moderator, control whether I, the OP, can edit or abandon a question. You state that my only option on the passive/agressive question is abandonment, and my oly option on the hands question was editing. If that was the original intent of the developers, don’t think it would have come up before last week?

As @GloPro asks, if I had one standing/posted question on one topic and it was a valid question, why would anyone moderate it?

“Many times, users post the same question, still with the same mistakes, making additional (unnecessary) work for the mod team to start the whole process over again”
Simply has no validity here.

Oh, and back to the restaurant moderation. How did changing:
“What’s the absolute most you have ever spent/would ever spend to eat at a restaurant? Not the highest bill you’ve paid at a restaurant, but the most expensive meal you have personally eaten/would personally eat at a restaurant.”
To:
“What’s the absolute most you have ever spent/would ever spend to eat at a restaurant?”
improve the question?
In fact, it changed the question in a way I specifically had crafted the question to avoid. Ultimately calling for my General question to be kicked to Social.

I’m pursing this because it all seems like “making additional (unnecessary) work for the mod team” to me.