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Right speech and SE customs. Are Buddhists too nice for an SE site?
Some of the best stack exchange sites can be brutal in how they deal with low quality questions and answers.

Low quality questions are shut down.
Low quality answers are voted down
People will either politely or curtly leave comments about low quality questions

And other other Buddhist places on the internet I've been on, sometimes being nice isn't as important as looking for implicit arrogance and setting people straight.  On the better sites, questions and answers are voted down because, say a programmer, doesn't really gain anything by telling someone they're stupid (or immoral!)-- vote down and move on. But (at least on other places on the internet I've been on) people act like they are racking up karma points for putting people that annoy them (put 'em their proper place, cut down those arrogant posters down to size, electronically wipe the smug smile off that better-than-you-know-it-all and really rack up the karma points for it!)
Will our Buddhist beliefs make it easier or harder to pull of a high quality stack exchange site?

"And other Buddhist forums I've been on..."
Unfortunately StackExchange isn't a discussion forum. We are supposed to be doing well structured and strict Q&A here. If you want a forum for extended discussions then there's always Dhamma Wheel and Dharma Wheel for Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism respectively.

Did I imply I want a discussion forum?

When you say "other Buddhist forums" it implies that that is how you view this site.

Fixed. Hope that clears up the confusion.

Now that you've had time to think about it, can you add an answer of your own to this question?

I think a balance needs to be struck. We do not want to be too "brutal", otherwise it can be hard for new people to join and participate, since you need a certain amount of reputation points to do so.
For example, on sites like Stack Overflow, their base of experts who are more heavy-handed with their critiques has grown to a point where it creates an issue for a lot of newcomers: you need reputation points to ask questions, and if you don't ask the "best" questions (most beginners probably won't, which is why they are learning), then you get downvoted, which negatively affects your reputation, which inhibits your ability to participate further. Full disclosure--this is the predicament that my colleagues and I find ourselves in with that site and others like it.
Buddhism is not like programming, it is a religion. It is not a meritocracy (whether any field is can be a discussion somewhere else). It is not just for people who can argue the best, there are no exams, and no grades. It is no secret that English-speaking Buddhism can seem too proof-based, since we still take western scholasticism for granted. This can be quite a turn-off to lay Buddhists who do not take that approach for granted, so we should tread carefully, especially questions that have to do with the cultural aspects of Buddhism that may or may not be taken from any one sutra, but is nonetheless a part of how many people practice Buddhism.
Also, "Right Speech" shouldn't be invoked just because someone doesn't like a critique. I think if that should be a "flag", the explanation of why a comment is flagged as such should be very specific.
Here are my personal observations: People are less "nice" when discussing topics on the internet in general, and topics like Buddhism are no exception. So I do not think that our standards for a community have to be much different from others: we don't always have to avoid critiquing someone, but we should respect the fact that were are talking to other humans, not boxes on a screen.

What jumps at me is how most questions are pretty low-quality compared to other SE sites. On one hand, we can't expect the same level of rigour from an average person interested in Buddhism as from (say) a mathematician or Sci-Fi geek. On the other hand, it would be nice to see questions that:

Do not take up to 5 paragraphs of text,
Do not ask 3-4 questions at once,
Have done basic research by googling and reading Wikipedia,
Do not use question as a platform for asserting their political opinion,
Do not ask questions out of logical reflex but to get a useful answer,
Take care to phrase their question clearly and objectively.

I somewhat agree with the premise of the question, in that being Buddhist often correlates with having a low stress threshold which manifests as tendency to avoid direct confrontation. In the interest of community though, we must overcome this weakness and step up our game to ensure high-quality content.

We don't have enough experts yet. I'm going to guess that Americans (I'm one of them) represent most of the users so far-- and Buddhism is a relatively new tradition and people tend to have a very shallow knowledge of the topic, usually highly influenced by DT Suzuki Zen.

re: wikipedia-- all sites have the problem. I rack up easy rep every day on Stackflow by doing other people's googling for them. Any new site is going to feel like copying wikipedia into SE until all the obvious questions are finally asked and out of the way.

perhaps you are right

@AndreiVolkov, I agree (some of my own questions included). I wonder if we're all open to the possibility that although we passed Beta, Buddhism may simply not be suited to SE? That said, there's no reason it shouldn't be if other "religions" manage to get by, but increasingly I wonder if the straight Q&A on which SE is predicated really works for these kinds of things. Shrug.

I just had some enlightening suggestions given to me in a chatroom for moderators of all SE.Religions sites, perhaps we can learn something from them. A thing or two :)

I think that Buddhism and right speech should make it easier for us to deal with ignorant or misguided comments/posts on this site. On any SE site, the point of downvoting, closing, and flagging is to help others, not to punish. On any SE site, you get the best out of people's ideas and contributions by encouraging and teaching them. We downvote questions when they are unclear or low-value, to encourage people to think before asking and to revise their questions. We close questions that are harmful to the community to protect others, and to set a standard for the site that everyone can see on the front page. We downvote answers that are unarguably wrong, to avoid newcomers thinking such answers represent mainstream belief or practice. And throughout all this, we explain sensitively why we do it, so that the user who has misstepped understands his mistake, and wishes to learn and participate further, which in turn helps him to observe right-speech (by not posting misleading answers or unhelpful questions).
Anyone familiar with the idea of "pushing down with one hand to lift up with the other" should have no trouble with dealing with other users sensitively even when doing apparently-negative actions like downvoting and flagging. As Sophie says, the tricky part is to remember that every username has behind it a person, with the same Buddha-nature as yourself, and the goal of all of us here is to help all people to realise that potential.
Speaking for myself, I find sites like this the easiest way to practise right speech. It may be easier in face-to-face conversations to remember that you're dealing with a human, but the immediacy also makes it much easier to lose your head, and speak hurtfully in anger or falsely in haste. Online, if you start to observe this tendency in your behaviour, it's much easier to step away and give yourself time to come up with a more helpful response.

Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum.
I think it needs to be made clear to all visitors that Stack Exchange is not a discussion forum. And I don't think this should become a Buddhism discussion forum either. After all, there are plenty of those on the Internet. Dhamma Wheel and Dharma Wheel are ideal places to have long, extended discussions involving personal opinions and experiences on Buddhism.
Buddhism Stack Exchange should be the definitive site for authoritative, well-sourced answers to questions on Buddhism.
A good Stack Exchange answer is typically accompanied by references to established sources. For Buddhism, these would include the Pali Tipitaka, the Sanskrit Tripitaka, Mahayana sutras, Prajna Paramita, and authoritative commentaries.
Unsourced personal opinions and discussions belong in comments, not in answers! Again, the point of having a Stack Exchange site in the first place is rigorous Q&A. This place should not become yet another discussion forum.
I do think we need more moderators to raise awareness on this site regarding how Stack Exchange works. Sorry if this comes across as terse, but I don't see why typical forum-style posts should belong on Stack Exchange. I assure everyone it's nothing personal at all.

One SE custom that gives me a tiny pause for thought is the reputation score. I confess I think I'm getting a wee bit attached to seeing it get higher :-)

it's like all the video games I've played in life.. "leveling up" always gets addicting. :)


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Should we have tags for part of the Tripitaka?
Should we have tags for parts and sub divisions of the Tripitaka and also the sutras?
E.g. Suthra Pitakaya, Anguthara Nikaya, etc.

What efficiency would this create?

We can search for all question with the particular tag. E.g. Say I want to read all question on Anapana Sutta.

I think yes. Because there are some suttas with same name but in different locations of the Tripitaka. So it is a good practice to add a tag or a reference. For example, I have seen 5 suttas named "Anuruddha sutta" in different parts of the Tripitaka.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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How to search for question with less than n answers with m upvotes?
Being able to search for question which have not attached much answers would be helpful for a Q & A site. Currently unanswered only shows question with no answered that has received an upvotes. This is a bit limiting as there might be questions which can get better answers but not necessarily without upvotes.
So it would be good to have a way to search questions fitting a much broader search criteria.

That level of control/customization in not built-in to the site's default user interface.
But, the StackExchange Data Explorer ("SEDE") lets users create and run arbitrary queries.
SEDE queries run against an archived copy of the site data. The archive is generated / backed up each week-end (so a SEDE query won't detect the most recent i.e. this week's questions).
An example of a custom query is Find interesting unanswered questions.
To use this query, enter your own user ID, which I think is 295.
You can edit this query if it doesn't do exactly what you want. For example, this line ...
where (select count(*) from Posts a where a.ParentId = q.Id and a.Score > 0) = 0

... filters/removes (from the list of 'unanswered' results) all topics which have an answer which have a score of greater than 0. The two 0 in the above line correspond to the m and n in your question title: you can edit the query to replace these 0 with other numbers, e.g. 1 and 2.
For example the following looks for topics which have less than two answers that have a score of more than 1:
where (select count(*) from Posts a where a.ParentId = q.Id and a.Score > 1) < 2

This particular query tries to present/filter questions whose tags match the tags which you have historically been able to answer. If you want to remove that filter (so that you see questions regardless of their tags), I suspect it's sufficient to edit/remove this line from the query:
join #tags t on t.TagId = pt.TagId

I am looking for unanswered questions in the site

Great information though. Upvoted.

If you can create some of these queries and share the links it might be a bit more useful to may site users. I created the following follow up: http://meta.buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/290/create-and-share-a-set-of-useful-data-site-queries-for-the-site . Please don't limit it to what I asked here.

You can do this straight from the Buddhism SE search box.

To search for only questions that fall within a particular range for score, number of answers, or number of views, you can enter an upper or lower parameter, or a range.

score:-1 or score:-1.. will both return posts with a score greater than or equal to -1
views:500..1000 or views:500-1000 will return posts with 500 to 1000 views
answers:..3 will return questions with 3 or fewer answers

More tips on searching are here.
So to find positively scored questions with no answers, try: answers:0 score:1 in the main site search box.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Stats on Various Aspects of Activity
Is it possible to get stats on user activity on the site.

What times users generally come
Are the question rates increase
How much time users spend on the time
How many new users are using the site
Site events in hourly buckets
etc.

This topic was kicked to the top of the 'active' list by 'Community', probably because it has no accepted answer. If you accepted the existing answer then it wouldn't get kicked again. I suggest that the meta.buddhism site should ideally be about topic related to this site (Buddhism). For general questions about the web site software (which would be applicable to any/every stackexchange site) I recommend using http://meta.stackexchange.com/ instead.

Some of this information (but not all) is available to the moderators, but they are not allowed to share it. AFAIK the following is not tracked:

Time users generally come (but you can see this for particular chatrooms here)
How much time users spend on the site
Site events in hourly buckets

Things that are tracked are for example:

Number of new users
Number of (new) visits
Number of posts/questions/answers
Number of votes

All these statistics are tracked per day (so not per hour), but again this data is only available to moderators.
What you can do is look at the site statistics on the Area51 page. These are updated daily, but don't provide a history. On a few other sites some people have started to write down the statistics of the Area51 page every week or every other week so you can see how things are progressing, for example here are those stats for Sustainability SE and for Personal Productivity SE


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How do you ping / contact a user?
Some users who have contributed good question and answers seam to have gone in active. What is the best way to get them back on the site?
Also some questions could do with attention of a perticular user as they have given good answers in the past. How can you get their attention.

You can leave a comment on their post or ping them in chat if you can find them around. You could email them if they have listed their email address publicly in their profile.

How do you invite someone one to chat?

I appreciate your efforts to make this site grow and attract new (or in this case old) users, but I feel you may be a little too enthusiastic.
First of all, Buddhism SE is doing a great job for a beta site of this age. Personally I think the question quality could be a bit better, but if I look at number of users, visits and questions, this site is doing great.
Now, if a user has decided not to visit this site anymore, he/she may have perfectly good reasons for this. There is no possibility for users to send messages to others users outside of the StackExchange website unless they've provided you with their email themselves (e.g. in their profile). This is intentional(!) because the last thing we want to do is annoy people by sending them unwanted emails.
You can attract the attention of a user that is still visiting StackExchange sites by typing @username (replace 'username' with their actual username and skip the spaces if there are any) in a comment or chat message. If you do this a notification of your comment/chat message will appear in that user's StackExchange inbox in the top bar.


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Use of the Blog / Newsletter
Our site has a blog feature which we have never used. The blog point to the main site. Also I read somewhere some sites have a newsletter. Perhaps we can try to have on also.
I think we can automate this process also with the data site queries so might not be much of an overhead for the moderators.

The newsletter is automatically generated - you can find Buddhism SE's on http://stackexchange.com/newsletters

There is a question on meta.stackexchange where the blog feature was first discussed and introduced. In the accepted answer it says:

Here are some guidelines that I would expect to see from a community wanting a blog:

Raise the idea on the child meta.  A community blog needs the involvement of community members.
Define the scope and purpose of the blog.  Is the blog about the site?  Is it about the site's topic?  Is it about the industry around the topic?  Keep in mind the audience of your community and their interests.  Another generic blog about <x> may not be all that interesting.
Recruit contributors.  Who will write entries for the blog?  Starting a blog is a bit like going through the buffet line.  Be realistic - don't let your eyes be bigger than your stomach.  Think seriously about if and how often you will be able to contribute a blog post, including research/prep time.
Plan a schedule.  Given the results of steps #2 and #3, think about a rough idea of a schedule for the blog.  Will there be one post a week, posted Mondays?  Will there be <x> posts on Tuesdays and <y> posts on Fridays?  You don't need to be pushing out posts daily, but I would say at least one post a week.

You've just done the first step. We now need to discuss the scope and see how many people are willing to contribute to a blog (or newsletter).
BTW, I disagree with the 'at least one post a week' mentioned at point 4. I think one every other month (5 per year) is the bare minimum.

How do we get this started? How do we get the editors? What needs to be done?

@SumindaSirinathSalpitikorala you need to raise awareness here on meta about this initiative and ask people if they want to contribute. You can start by asking one of the mods to make this post a 'featured' post so it will show up in the 'Featured on Meta' box on the main site and hopefully draw some attention.

I also found this article, where at the bottom is more info on how to get started.

@SumindaSirinathSalpitikorala You can also look at how other sites have tried to do it, by looking into their 'meta' sites: for example, http://meta.codereview.stackexchange.com/search?q=blog and http://meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com/search?q=blog

Which are good sites to look at?

On my mobile. I didn't see the links before. Will look at them.

Other sites also have it. We also need to follow. E.g. http://islam.blogoverflow.com/

Also some sites have twitter and facebook accounts. We could do something on that front also.

Lets start with twitter and facebook. Also there is Quora. May be we can look at some integration with it also.

Also G+ page also would be great.

Hey, talk talk talk. I read the whole page and there is no talk about a start. How about we drop the antics and start for heavens sake and see what happens.

The creation of new site blogs is on hiatus, but that's not to say that the community here shouldn't make plans for what they would want to see in a blog down the line.
There isn't any real proper integration between the blog and Q&A systems. The blogs we do create - and their authors - ultimately suffer as a result of that disconnect. We're looking to fix all this but it's going to take some time, and we feel that it's better to have people wait for a more complete blog experience than to continue to create ill-fated blogs. However, that's not to say that this community shouldn't discuss the idea of a blog or collect volunteers and ideas for posts. It's just a disclaimer that it may be many months before the blog can be created.

Ping us on this when the infrastructure becomes available.


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Social Media Accounts
Many of the other sites have social media accounts. I think we also should do the same. These are powerful way to communicate in the moderns world.

Maybe someone could start us a Facebook page and twitter account.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that a Twitter account used to be set up automatically. Almost all older sites older than 7 months seem to have one (you can see this in this list below each site's name). However, the most recent sites don't have it so perhaps you now have to request one?

Let's get the info how this is done and get this going.

We need to get hold for somebody from SE who knows and get his help to walk us through the process and integration.

We do not set up per-site Twitter accounts anymore. They have not been shown to add any value, and Twitter now shuts them down more often than not because they are obviously run by robots.

Ok, I've created a twitter account:
https://twitter.com/Buddhism_SE
and a Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/buddhism.se
And set up an account with If This Then That:
https://ifttt.com/p/buddhismse/shared
So it will send new questions to both Twitter and Facebook.

Great. Also hos about an a G+ account also.

Time being lets just register the G+ page / community also. No need of integration as IFTTT does not have it yet I think.

You are welcome to create social media accounts and use them however you like; however they must be clearly marked as not run or sanctioned by SE corporate. Something like "This page is administered by members of the Buddhism Stack Exchange community and not affiliated with Stack Exchange, Inc.". Stack Exchange logos (including the beta "Bu" logo) also can't be used by the page as a profile or header image.
Aside from all of that, I would encourage you to think about what you will be using these pages for. I mentioned above that we no longer automatically set up Twitter accounts for newly created sites. This decision was triggered by the fact that Twitter was shutting down the new accounts almost immediately after creation, making the creation process for these accounts take several weeks when the amount of return we got from those accounts barely warranted several minutes. Hardly any ever managed to scrape together more than a few hundred followers - a mere handful in the Twitter world. These accounts are robots shouting questions out into the void, and nobody is listening.
I would argue (and have done so in our internal discussions about social media) that an underfollowed and totally automated social feed is leaps and bounds worse for an entity's public image than having no presence at all. More briefly: not doing it is better than doing it poorly.
This community is free to do as it likes with these social accounts (provided that they follow the guidelines above). But first I recommend asking yourself what value you see these pages adding to your community.

Thank you for the info and opinion. Why would you say it is worse than no presence? It seems like a useful way for people to keep up with the latest questions. Mind you, I'm thinking it wouldn't be entirely automated.

@yuttadhammo If it weren't entirely automated, it might be more useful as a way of interesting and attracting drive-by users. If it's just automated, it's a glorified RSS feed, and individuals can just... use RSS feeds however they see fit.

Social media is inherently outward-facing; non-users of Buddhism Stack Exchange are going to encounter these accounts, even if that's not how they're intended to be used. If a potential's new user's first encounter with B.SE is "oh, that's that robot that spits out links I don't understand", we're unlikely to get them to come hang out with us.

I guess I thought they might thing "oh, that's that cool list of interesting questions I can click on to see the answer to"... I'm still not convinced it is unappealing. Too bad we can't see where traffic to the site is coming from...

@yuttadhammo My personal opinion is that "Oh, yuttadhammo, that's that cool guy who posts really interesting stuff" is much more powerful than a robot account. After all, the power of a Stack Exchange site lies within its community--its human beings. You guys are what make this place interesting and useful.

To me, it's the difference between two roommate wanted ads. "Come live in our house! It has big bay windows, hardwood floors, and a dishwasher." or "Come live with us! We're a bunch of astronauts who do macrame for charity and love to read medieval French poetry, and we have a room open in our house." I know which house I'd contact first--the one that led with what makes their house unique and awesome.

Yes, but it's one thing to say that an automated feed is less useful than a human presence; it is another to say that it is less useful than no presence...

@yuttadhammo That's exactly what I meant, though. I believe that automated feeds can actually be detrimental. Not always, and it depends on how it's executed and used.

This is ultimately up to you folks, of course. My recommendation is to keep the social in social media and reach out as humans, but if you have a killer strategy I'm just not understanding I will certainly not try to stop you.

@yuttadhammo I'm worried I come off like a negative Nancy here, so I'll try to reframe. You guys are doing a great job already, and your desire and energy to get out and evangelize is extremely commendable. I just meant to encourage you to consider a greater strategy before setting up robots to shoot links into the ether, is all.

No, it's not that, I was just surprised at the idea that it might actually hurt us to have an automated Facebook page. Maybe we should consider whether we can put together a Social Media team?


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I see "Unregistered" next to some users in their profile page. What is this?
Some of the users have "Unregistered" next to their name. What does not mean.

I noticed the same here:

If you want to answer a question, it is not necessary to login with your Stackexchange account. This option becomes visible when you log out and is show as below:

It means you can fill in whatever name you want to display (tested). This does not work for Meta as an registered account is mandatory.

Is it possible to convert your existing account to anonymous?

I believe it can only be done the other way around, your account is already been registered to a name etc. but it is possible to alter that information and use a fake name so it make you look like anonymous. There is a downside to anonymous accounts in my opinion, that is if you lose your cookie file before or without registering then all your progress is lost too, so I would just stick around with the registered accounts ;)


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Site Beta Cycle
How does the Beta cycle work. What can happen after a beta? Based on what are the outcomes decided? To become a permanent site what needs to be done and what are the low hanging fruits?

Don't worry about getting out of beta. This is already a permanent site.
Being in public beta does not mean a site is in danger of shutting down at any moment--or even at all. We rarely shut down sites once they have made it out of private beta. This community breezed through private beta with flying colors and is now a fully-fledged Stack Exchange site forever and ever, as long as there is still sufficient activity to keep the site going.
Graduation is not just a question of hitting the right numbers or meeting a quota. The stats on Area 51 are good indicators for what kinds of activities are lagging, but they aren't an assignment that you need to go out and fix them right now or you won't graduate. This community's energy will be much better spent focused on building a high-quality Q&A resource about Buddhism: asking good questions, writing thoughtful answers, voting on both of those, and building a strong community.
Notice that I said "building community" and not "spreading the world" or "getting more pageviews". If it were a simple question of getting more eyeballs, SE corporate could just spend some VC on advertising and call it a site. Stack Exchange Q&A sites are powered by more than just traffic. They fail without a solid community of people who govern the site. They care about the site and want to see it succeed. They vote, they guide new users, and they keep the site clean.
New users and traffic will come with time as long as this community focuses on putting together a high-quality Q&A resource about topics related to Buddhism.
Some specific tips:

Invite your friends and Buddhist discussion groups - but don't focus on marketing to as many people as you can. You should invite specific people or groups that you want to talk to about Buddhism, not just as many Buddhist eyeballs as possible.
Start initiatives to get the existing core community asking more questions.

Lots of sites do something like a Topic of the Week program - something to prompt people to ask questions about something specific. It's easier to think up questions to ask about a topic you're given than to come up with something from thin air.
I've also seen sites do discussion groups or book clubs in chat. It's a more relaxed atmosphere where like-minded people can get together and talk about a previously chosen topic or text. It's good for helping people get to know each other and learn about their field - and it frequently also inspires extra questions.

I hope this helps.
In short: Buddhism SE is already a great resource and its beta status does not mean it isn't permanent. We hope you keep up the good work.

This article explains the situation quite thoroughly.

According to these statistics the site needs more users with more reputation.
The worst statistic is:

150 users with 200+ rep (currently 61 users with 200+ rep)
10 users with 2,000+ rep (currently 6 users with 2,000+ rep)
5 users with 3,000+ rep (currently 3 users with 3,000+ rep)

... of which the worst is the number of users with 200+ rep.

There will soon be 2 more users with 3,000+ rep
There will quite soon be 3 more users with 2000+ rep.

The statistics want another 100 users, who use the site enough to accumulate at least 200+ rep.

We need to get more users. Any ideas or suggestions?

Alternatively, perhaps there are or have been more than enough registered users of this site already, and the challenge is to get users from 1 or 101 rep to above 200 rep. You want to advertise the site; but instead perhaps we should concentrate on improving the site by posting better questions and better answers, both to attract new users and to engage or inspire existing users.

There definitely is a problem / imbalance between supply and demand in the questions. This is evident that many questions are answered and they attache many answers. If there were a lot more question every one has leeway to be picky and choosy on what they answer. But they should be high quality questions but not too over the top also so people will try to help out.


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How do you report moderator abuse?
If you feel there moderator abuse or is not impartial or marginalising view coming from not so mainstream lineages how do you report it?
Some moderators have:

couple of times said that my questions are not genuine, and implied they are not inclined to answer them, and I am not expecting an answer which is far from the truth
couple of times closed question which might bring your alternative view on a particular matter
showed selective ignorance to certain topics (symbolism embedded in a Pagoda)
said I am asking too much questions (there many who ask more)

Problematic question:

I asked questions on Discourses on Satipatthana Sutta - S. N. Goenka (abriged of the original) on phases which was mentioned to be different from the more generally accepted interpretations. I wanted to get an unbiased representation of the other interpretations. These question were mostly received with hostility. Followed by later comments by comments which saying I am not asking genuine questions.
Above reference makes a reference to the shrine room in a temple (one everyone comes from different practices and comes to this point beyond this all meditation is the same) and unification of the meditation after is all the same. The referenced phase one which different interpretations. May be if this interpretation is not held then this
I asked questions on the effects on Body Language (something that comes up in Bhante Vimalaramsi's teaching - smiling. He once referenced the psychology research in this area in a talk I cannot locate it any more) trying to get an unbiased Buddhist rationalisation of how it works which was also shot down by the moderator (Banthe was one a student in the same linage but changed due to differences in some interpretations.)
I asked a question on a practice of a particular type of meditation which I did not get a clear actionable instruction to practice it. So I asked for more elaboration. After this I got comments like I am not asking question with a genuine interest to get answer (I might be wrong about rationalisation as I cannot read throughs.)

If any questions are unclear the moderators can edit them which is a better way than closing them. If the meaning changes the OP can edit it again progressively improving. Not every one is as good with use of language as others. Also comments should be used to clarify the question or suggest improvements mainly and should not be judgemental about the OP or the questions. Also moderation should be light touch in a forum like this and after getting further explanation and clarifications from the OP when you do not understand.

If a question is unclear, it's usual to close it (temporarily) until it's clarified. After it's clarified, then it can be reopened. A reason why it's closed is so that it cannot be answered while it's unclear: because if it's answered while it's unclear, then that answer may be answering the wrong (unclear) question. An existing answer makes it more difficult to improve/clarify the question, because editing the question might invalidate the existing answer; for that reason it might be better to have no answers, until the question is clear enough to answer.

Please reference actual questions/answers/comments relating to your claims, otherwise it becomes "he said, she said" kind of stuff.

Some comments seam to be deleted. One such instance is: http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/3867/i-have-heard-after-the-phase-sabbakayapatisamvedi-all-the-meditation-instruct. Let's leave this aside now.

I think one other is: http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/2522/how-is-the-pali-phase-passambhayam-kayasamkharam-assasissamiti-passasissamit

For questions whose issues have been resolved, the comments pertaining to the issues are normally deleted. For the first example you cite, my comments regarding your activity on the site were not the reason for closing that question - it has legitimate issues, IMO. You can vote to reopen if you disagree. The second question you cite was deleted by the community, with the votes of several members, including non-moderators. I think you might want to reflect on your own actions, especially your accusations in the first question you link to above.

I think the answer for this question will be valid for both of them: http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/3889/pagodas-symbolism-of-yogis-progress-to-nirvana

For the ones that were closed I am thinking on how to ask a better question.

Moderators can use different ways to abuse and they can be really corrupted that many people can be hard to believe the truth. That's why we need experienced meditators like my teacher Ven. Yuttadhammo, Lanka and maybe another person who is in deep in this path to be moderators. I still don't write my opinions about this subject, but one day I can decide to write it with details ;)

Reporting abuse
To answer your question, What recourse do I have if I believe a moderator has abused his/her privileges? describes how to report it.
Personally I've never tried to "report abuse".
Lineages
I hope/expect it's wrong to assume that questions are closed because of "not so mainstream lineages".
It's more likely to be ordinary close reasons, "unclear what you're asking", "off-topic", "subjective", "too broad": reasons why a question might be impossible to answer accurately on a StackExchange Q+A site.
Using chat
On other StackExchange sites I've seen, people (including at least one moderator) use a site's Chat room. A moderator might be lurking in the chat room (or have visited the chat room recently enough that you can @tag them there). If there's a moderator decision or comment which I don't understand, I might post a message in the chat room, hoping/expecting that a moderator will see me post in chat, and discuss/explain the decision.
As a result of using the chat room and using meta (on other sites), for discussions over weeks and months, even if I (still) don't agree with 100% of the moderator decisions, at least I understand them better now, know that I'm not 100% correct either, and that when they disagree with me that's not "moderator abuse".
However, people (including moderators) on this site don't seem to use the chat room on this site. Maybe it would help if they did (it's good to "chat", when you can't "see" the people you're working with). Or maybe it's not worth their while, I don't know. I'm grateful people even take time to be here on the main site.
Private chat
Instead of using a public chat room, moderators are also able to initiate a private chat if they think that's necessary.
Using meta
Alternatively you can discuss specific questions on meta: ask whether a question on-topic, whether it should be asked, whether it can be answered, whether and how to improve it. Use the specific-question tag on meta, for meta-topics whose subject is a single/specific question on the main site.
Moderators are, to some extent, here to enforce the rules and standards expressed/chosen by the community. And Meta is a place where people ("community members") can discuss specific questions.

OK Thanks. I will just wait and see how things turn out before forming a more concrete opinion what is going on. So will leave the matter to rest for the time being.

I would say, bring up an actual case here on meta, and let community and other moderators take a look. If discussion confirms there is something to be corrected, the other moderators should ask the moderator in question to change the approach.

OK. Let me put this together. The community option may not work well as because of some lineages may have a bigger following here. Best is to let the other moderators and SE deal with it.

Well... moderators on SE are elected by community, so the power to decide comes from the people, mods are only representatives. Mods should consider people's opinions before they make major decisions.

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


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Are we here to preach and make converts?
Are we here to preach and make converts?
For me, the answer is no.
We shouldn't be a site for people with out a religious inclination or with doubt yearning for a change to a whole new system.  (Blatant hypothetical question "Shouldn't we all be Mahayana by now?") We shouldn't be posting normative declarations in the form of a question. (Blatant hypothetical question "Should Buddhist be teetotalers by now?) And so on for every view ever ascribed to Buddhism. My comment about preaching should apply to answers & comments-- with the exception of advice questions. If someone is asking "What is the Buddhist thing to do about abortion, alcohol, depression, etc" and as they invariably do-- don't bother to tag with any particular school of Buddhism, then an answer is going to be somewhat prescriptive.
We shouldn't be a debate site, there is no independent third party to call a winner, no referees, no ground rules for what constitutes fair debate. Instead, we have Q & A where the winner is chosen by the question asker, or more commonly, not at all. Question askers are likely to pick an answer that suits their biases were they to post a statement for debate. (Blatant hypothetical question "A permanent, non-changing soul doesn't exist-- can you prove to me otherwise?") Maybe some enterprising reader of this post can go make a debate website.
In light of this, I urge people to ask questions with potentially factual answers, or advice questions or the many other sorts questions that get numerous upvotes — and move the preaching to their blog, the debate to one of the many forums that exist elsewhere on the net.
And I descent from my soap box, because this post is getting a little preachy.

If you look at other SE sites like Programming, Travel, Parenting, Cooking, English Language, Gaming, Photography etc. - most of them are based on the idea of requesting, sharing and receiving expert advice from people who have programmed, traveled, had children, cooked, played the games etc.
Very few of these sites are intended as places to copy/paste quotes from official documentation or from books on travel and parenting etc. Instead, most of the best answers come from the users who either faced the same exact problem as the questioner faces now and for various reasons were compelled to invest some serious effort into doing their homework, OR from the users who had direct and extensive experience (e.g. with traveling, raising children) -- in the area that OP has none.
Here comes my punchline. Most of the SE sites are based on experience rather than on quoting official sources. The only notable exception that comes to mind is the Fantasy and Sci-Fi site which in the large part depends on presenting quotes, by the people who seriously studied e.g. Tolkien's universe. Obviously no one can travel to Tolkien's universe and come back with direct observations. All we have is quotes.
I hope that Buddhism is an area of human activity in which people may and should have direct experience.
When a question is asked on the Programmers Stack Exchange, for example "what is the Agile approach to work estimation", the answer can certainly be "according to Poppendieck's vision of Lean we should do this, and according to Ken Schwaber's definition of Scrum, or David Anderson's presentation of Kanban, or whatever, we should do that" (="high quality, well sourced answers") -- or it can be something like "Inspired by Poppendieck's guidelines here is the method I came to prefer after trying various other approaches" or even "here is the approach to estimation that I think the best reflects the spirit of Agile based on my studies and practice". -- It is my belief that answers based on both wide study of preexisting art and on trying various methods in practice, are almost always superior to pure speculative answers or to answers discovered purely by uninformed trial-and-error.
So, are we here to preach and make converts? No. Are we here to share experience and give expert advice? Absolutely.

Yes, but, on the other hand in this answer for example I think you agreed that [tag:personal-practice] questions aren't easy to answer well. Do you think we should keep allowing all questions (as is current policy)? Or can you suggest a method/measure by which to classify them, into questions which can't be answered well (and shouldn't be asked) versus questions which (with enough of the right experience) you could answer (e.g. as described above)?

Right, there is no contradiction. I feel the easiest to answer questions in this format are framed inside Buddhist framework, tied to Buddhist stake poles, requesting interpretation in terms of actual experience -- as opposed to the personal-practice questions tied to actual experience, asking to be framed within Buddhist framework. Makes sense?

I think you're saying that it's easiest to answer, "How do you interpret this Buddhist doctrine (referenced here in this question), based on your experience and/or based on what you've read and been taught)?"; as opposed to (maybe not such a good question), "How do you interpret this experience of mine (described here in this question) based on Buddhist doctrine?"

Correct, yes, you understood right. Although the second is not "maybe not such a good question", just not easy to answer in this format without knowing more about the person or making far-fetched conjectures.

I could propose that as a specific new amendment to the policy for questions, to see whether users agree ... maybe that kind of question (about personal experience) should be off-topic (because we can't answer it "in this format"), and say that it's up to the questioner to instead formulate their question to ask about doctrine. If I did (make that proposal) then IMO I ought to include a list of (past) questions which that proposal would have affected (so that people could see the effect of the proposal).

What do you think of generic/impersonal questions about sila such as, "How do you interpret the Buddhist doctrine about celibacy: i.e. that for lay people celibacy is not recommended except on Uposatha days?" Is that easy to answer because it's about doctrine and your experience of doctrine, or is it less easy to answer perhaps because it depends on personal circumstances or something?

If you insist on classifying it as one of the two categories, it certainly leans closer to the first type, but falls short because instead of asking about "purpose/benefits of celibacy according to texts and your experience", it ask for a reason of Buddha not deciding to recommend celibacy to laity. In other words, the question pertains to Buddha's teaching methodology instead of student's practice and experience. I did hint at what I think is an answer in a comment (http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/11716/43) but generally I don't feel comfortable explaining why teachers do or not do X/Y/Z.

You're saying that answers should be based on experience; but I don't see how that relates to the question, i.e., "Are we here to preach and make converts?"

I think that the correct answer is that we are not here to make converts or preach. The overarching goal of stackexchange is to give high quality, well sourced answers in a brief and convenient format. In other words, the essence of the site's function is that of sharing information, rather than taking a position. People ask questions about what Buddhism says about x,y, or z, and other people give factual answers as to what the various traditions and schools of Buddhism have to say on it, because that's by and large a fact based style in conformity with the way the other stackexchange sites operate.

You wrote, "well sourced". Moving on and away from the topic of 'not preaching', and on to the topic of 'what is this site for', "well sourced" is obviously true for questions tagged [tag:reference-request]. It isn't current policy though that 'reference request' questions are the only type of question permitted.

Reference requests aren't the only allowed question, true, but it is generally preferred that answers quote relevant portions of texts to back up their positions.

@Bakmoon BTW quoting the texts is not preferred on most of the SE sites. But I understand why it is preferred by many on this site, and do try to include sources whenever I can. But in those cases when the answer involves interpretation of the doctrine that I slowly absorbed from my teachers over the decades of practice, or something that I have read in one of the gazillion Mahayana texts -- to find reference would be too time-consuming and impractical, in which case I prefer to retell the points in my own words, rather than to keep the teaching to myself and leave the others in the dark.

No. I am hear to talk, discuss, and inform, those curious about Buddhism.
The culture and beliefs are of interest to me.
I have studied them for some time.
At one time I considered myself to be a Buddhist.
Though I no longer consider myself to be a Buddhist, I still enjoy talking and discussing on the topic.
For me this site is an opportunity for me to talk about interests of mine, and maybe help someone find an answer to a question or two.
As soon as this site becomes about which school of Buddhist thought is correct, or starts trying to sway peoples beliefs it will begin to falter.
Though I do think this site should encourage those with questions that challenge the beliefs of Buddhism, and to try to answer them to the best of their ability without making it personal/ getting defensive. I do see that happen sometimes, thought not often at all. Overall this site does a great job of not preaching. The area to work on would be the reaction to questions that might be more challenging, or even seem disrespectful.

Yes, we all are here to preach and make converts. All shades of Buddhists will surely try to win converts for their set of beliefs, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing to be coy about.
Rationalism is a form of Buddhism. Gautam Buddha himself was a rationalist who questioned the established beliefs of his times, and took nothing on faith. Moved by the spirit of enquiry, Gautam Buddha established a tradition of intellectual and spiritual leadership, opposed to the traditions of followership that was prevalent in his times.
And so, rationalists too, like other schools of Buddhist thought, seek to win converts.

I infer then that your questions are intended as a type of preaching.

Careful there, too much identification with, "I'm a rationalist Buddhist" seems the opposite of letting go. See sakkhaya-ditti.

@ChrisW - Feel free to infer.

@Buddho - Was The Buddha a rationalist Buddhist? Or not?

If the Buddha ever held a self view on such terms as, I'm Buddha or I'm a rational Buddhist, that would be sakhaya-ditti, something even sottapanna-ship will destroy. Thus your question is invalid.

@Buddho - No, my question was not, "Did the Buddha think of himself as a rationalist buddhist". My question was, "Was Buddha a rationalist Buddhist". But why are we debating this in meta? It's not a question about questions on this site... hence, invalid. It belongs out there, not in here.

It is wrong to assume "we" as one corpse with the same intention here (that corpse is actually very small). And I find it even rude to appropriate the visitors and participiants here for this statement even if only verbally. The sites of stackexchange are not meant for  preaching but for Q&A of real questions with a (faithfully expected) concrete answer and it is a misuse of the great work of the founders of this software and the maintainers of this site; such misuse is not fair and should not be done by follower of the dharma.

@GottfriedHelms - The question has been raised by someone; as it has received at least 5 upvotes currently, I assume that it is not a rude question. This question has assumed "we", not I. This is a basic-level question about this SE forum, and it requires a straight answer. I fail to see how the above answer is "rude".

Please explain, how after "Yes, we all are here to preach and make converts" one can say "this question has assumed 'we', not I". This seems not much rational to me...

@GottfriedHelms - But let us not argue about this in comments space. May I request you to enrich this discussion by kindly posting a well-reasoned answer to the question that has been raised? If you know for sure what this SE site is exactly meant for, then perhaps you will be able to share your knowledge, supported with the relevant rules, guidelines etc?

@GottfriedHelms - The questioner asked, "Are we here to preach and make converts?" and so I replied, "Yes, we all are here to preach and make converts. All shades of Buddhists will surely try to win converts for their set of beliefs, and there is nothing wrong with that." Why does the "we" in the answer offend you while the "we" in the question does not?

@GottfriedHelms Instead, if the questioner had asked, "Are YOU here to preach and make converts?", I would have replied, "Yes I am" or maybe, "No, I am not". Then I would not have used "we" in the answer.


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What's a "characterization" question?
This came up in the non-buddhism question (comments to the question). Apparently this is a sort of question that is discouraged on some stack-exchanges. My google-fu is not good enough to find the relevant meta discussions.

Thanks for bringing this up, it did slip off my radar. When I said "this question asks for characterization" (in reference to question about the "non-buddhism" movement) I meant that the question leads to answers tending to be closer to value judgement, than a fact or interpretation.
I define the boundary between question seeking interpretation and question seeking a characterization as follows:
Question seeking interpretation pertains to a phrase or concept the meaning and/or significance of which is unclear (to OP). While question seeking characterization pertains to behavior of a person or group of people. The two seem similar, however in first case, there is supposedly an objective answer, even if it is arguable (e.g. "what does anatta really mean?" or "is life really suffering?" or "does bowing have any significance beyond ritual?"), while in the second case, the question is unquestionably open-ended and all answers are a matter of opinion.
I believe we should allow interpretation-questions but not characterization-questions.

Well I don't think my question was soliciting value judgements, but the answerers sure did take it as a request for discussion of the merits of non-buddhism/or the demerits of those who don't adhere.

Yes, because you clearly were familiar with the phenomena in question, so when you asked what it was, you did not need a description (as somebody who only heard about NB but did not have direct access to their writing would need), therefore you could not have sought anything but opinions. That's what I call seeking characterization.

That sort of puts questioners into a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Were I unfamiliar with who they were, I would be criticized for not doing do diligence and basic googling. Anyhow, I'm fine with the Q being on hold. It will be a few more weeks before the patterns of "okay" questions become clear (to me).

I agree, that's why it is safer to stick to questions relevant to one's practice rather than letting one's mind run loose.