text:
Do we have a clear idea what is on or off topic?
After 100 plus days in beta do we have a clear idea what is on or off topic? I have reviewed the closed queue and I'm not seeing an obvious pattern. This is what I can glean from meta questions, the closed question list and personal experience
We seem to like

Questions and answers involving personal experience
Questions comparing one aspect of a religion to Buddhism are OK but feelings can run a little high with these
Fairly general questions about meditation
Questions asking for a specific text

We don't like

Questions asking for great lists of books
Very localised questions about retreat centres or local Buddhist resources
Vague questions

We are ambivalent about

Very broad questions. Sometimes these get closed down but sometimes they become very popular
Very specific questions - as above
Spoiler questions or answers - such as koan answers. I think the consensus here was OK but treat sensitively

I think it would be a good idea to put something up for the help centre around this area hence the motivation for this.
So anything to add, take away, shout about?

My own dilemma is when I see something like on this post where it has been edited by " ". First thought is what did I miss? Was this a necessary edit? Does this restrict someone's freedom of expression? Would it be possible to view the unedited question or answer so that we can answer some of these questions? I had a teacher that always "edited" my papers and there was a loss of spontaneity and trusting my own impulses in the presence of editing for unknown reasons.

We should be careful of becoming averse to what happens on this site, as well as of any attachment we may have, wishes for the site to be this way or that way. This site has a lot of potential and I've recently been guilty of those things.
Let's have a look at the more established StackExchange sites and see what makes them so great, and let's see how we can make this site stand out from ordinary forums.

Speaking for myself, I don't like:

superficial controversies and popular topics (can buddha be a woman, LGBT topics etc.)
comparative-religion questions (tend to borderline with "whose father is stronger?")
questions about scientific studies of Buddhist practices (I don't believe the amount and depth of research currently done on B. is enough to adequately answer these)
questions requesting conclusive summary / comparative analysis of any subject across all texts and/or commentary traditions
questions challenging buddhism beliefs in light of scientific world view (e.g. rebirth)

Questions I like:

About meaning of certain passages in texts
About definitions of basic concepts (suffering etc.)
About basic principles (often encoded as matrika lists) and how they play out in life
About challenges one faces in one's practice (as long as they are not too personal / specific and can be of use to many other practitioners)
Reference requests (finding texts a quote comes from)


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Why so many account deletions?
I've noticed quite a few people have asked for their account to be deleted. I'm just wondering if that is normal for a site at this point or are we having more than normal. It just seems an extreme step for people rather than just stopping contributing. Is it something we are doing that causes it?

I don't know about this site in particular; but in mmorpg, rage quitting is very common when people get upset that they can't have everything their own way. It's a strict format here. It's not going to appeal to all types IMHO.

When this site got founded I anticipated a higher than average number of deletions in part because, if you maintain any sort of link to the rest of the stack exchange universe, you might not want a religious association to show up that you aren't actively participating in.

We also had one person who was unsuccessfully deleted and needed to be deleted again.

@Hrafn I wondered if it might be because of the religious nature of the site. Particularly as it is fairly fringe and a bit weird for a lot of people I guess. It can be a hard thing to talk about and to own

@Crab: Well, you might have gotten a point. When I'm thinking to stop in math.se I very likely would simply stop contributing math questions and/or answers. But if/when I'm stopping buddhist.se I must be in anger or without hope for improvement - and then I'd wanted to have my account deleted. It's just more "important"/nearer at the "importance"...

(D'oh just notice my answer isn't a direct answer-- the answer is: those people weren't going to be happy here-- an SE site is specialty site like the way wikipedia is)
You know who I want on Stack Exchange? Donald Lopez. The guy is a one man Buddhist research machine-- he doesn't preach (he's a scholar), but he knows who was preaching and what they said. As far as I know, he doesn't participate with the internet via twitter, blogs or forums.
Who we do have on the internet are lots and lots of people who are used to the social conventions of forums-- there are two huge buddhist forums on the internet that I know of we must be getting a lot the same audience--, so we are seeing people use buddhism.SE like a forum and getting stomped on, so they get upset. Some people have adapted wonderfully, some people post unanswerable questions, post multiple answers that are personal observations and tangents. The people who really just want a forum need to head over to the forums, they aren't going to be happy here, and they aren't going to be happy participating in the talk tab in wikipedia either! All sites can't be all things to all people.
So positively speaking again, we need to either attract the Donald Lopezes of the world, or coax the people already here to be more like that-- post questions  that are answerable and aren't starting points for shooting the breeze.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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New General Chat Room
Not really a question but I've just created a new general chat room called Buddhism Chat (not original sorry) to replace the general chat room that got frozen. Someone was asking about it on another meta question.
I think we need to post something every 7 days at least to stop this one freezing up. I'll try to post something in there periodically even if it it is a bit trivial. Appreciate any contributions if anyone wants to post. I think it's a shame not to have a general room for people if they need it.

Moderators can un-freeze chat rooms - just post on Meta and someone will get to it. Would you like me to un-freeze the original room, or would you rather stay in this new room?

@abbyhairboat I'd prefer restoring the old chatroom, because then we don't have to setup any feeds again. But that's just me.

@abbyhairboat please that sounds good. Can we unfreeze the old chat room. I'll delete the one I created if I can

Yeah! Can you drop me a link to it?

@abbyhairboat Thanks. The link is http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/15162/buddhism Cheers

All set. Have at it :)

@abbyhairboat brill cheers

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


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Should we flag up which Buddhist tradition we practice with?
Just a thought / random idea.
One of the interesting things about the site is that people from different traditions all contribute to the site. Hopefully it will continue and grow.
When I am reading answers I am interested in which part of Buddhism they practice with or identify most with. Could we/should we gently suggest that people might like to put on their biographies which branch of Buddhism they practice with if any. Or maybe which teachers they are particularly inspired by. I might help to know they are 'coming from'
As I say just an idea

Yeah, I do tend to click on people's profiles to see if there's any identifying information about their tradition. It should be pretty clear which branch I'm from.

in the interest of transparency it is important to know where people are coming from. I like on reddit how you can have your "theravada" tag next to your name etc.

Indicating which tradition the users follow is a great idea indeed.
Personally, however, I would not dare to state who my teachers are, out of deepest respect. My participation on SE is purely based on personal and limited understanding and should not be linked to the teachers I trust. My poor and confusing answers shall not discredit my teachers.


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Vote Early, Vote Often
I read a while ago the Maths SE has an explicit aim to vote a lot - to really encourage the voting up of answers AND questions to try to have the set point for the community as being a high voting one. The chap writing attributed some of Maths SE success to that approach (if I find the reference I'll post it in).
So should we do the same. Should we aim to be the place where votes are given out more freely. Still for worthy content but if it's got merit then give it a vote. Also if we did want to do this how could we encourage people - leading by example for instance.
Just a thought as always
EDIT
I've found the reference. They even called the post the same as this one - pure coincidence (or is it the interconnectedness of all things :-)
http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/662/vote-early-vote-often

I'm just going to go out there and say that we might inadvertently be a low voting site. Does that seem fair? I'm noticing that our predicted numbers of users with 200+ votes seems to be dropping and now we are on pace for 58. I'm also noticing that great questions and answers struggle to get above 3 or 4 votes. I think we are low on questions particularly - there are a  number that 2 or more people have found worthwhile to answer but no-one has found good enought to vote up (OK - I admit some are my questions - I'm not scrabbling for rep (i think)).
Anyway I though i would post to see if anyone has any other opinion/stats to back this up or refute. I notice with sites as they wonder why they are still in beta - the advice often comes that people should vote more. A key metric apparently is number of users above 10,000 or even 20,000. Costs nothing to vote after all.
That said I think I go the other way. There are a number of posts that I regret upvoting as they are not that good and with an upvoted answer the question moves away from the unanswered list. So I will never get a good answer on those unless I'm motivated enough to offer a bounty.
Anyway I'll stop now.

Damned Buddhists and their ambivalence ;) seriously, though, I've taken to upvoting Qs and As just because they are cogent, unless I actually disagree with what they say.

@yuttadhammo I have to say I'm in the liberal voting camp. My rule of thumb is that if a question is interesting enough to answer then I vote it up. If it doesn't have merit as a question then I wouldn't be answering (in theory). I think that there is merit in this life and the next for up votes (maybe) :-)

I agree with the statement that we are a low voting site. I went to Area 51 and picked 2 sites which are also in Beta and compared some stats between those and here are some results:
(B)uddhism : 71 days in Beta
(C)raft CMS : 77 days in Beta
(P)uzzling : 105 days in Beta
Now let's look at various badges awarded on those sites:
Nice Question (Question score of 10 or more) : B: 18, C: 24, P: 31
Good Question (Question score of 25 or more) : B: 0, C: 1, P: 2
Nice Answer (Answer score of 10 or more) : B: 25, C: 51, P: 66
Good Answer (Answer score of 25 or more) : B: 0, C: 3, P: 10
Commentator (Left 10 comments) :  B: 37, C: 69, P: 54
Tumbleweed (Asked a question with no votes, no answers, no comments, and low views for a week)
B: 2, C: 0, P: 0
Enthusiast (Visited the site each day for 30 consecutive days) :  B: 14, C: 11, P: 18
Suffrage (Used 30 votes in a day) : B: 8, C: 12, P: 5
Total score of the top user: B: 5050, C: 7411, P: 3373
Comments:
We are only 6 days behind Craft CMS, but they have 6 more Nice questions and twice as many Nice Answers as we have (25 vs 51 !). None of our questions and answers were good enough to receive the Good badge.
Possibly the posts aren't as good as expected, but one way of improving them is to comment and suggest some changes - here again we are rather behind with only 37 active commentators while other sites have at least 54. Tumbleweed badge was awarded twice, which means that some questions did not interest enough people in terms of answering, commenting or upvoting them. This hasn't happened so far even on Puzzling site which is 28 days longer in Beta than us. An interesting thing is that we have 14 enthusiasts who visited the site 30 days in a row (Crafts have 3 more and Puzzling 4 fewer than us). We have also 8 avid voters who voted 30 times on 1 day - Puzzling site has only 5 such heroes. Their top user has also much lower total score than ours. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that the core of our site comprises a handful of people who vote, answer and comment, whereas on Puzzling site the active community is much bigger in number and the points are more evenly spread between the users. It happened 10 times on the Puzzling site that 25 different people upvoted an answer - something we haven't achieved so far.
To change the stats we can either vote more generously (if recent questions don't seem good enough, try browsing the older ones) or we can post better (more interesting? of higher quality?) questions and answers (and comments).
I might try to revisit this analysis in 28 days to see if our 105 days in Beta will look any similar to Puzzling' 105 days in Beta.

Great analysis - thank you. I think one of our things (as you say) is that we are overweight in very active users and underweight in more causal visitors - so if the active users don't vote then we sink down. I think the content (answers) are good (IMHO) but i would personally like to see more and better questions perhaps digging into Buddhism a bit more than the casual users are able. It's hard to have great answers with less than good questions.

@CrabBucket hmmm since yesterday we have two more Suffrage badges... any idea who got them?;) And we have 3 more Nice Questions :)

Guilty as charged!!!

Judging by the views-to-votes ratio, we clearly have a lot more lurkers than voters. I know I don't vote a lot at all, but even with my sparse impulsion, I'm ranking as #5 top voter! Crab Bucket is definitely the most generous here, outvoting me by 150 percent.
I suppose the reason behind this, is most of the people being rather unsure if a given answer is really correct or not -- this must be the main problem. It's almost like questions are getting upvoted more liberally than answers.

Some users do not seem to use this feature at all.

How do we encourage people?

I narrowed down on some user who have been been very active but not voting. Do we leave a comment on their posts?

I don't know... I feel harassing users too much about this could be counterproductive. Like I mean we could edit all answers to add a line at the bottom: "Please remember to vote for the question and answers if you find them useful." -- but I think this may be too intrusive? Similarly, leaving comments, insisting that people vote is not very cool. What would be the best, is if we could put an announcement at the top of the page. I wonder if Stack Exchange allows that.

This is possible if you add the featured tag in meta. Only moderates can do it.

Added "featured" tag to this post, do you see any changes?

I don't see any changes

It seams to work now.


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Personal-practice tag
I've recently created the tag personal-practice and did a bit of retagging.
Was that a good idea?

Well I guess I thought it was a good idea but i just wanted to open it up a little. The practice I think has become a bit of a dumping ground so I wanted to tidy it up
a bit
I think there was two concepts in the practice tag. The sort of question like

Why do monks shave their heads type of question which I think is a general question about Buddhist practice
And the Hey why do I get pins and needles type question which is about some personal experience that the OP wants us to dig into.

So I split of another tag personal-practice which covers the second concept. I wanted to capture the more subjective nature of these questions. Also I'm aware that some people might not like this kind of question and I separate tag would enable them to screen it.
I guess one could see this as a meta tag like beginner but honestly I see personal-practice as been an identifier for the content of the tag.
Just what I think though.


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Moderation policies for Questions
The policy of each SE site is defined by its community, for each specific site like Buddhism.SE.
In this topic (which is long, you probably don't want to read it all) I asked, and a few people discussed what 'moderation rules' or policy we do or do not want to implement, for questions asked on this site.
The desire or consensus which people suggested then (in that topic) is more liberal or more permissive about questions, than the policy on other SE sites that I know of.
Anyway, based on that input, I wrote the following to summarize what I think is this site's current policy (i.e. the policy which the three people who discussed it asked for) for moderating questions.
You can discuss or define this policy more if you like: post another answer, post a comment, vote, etc.

This policy has two parts:

A long list of various reasons for which a question isn't moderated
A short list of other reasons for which a question should be moderated.

These kinds of question do not need to be closed
On this site we will try to avoid closing questions for any of the following reasons:

"Too broad": we are allowed to ask a broad question, even a question which could theoretically take a whole book to answer. The site allows (welcomes) beginner questions. You can't expect hugely long answers though, so if a question is very "broad" then an answer might be quite 'shallow': a superficial summary of the topic, and/or a reference to further reading on the topic.
"Unclear what you're asking": if possible we prefer to avoid closing 'unclear' questions, because:

Someone else might understand the question even if we don't
There are not too many questions on this site, and we want to allow as many as possible
Asking a totally clear question might be, sometimes, too difficult
Closing their question may confuse a new user and send them away from the site

Instead of closing, our other options options are:

Politely leave a comment asking for clarification. Please be very polite, don't be too hurried (which might seem rude), try to make a good/friendly first impression on the people asking the questions. Don't assume that the people posting questions have the same experiences that you have with the norms of this and other Stack Exchange sites.
Politely edit the question. Leave a comment explaining why and inviting a reply, clarification, and/or rollback. Don't lose sight of what the OP wanted to ask (so that any answers might still satisfy the OP).

On a high-volume site with too many questions, 'bad' questions are put on hold until/unless they're improved. At the moment, here there are not too many questions, and so we'll leave questions open and allow them to be answered, even if the question might be altered or improved after people have answered (which might be a waste of those early answers).
"Too theoretical": unlike some other SE sites which are only for solving specific practical problems, this site is for (among other things) Buddhist "philosophy". This site has a generic help page which says,

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.

That's not true on this site. On this site that should, instead, be read as saying,

You may ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face, but that's not the only kind of question you can ask.

"Too practical": some other SE sites are only for theory. For example the Christianity.SE will refuse what it calls Pastoral Advice Questions. However this site is also for Buddhist "practice" so practical questions (about Buddhism) are on-topic.
Advice when asking practical questions might be to include:

Any background research you've tried but wasn't enough to solve your problem.

Questions about ethics (e.g. about the 'precepts') are also allowed.
"Too controversial": this site allows some controversial or seemingly 'heretical' questions, including for example "Is rebirth a delusional belief?", especially if it's asked politely/respectfully, and with the intention of learning.
"Too obscure": this site is fortunate in having some experts who are willing and may be able to answer. If a question is too difficult then the worst that will happen is that it won't be answered.
You can try not to ask too many unanswered questions (you'll learn what types of question people can and can't answer).
Also kindly avoid asking question just for the sake of asking questions, of trying to 'improve the site' (by asking questions), of increasing the number of questions asked, because (as one expert user wrote),

Personally, I find seeded questions irksome; it's generally easy to see that the asker isn't really looking for an answer, so there is no sense of accomplishment in answering. It feels more like a chore, like editing Wikipedia or something.

"Too easy": some experts might not like questions which can be answered using Google or Wikipedia; but some other users on this site don't mind trying to answer those 'beginner' questions as well. You might not get an expert answer to an easy question; but if the answer is written by a regular user, and if that answer is reviewed and voted on and/or commented on by the other users and/or by the experts on this site, at least you'll be getting peer-reviewed answer (fairly reliable or hopefully not completely wrong).

Closing questions
A moderator and/or the community should (and does) close the following types of question:

"Off-topic" (insufficiently related to "Buddhist philosophy, teaching, and practice")
"Polling questions" which only ask "What's your experience?"
For example, this question was closed by yuttadhammo and it's a type of question which he regularly closes. The question asked this, after describing an experience,

Has anyone ever experienced anyone like this off or even on (!) the mat? It was most striking...

I gave the following comment as an explanation for closing this question:

I think a problem with a question that is phrased like, "Has anyone ever experienced anyone like this?" is that it could attract an unlimited number of people each answering "Yes, me!". Each new answer would be a bit new (different from previous answers) and as valid as any previous answer. There's no obvious way to select any best answer to that question, no way for any answer to finish answering or to provide a complete answer to the question. And it doesn't seem to describe any practical problem you have, so there's no way for anyone to help to answer/fix that problem.
Crab bucket's question is modified (a sufficiently different, on-topic version of the same question): it's different/better because in particular it identifies a problem to be solved, and it asks for advice (on how to deal with this problem).

The site's format and strategy is not designed for long discussions. Its strategy is to serve for Q+A (answering questions) now, and for previously answered questions to remain in a clean format which works well for reference (so that future readers who find the topic using a search engine can read simple Q+A).
If people wanted long unfocused discussions, an option would be to use of a 'Chat' room.
"Exact duplicates": if a question has already been asked and answered well, then it's better not to answer it again elsewhere (because it's better for the reader if all those answers can be found under the same question). Hopefully the person whose question is closed will be happy to find that their question has already been answered!
"Hostile": rarely we may get a question which seems to be hostile or mocking. It's reasonable to say "I don't understand" something, but less easy to post a question which says "I disagree". If you disagree it's probably better to rephrase that as "I don't understand". We tried to discuss this kind of thing in the topic, How to ask questions about different traditions of Buddhism? In summary, we won't close what seem to be genuine or sincere questions, but we would edit (or close) questions which seem to be just a disguised complaint about another belief or practice.
"Broad comparisons": we don't support questions which ask for broad comparisons between different approaches and traditions; for example:

What's the big difference between Christianity and Buddhism?
Which is better: Mahayana or Theravada?

Some 'comparative' questions are allowed, but only for comparing some specific detail; questions which devolve into broad comparison tend to lead to discussion, rather than to finite answers that are expert and balanced.
On the subject of comparisons, there are different schools of Buddhism. When you ask a question about any topic, if you want answers from within a single specific school, you might tag the question appropriately. If a question isn't tagged with a specific school, then it may attract different answers which attempt to answer it from the perspectives of different schools.
"Seeded questions": the standard Stack Exchange Help says,

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Also this topic includes the following popular answers:

I find seeded questions irksome

And:

I do not mind beginners asking beginner questions. I do not mind experienced people asking beginner questions because they have a gap in their training or education.

But, questions which may be intended to teach other people a lesson are less popular. If a question is to benefit you then please ask it; but not if you ask it only to teach other people.
This is similar to other policies, about answering questions and minimizing controversy:

Don't preach
Don't assume a teacher's mantle
Don't ask questions in order to self-answer them (i.e. questions posted to benefit others)

"Too open-ended": long answers are welcome on the site, but a question should not require an overly-long answer. A typical "answerable" question on this site can be answered, by an answer which consists of just a few paragraphs with maybe a reference to a canonical literature or a book. The rare question which would requires a 1000-word essay as an answer is therefore off-topic. You can ask broad questions (if a shallow answer is OK), or a detailed question if it's focused on one topic and answerable.
Similarly a question which most likely requires a back-and-forth discussion, perhaps because almost any answer will be seen as unsatisfactory, would also be too long for this site.
For example, "please explore X and tell me everything you can about it", makes for a good homework assignment but not a good (finite) topic for the "Question & Answer" format of Stack Exchange.

And ... that's it: no other reason? The above are the only usual reasons for closing questions.

I think we need to add a section link only answers unless it is a reference request question.

@SumindaSirinathS.Dharmasena This whole topic is about questions, not about answers. We have several meta-topics about answers, but not one combined FAQ-like topic like this one (and/or like the Welcome topic) for answers.

Let's have one combined topic under the Welcome topic about question, answers, comments, chat, writing tips, referencing tips, sourcing, etc.

Also answers asking to do a google search just linked to a search need to be mentioned in the welcome as there are not helpful or fit for the site.

See also Questions about choosing a tradition? -- consensus is that you can ask similar questions i.e. "recommendation-like questions" but not that one.

See also Let's reconsider the 'Moderation policies for Questions' which says that the community of users can choose to close other specific questions when they want to.

Would asking an open ended question about requesting sources of information, then re-editing in more source requests be allowed? instead of making a new question for every answer needed. I ask because next spring I intend to be studying a specific sects teachings and wanted to ask for help for cross references related to theravada teachings on whatever subjects I would need to correlate with theravada. Specificlly claims of "Buddha said X,Y,Z" and request sources from the community. Thing is if I asked individual questions, it may become a spam of individual source request questions. @ChrisW

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


text:
Should we close this question as 'too broad'?
Should we close this question as 'too broad'?
I thought we should not, because:

People seem[ed] able and willing to answer it
Our Moderation policies for Questions says that 'too broad' isn't a reason for closing
I myself ask 'broad' questions (and appreciate the answers they get)
I don't necessarily 'like' this kind of question so might prefer to see it posted as 1 question than as 7 questions ... if the OP posted it as 7 different questions, that might seem more 'hostile' than if it's just one question ... or it might seem like an extended argument, e.g. you answer 1 question and the OP posts 6 more questions more or less like the first. So, in a way, seeing all the questions together like that makes the question seem more finite, thus more answerable.


text:
FAQ index (summary of site policies)
The community of users discussed and agreed various conventions, behaviours, policies for this site.

Heres a list of the topics which are labeled faq and my summary of each one.

Introduction
I am a new user here at Buddhism.SE. What should I know before I post?

Welcome!
This is a site for questions and answers (not a discussion forum)
Questions may be edited, put on hold, duplicate
You can vote when the answer is useful (or not useful)
Here are some links to help with the site, and to other 'Useful resources'

Moderation policies for Questions
The moderation policy for questions on this site is unlike other SE sites.
Unlike on other sites, the following are not reasons to close a question on this site:

Too broad
Unclear what you're asking
Too theoretical
Too practical
Too controversial
Too obscure
Too easy

The following are reasons to close a question:

Off-topic
Polling questions
Exact duplicates
Hostile
Broad comparisons
Seeded questions

How about a 'resource' tab?
There's a list of Useful resources at the top of this page. It's not complete, of course, but is meant to be "like a sandbox of different material, either to kick-start understanding of Buddhism, or background material".
How do you vote?
Voting is important. How you vote is up to you. This topic has answers from several users, which explain how they choose to vote.

Answering questions
When my answer is short, shall I post it as a comment instead?
Please post your answer as an answer, and not as a comment, even if your answer is short.
What about providing sources?
References (e.g. hyperlinks or citations) to sources are welcome and helpful. They're not required though, i.e. you are allowed to answer questions without giving references.
Good answers may be based on references or on experience; answers based on experience may be unreferenced.
Some people sometimes post a comment under an answer to ask for a reference, only if they disagree with or have doubts about an answer (asking for a reference can be a polite way to disagree with an answer).
Answers vs Advice

The best answers deal directly and solely with the question(s) specifically asked
Avoid invalidating the question with answers of the form "That's the wrong question..."
In general, unless you actually are the questioner's teacher, don't assume a teacher's mantle.

Moderating answers which don't answer the question?
The community has asked moderators to allow (i.e. to not delete) answers, unless or until the answer receives several downvotes from users.
So if you think an answer should be deleted, please downvote it as well as flag it for moderator attention.

Minimizing controversy
Some people experience conflicts between different views or different sects, both previously (on other sites) and on this site.
Note that this site (Buddhism.SE) is meant for users from all schools, and for non-Buddhists too.
I assume that what most people want from this site is something like this:

a place where I could answer (or ask) specific questions about topics, under the assumption that I (or anyone) could provide the single right answer to the question as a resource for Buddhists searching for answers online, without having to deal with (much) controversy or opinion.

Controversy is counter-productive to this goal, and the following policies are meant to help minimize that.
Theravada and Mahayana
This is one site for all schools.
If you want an answer from the perspective of a specific school, then please add the corresponding tag to your question
(for example, theravada, mahayana,  zen, and so on).
How should we handle the different traditions of Buddhism in our answers?
When a question (a topic) is tagged for a specific school, then answers must be from the perspective of that school.
If for example a topic were tagged mahayana, then any answer like "You know, everything to do with Mahayana is just a later corruption of the original teachings" would be off-topic and deleted (see also Answers vs Advice).
Many questions aren't tagged for a specific school:

Because the answer is the same for all schools
Because the OP who asked the question didn't know to tag their question ("questions by laypeople that have vaguely-defined ideas")
Because the OP is looking for a survey of answers from several schools

These questions are a "real mess" and "tricky" to answer. Answers may contradict each other, and so

it is incredibly important that these questions be answered with an explicit mention of the tradition on which the answer is based. It does nobody any good to see a question like "How do I attain enlightenment?" with a dozen contradictory answers and no explanation of why they are contradictory.

We have the following policies for handling multiple traditions:

Try to specify which school a question is asking about -- you might do that by adding a tag to the question, for example theravada
If a question is tagged for (limited to) a specific school then avoid posting answers from other schools
When possible, indicate which school an answer is from; you could do this:

Explicitly in the text, by starting the answer with something like, "According to X school, ..."
Implicitly in the content, by quoting text or an author who is associated with a specific school
Optionally, by editing your user profile, e.g. like this, to say which school you're informed by

If a question isn't school-specific and you can see that someone's answer is school-specific, it might help other readers to post a comment under the answer to say something like, "This answer is the doctrine of school X." (to clarify that the answer is school-specific).

Questions asking for an answer to a controversy
To avoid being controversial (and to be helpful), answers can:

Outline the controversy in the answer
Or state that this answer is just one of several possible views

Avoid any disrespectful terms, e.g.

"mahayana developed pseudo-sutras" ("pseudo" is disrespectful)
"abuse by generations of abhidharmists" ("abuse" is disrespectful)

Instead of being disrespectful it's enough to state that there are other point of view other than your own:

So, in summary, instead of deleting questions, or asking to rephrase, or to make obligatory survey in the answer, I propose to delete derogatory statements only and allow single commentary to state existence of other point of view, and leave everything else as it is.

Separately, there are a few topics which have become well-known to be controversial (for example, vegetarianism, SGI, NKT). Some of the ways to handle these topics can include:

Banning it as a topic
Keeping it to a single thread (e.g. closing new questions as duplicate)
Deleting comment threads when they turn into massive forum-like discussions.

Sectarian shout downs should be dealt with
The question asks,

Do we want to leave open answers and comments that do nothing to answer the question, but instead are a sectarian attack on the beliefs implicit in the question?

It suggests that "these sort of comments and answers be dealt with aggressively or just quietly removed."
Are we here to preach and make converts?
No:

We shouldn't be posting normative declarations in the form of a question
We shouldn't be a debate site
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.

Even questions which are intended as a form of preaching are unwelcome.
May I share my research, by posting questions on this site and self-answering them?
No. Other SE sites allow people to answer their own questions; but on this site we don't want you to post a question just so you can answer it ... for several reasons, including "not preaching". So instead,

Post your question because you want other people's answers (not because you want to answer it yourself)
Post your question because you want other people's answers (not because you hope the answers would be useful to someone else, although not to you)
Post an answer if it's inspired by and relevant to  someone else's question

You can do it occasionally (if you ask a question first, and later research the answer) ... doing it once or twice a year per user isn't harmful.

these rules appear to be ChrisW's rules. who are the "we" that appear to have created these rules, such as "The moderation policy for questions on this site is unlike other SE sites"....

@Dhammadhatu I wrote this answer -- it's my summary of other topics on Meta, topics in which users seemed to me to have reached some consensus, and which I tagged with the [meta-tag:faq] tag. Many of the "we" are just direct quotes from other posts. The "Moderation Policies for Questions", specifically, was my summary of this discussion.


text:
Want a new tag, e.g. for office work and academic work?
I think we could use a new tag, for people who ask on this site about (I'm not sure) the connection between their work and Buddhism -- especially, office-work or mental work.
Examples of questions include:

Software programming/Art and Buddhist Practice - Pursuing creative activity
Scientific Problem solving and Wu Wei
Is Buddhism against scientific attitude?
Can meditation help students in exams?
How to be mindful while studying?
Can meditation help me in my academics?
How to reconcile non-attachment in a Type-A, North American culture where work is life?

A characteristic of these questions is that they're about lay pursuits.
A benefit of a tag would be that people who ask a question like this could also find previous answers to related topics.

What would be a good title for new tag? Something to do with "mind", "mindfulness", or "meditation" perhaps (or, not, because these are lay and not traditionally Buddhist activities)? Something like "science" or "modern-world" (or, not, because "science" is too restrictive and excludes students, and "modern-world" is too inclusive of too many other topics)?
As a bonus can you also suggest the "wiki text" (the description) associated with the new tag: which explains what topic[s] this new tag is or isn't used for?

In general I recommend we don't define a new tag that's only used for one question: a tag is useful to identify a group of related questions; especially when those questions don't necessarily all contain the same word (e.g. "science" or whatever), which a user can find using Search instead of using a tag.

Maybe worldly or worldly-affairs or worldly-pursuits

I asked this question on English.SE, I think the best reply there was knowledge-worker.

knowledge-worker may seem a bit odd for this purpose? Say a person is going to ask a question about studies. It is unlikely they might search for this tag. Just my thinking.

I doubt they'll search for wordly either. I expect I will be someone who might add a tag to existing questions if I notice them ... the point of the tag is so people (including me) can find similar topics after they're tagged.

Or student might have been good (people might look for that tag) ... except that, on this site, "student" would imply "someone who's studying Buddhism": which isn't what I want this tag for. I want this tag for people/topics that ask how Buddhist practice might help or might hinder their lay knowledge-work or lay studying.

Yes. How about householder? For question related to householder's affairs and pursuits which include work, studying, family matters, medical issues, etc..

householder (or lay) would include for example Is it okay to seek financial gains as a layman? plus a huge variety of other topics (sexuality and ethics etc). I want a narrow tag for questions like "Will practicing meditation help my studies?" and "How can I be 'mindful' when I'm programming?"

meditation-daily-activities

buddhist-techniques-as-tools comes to mind...

I like meditation-daily-activities, except that it's unusual to have a 3-word tag, and I'm not sure it's necessarily meditation (though it's neat to fit it into the spectrum of existing meditation-xxx tags) daily-activities or daily-job may be enough.

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


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Baiting Questions and Resulting Answers
This follows my previous discussion. Some question express personal take on a matter and the response is agreeable when it is not exactly a Buddhist answer. The answers seem attractive to the poster of the question.

More than once (and not only you) I don't find it useful/meaningful to ask questions about the policy for handling types of question or answer, unless you're willing to reference some specific examples of what you're referring to -- otherwise I don't know what you're talking/asking about.

Giving an example in this context I have to point to an answer and question which are from 2 users. This might be unpopular with 2 users which I want to avoid.

Sometimes in the past we've closed 'rhetorical' questions which aren't real questions and whose purpose is to promote the OP's point of view ... so that (i.e. closing questions which aren't questions) is the current policy. On the other hand I haven't noticed any recent questions which IMO probably fit that policy and therefore ought to be closed.

I am not saying about the question but mostly on the answer. Question like I think according to Buddhism x then answers say you are right will justification when x is wrong or not be exactly so. When this happen from established users it can be misleading but let's see if this continues in which case I will bring up who the user is.

If it's not about the question, then maybe this is the same as the previous meta-topic: i.e. how and whether to respond to answers which you disagree with and read as being "contrary to Buddhist doctrine".

Yes. This adds one context such thing can happen.

It is not matter of my opinion or anybody else's opinion, but if Tripitaka or established work in the lineage or teacher in the same linage / school says otherwise and if this is quoted then I don't think there is any issue in responding. I am not saying what is posted should be deleted but you should say x, y, z mentioned here is my opinion and not what Buddhism says about it and if the answer is held out to be from x school / lineage then say this is my opinion and that of x school / linage.


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Pasting images of PDF text, instead of organizing the text extract as quote
For example, in this answer and this answer, we see that text had been quoted as image snapshots from a PDF file (in this case, Piya Tan's commentary) instead of copying, pasting, and reorganizing the text into a quote like the following.
I think this is not good, as such an image cannot be searched. Diagrams, pictures and charts (for example in this answer) can be images, but I don't think text should be pasted as images.
I appreciate the effort put in by the author of the answers, but I suggest that going forward, we should consider making it a strong recommendation or guideline to paste text as text.
What is your opinion?
Example of copying, pasting, and reorganizing the text of a PDF into a quote:

Bhikshus, as far as the sun and the moon revolve, illuminating the
  quarters with their light, there extends the thousandfold
  world-system. In that thousandfold world-system there are
  a thousand moons,
  a thousand suns,
  a thousand Sinerus,
  the kings of mountains,
  a thousand Jambu,dīpas [Jambul Continents],
  a thousand Western Goyāna continents [Apara,go,yāna],
  a thousand Northern Kuru continents [Uttara,kuru],
  a thousand Eastern Videha continents [Pubba,videha],
  four thousand oceans,
  four thousand maharajahs [emperors],
  a thousand heavens of the Cātum,mahārājika [the
  4 great guardian kings],
  a thousand heavens of Yāma [the Yāma devas],
  a thousand heavens of Tusita [contented devas],
  a thousand heavens of Nimmāṇa,ratī [the devas who delight in creating],
  a thousand heavens of Para,nimmita,vasavatti [the
  devas who lord over the creation of others],
  and a thousand Brahma worlds.
  And in that thousand-fold world-system, MahāBrahmā is
  regarded as the foremost.
  Yet even in MahāBrahmā
  there still is uncertainty, there is change.
  Seeing this, the instructed noble disciple is revulsed
  with that.
  Being revulsed with that, he becomes
  dispassionate toward what is the foremost, not to
  speak of the inferior.

When copying from most PDFs the actual formatting is lost. Therefore if you are quoting more than a few lines of text, it might take more time than you are willing to spend on reformatting. In case of Firefox at the time of writing, copy-pasting from PDF, like those by Pya Tan, corrupts the formatting of the pasted text, requiring even more work to format. In copying romanised pali from Piya Tan's texts the words do not copy properly sometimes (E.g. Alagaddûpam, bhassara, paipadā) hence you have to retype the these. Therefore it is much easier to copy a snapshot. Also, time may be well spent in improving the answer or answering another question.
Also, posts are editable. Others who might be able to invest the time and effort covert the quotation as an image could always edit and repost the image as formated text.


text:
What are your suggestions and vision for moderation in 2024? And opportunity to moderate BSE
Happy New Year to users of Buddhism Stack Exchange!
In this New Year, the moderators of Buddhism SE would like to get your feedback on:

Suggestions for improvement: What would you change on Buddhism SE, if you had the chance to do so?
Vision for the future: How would you like to change the direction of Buddhism SE, if you had the chance to do so?
Opportunity to moderate Buddhism SE: If we have new openings for moderator positions, would you be interested to volunteer to fill them?

Suggestions for improvement and vision for the future are welcome even if you're not interested to become a moderator.
On the other hand, if you are unhappy with the way things are, you can change it for the better, if you were given the opportunity to do so, instead of complaining or giving up on the status quo. Please read "Who are the site moderators, and what is their role here?".

Low-quality answers
Another way to increase the overall quality of the site might be to delete mediocre answers.
For example I posted 2000 answers, heaven help us -- that's 68 pages, and if I order them by "Score" then those with 0 votes begin on page 51 -- so 25% of them have a score of 0 or less.
It might be good -- for the quality of the site and for the benefit of any future readers -- to delete these.
They could be deleted by the author -- or maybe someone might want to volunteer to delete other people's.

Some suggestions.
Chat
Other sites have an active Chat room

For socializing ("How are you?")
For off-topic chat ("How's your weather?")
For chat about the site ("What do you think of [this question](http:\\example)?")

I don't generally very much want to chat myself online, unfortunately, but other sites seem to.
This site's chat room is so unused that no-one uses it (if anyone tried to, no-one would notice) but maybe it's important:

https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/chat

The existence/location/activity of the chat room is not well-advertized by the UI and I don't know what (so far as I know, there's nothing) we can do about that.
Meta Bot
The Community bot sweeps old topics to the top of the active view, if they don't have an upvoted answer.
IMO these are by definition the least popular/useful topics.

Perhaps moderators should delete them -- especially on the Meta site -- to avoid polluting its Active view.
ChrisW on Meta
Historically @ChrisW has posted at length on Meta, which I find tedious.
Perhaps another moderator could be more concise, easier to read.
Curating the main site
If you think the posts on the main site have value, you could maintain them.
For example before I started as moderator I reviewed all the posts on Meta and rationalized how they're tagged.
I never did that on the main site (a much bigger task) but you could begin to -- choose topics (e.g. chronologically or those which interest you) and edit their tags.
That would "bump" old (interesting?) topics to the top of the Active view (for current users to review), and ensure they're well-tagged (perhaps for the benefit of future users).
Curating new question
SE wanted to be both a resource for current users (to ask questions), and for future readers (already-answered questions).
The moderation policies proposed by the early users of this site, e.g.

Moderation policies for Questions
... is very non-standard.

Perhaps we should review that:

Is "our way" working well?
Should be change it to be more like "the SE way", closing lower quality or already-asked questions?

Problem users
If users cause problems for other users, be stricter about suspending them.
Maybe follow the SE standard:

1 week
1 month
1 year

We may be sympathetic and not want to suspend a user.
We may say that if other users leave because of this user then that's their fault for overreacting.
Even so perhaps we're failing as moderators and should do better.
The "Disruptive behaviour" section of this post is descriptive and ends with this, we can't say we weren't warned:

and, even worse, these behaviors begin to actively turn people away from our community, stunting its growth and harming everyone.


text:
A request to reopen a question
My understanding is that this is the "more liberal" moderation policy for this community:
Moderation policies for Questions
According to this  "more liberal" moderation policy, I do not understand why my question was closed and deleted?
"What are the most common ways to enable keyboards to type Pali characters in 2021? [closed]"
It was suggested that the question was too technical and that it should be asked in another community.
And yet, in 2021, everything we do is technical and, more importantly, this particular question concerns the technology used to enter questions and answers into this forum using characters from the Pali language.
Many members of this community have, at one time or another, struggled with this particular question when trying to figure out how to post questions using the Pali language on various devices.
I submit that it is a reasonable question to ask and that many people would benefit from knowledge sharing.
I submit that this is the correct SE forum in which to ask it because this is the forum with the largest collection of people who are most interested in this particular language.
I agree with the author of the "more liberal" moderation policy and would like to remind fellow practitioners what the Buddha said about such things:

"While you are doing a bodily action, you should reflect on it: 'This
bodily action I am doing — is it leading to self-affliction, to the
affliction of others, or to both? Is it an unskillful bodily action,
with painful consequences, painful results?' If, on reflection, you
know that it is leading to self-affliction, to the affliction of
others, or to both... you should give it up. But if on reflection you
know that it is not... you may continue with it.”

Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta: Instructions to Rahula at Mango Stone
Allowing this question to be asked to and answered only contributes to merit.
I fail to see how closing it is meritorious.
I would also like to request that those who are eager "rule enforcers" and would like a "less liberal" moderation policy in order to their satiate their sense-desire to inflict their will upon others by practicing their rule enforcement craft to consider the words of the Buddha:

“Only the self controlled should restrain others.
Truly it is hard to restrain oneself.”

Dhammapada, Chapter 12: Oneself
Please re-open the question and/or provide an alternate means by which members of the community can acquire this information from those who possess it.

At some point we decided that questions about Pali language -- e.g. grammar -- is off-topic ...

Because for example questions about Chinese language are off-topic.
Because someone studying the language (e.g. its grammar) might have 1000 questions, that aren't very interesting to most people

... but that questions about the meaning of Pali Buddhist texts are of course on-topic.
Perhaps your question was closed for this kind of reason: i.e. that it's more about language -- grammar, syntax, script -- than meaning.

That said, there's a concept of "forbidden but tolerated" which goes like this for example:

It's forbidden to park your bicycle in the courtyard (because if everyone does that then it's a problem)
If only one person does it then that's harmless, so that's tolerated and the rule isn't enforced
But if everyone does it and it becomes a problem, then we begin to enforce the rule

I'd suggest that as long as it's just this one question, that seems harmless -- and so I'd be willing to undelete it, if another moderator will agree to.

In Proposal: Pali should be on-topic, the majority voted that Pali (syntax, grammar etc.) should be on-topic. However, this question seems to be about software and keyboard for Pali, and not Pali language itself. Would this be on-topic if Pali is on-topic?

@ruben2020 You're right, I'd forgotten we revised that policy about language. But here I'm not trying to vote that all technology questions are on-topic -- I am saying this question is at least adjacent to the topic, and harmless ... and that, especially because there's only one of it (and the fact there were two of it only implies that it's a FAQ and therefore popular/useful), it can be "tolerated" even if not "permitted".

It doesn't matter to me whether the question is re-opened or if the need is met by some other means. e.g. an FAQ that others can contribute to. But the need to understand how to correctly enter words in the pali language on this forum from a variety of devices is a need that many of us would be grateful to have met by some means.

@ChrisW OK. Then in that case, I agree that the question can be "tolerated".

@ruben2020 And it's not only about the topic, it's about the community. A reason why SE sites are segregated by topic (instead of hypothetically one big site for every question on every topic) is so that when you ask a question there's a "community" of users on the site who are able and willing to answer that kind of question. And it seems to me that this question is sufficiently within the "sphere of interest" and "area of expertise" of this site's community.


text:
Sharing the reputation
I have seen many new users who are actually very impressive and most of them seems to bring many new ways of thinking and perspectives.
Older the users are more they have reputation and they have no practicle use for it.
So my question is...
Can we have a better rewarding system (Something like a community recognition award for new users)
This way we can encourage them and keep them here at Buddhism SE.

@CrabBucket

If someone decided to give away a big chunk of their rep it would undermine this a bit.

The real world works like that though: if I trust someone and they trust someone else then I might believe their assessment of trustworthiness (you do that if you trust employees of trusted institutions).

Just a thought

It's a good thought.
Another idea  might be that on CodeReview.SE they have some kind of topic on their meta for proposing good answers. For example we could have a "Best of 2015" topic on our meta, in which we invite people to submit (as an answers) a short list of their favourite posts from the last year.
That needn't be specifically/exclusively for new users (but it could be if that were a good idea, e.g. "Good questions or answers by new users").
And there could be bounty associated with that.
Another benefit is that I'd be able to review some posts which other people thought were especially good, and perhaps read their explanation for why they think they're especially good/useful.

"Best of 2015" that's a very good idea!

I think the only other thing that could be done is for (higher) rep users to put bounties on certain questions to encourage answering and spread the reputation around a bit.
I personally think that's a reasonable idea but really is going to be up to the individual users. The downside is the reputation is a signal to the rest of the community. It indicates trust in a particular user and let's people know that this user has a history of good quality answers with maybe a bit of community building thrown in. If someone decided to give away a big chunk of their rep it would undermine this a bit.
That said it could be a bit of Dana as well. Just a thought

Yes bounties are rare here!


text:
New SE site for vegetarianism and veganism
There's an Area 51 site for Veganism & Vegetarianism. I figured there would be a fair amount of vegetarians and vegans here, so I thought I'd post it here for those who may be interested! It's currently in the commit phase, so if you feel you can contribute or want to learn something, please practice Mettā by coming along and committing!


text:
If you are doubting of Abhidhamma so long, please keep those questions on, and ask whatever conflicts you think you found in Abhidhamma to me
If you are doubting of  Abhidhamma so long,  please keep those questions on, and ask whatever conflicts you think you found in Abhidhamma to me.
And I think to understand the main problem of the conflict you think you have in abhidhamma first, please read my answer in this questions first. Most of doubts in Abhidhamma began from that simple point.
Metta ^.^


text:
What is the most important thing (truth, lesson), you have learned so far in your Buddhist practice?
Being of a little Zen orientation I believe in a dialectical approach to the Buddhist practice,
Having an open conversation about your station on the journey to enlightenment will often correct your belief errors and point you in the right direction.
So if you want to share your experience please join me in a conversation.
PS - All beliefs and opinions are welcomed
 Hopefully this being a meta site the thought Gestapo will let us be :)

Where do you want to converse? A chat room is the best place for conversation. There are limits built-in to the other pages of the web site to discourage conversation (e.g. unlimited-length answers but limited-length comments, chronologically-sorted comments but not not chronologically-sorted answers).

Chat rooms are difficult to organize though ... they work best when people participate in real time, conversely a single Q&A topic (one question and a few people's answers) can happen in everyone's own time over the course of a day or so.

I tried to answer recently, what are 10 the best things I learned from this web site -- see here -- if that's what you're asking about at all, though I guess it isn't.

Here's a chatty question for you: given what you answered here, what is a so-called "belief error"? What's the point of saying (i.e. teaching) that "Buddha is a state of mind" if you previously said that "all teachings are false teachings"? Can you describe (or otherwise point towards) that state of mind at all, for your own benefit or anyone else's? And isn't the outstanding characteristic of a Buddha that they're not only enlightened but also able to teach?

Let's say you wanna learn how to cook - You can A study a lot of cooking books or B enter as an apprentice to a master chef. A is academic learning B is practical learning. Buddha never taught or wrote a sutra or any other teachings neither his disciples or his disciples disciples. It took 500 years untill some Ego became so ignorant as to write it down and call it "Buddha's teachings". Those are the historical facts, not my own imagination. Enlightenment cannot be achieved academically. No matter how many cookbooks you read you'll never be a chef.

When they taught me how to cook, at school, what they taught me was how to read and understand (i.e. follow, obey, or execute) a written recipe (the first thing I made was a Christmas cake). Now I can cook (e.g. for myself and family), to the extent that I can perform according to a recipe or cook-book (and have some recipes memorised). I'm not a "chef" to the extent that I don't try to teach others, I don't cook different meals for dozens of people simultaneously, I don't have staff, and I don't experiment with creating new dishes.

Very good point So how is that recipe for enlightenment coming up?

I haven't met Zen teachers. My (superficial) reading of (popular) Zen literature suggests that "Are you enlightened?" is some kind of preoccupation or frequently-asked-question, is that so? Do they teach the four noble truths, or not really?

Is there a better way to communicate than this?

The word "enlightenment" might be one of those abstractions, intellectual conceptions or inchoate desires that you might warn against -- and a barrier rather than a recipe (see e.g. "To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs").

I'm having a problem with this damn thing. I keep hitting the return and cannot finish my thoughts

Yes, of course, study the 4NT but not as a way to enlightenment just a way to alleviate suffering.  How do you go about chatting?

Yup. There's no point in trying <Shift><Return> either, there's only limited formatting (no paragraphs) supported in comments. I can move these comments to chat (which would at least support <Shift><Return> if you'd want that; <Return> is still an implicit Send, though).

Ok I'm wide awake let's chat :)

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.


text:
What is the main chatroom of this site?
It seems that there is no official, permanently open chatroom in the chatroom list?

It's here: Buddhism -- General discussion
People don't use it ... so it's repeatedly (automatically) "frozen" for a lack of activity; but I can unfreeze it whenever someone asks.
When people chat it's normally in a "room" spun off from a specific question or answer.

Hmm, you don't have a bot that post questions on that room to keep it open? I see many sites have that bot?

Would you point me to an example (of a question posted by a bot in a chat room)?

The Meta Academia bot will post new meta posts on the generic chatroom of [academia.se]

We have one of those bots. Looking at https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/15162/buddhism, the most recent time it was frozen was two days after the bot posted a meta-question, so I don't know, maybe that doesn't keep the room unfrozen. Perhaps it would be good "for the community" if there were an active chat room -- it is a feature of other SE sites -- hasn't taken off, here. Look through the history of the room if you like, it's been occasionally or in the distant past. People do chat still but individuals about specific topics in different rooms.

there is an anti-room-freeze bot. I've asked the author to add it to this site: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/49127871#49127871


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On questioning motivations for asking
I asked the question: "How do we know complete liberation from dukkha is possible?" a few hours ago. On it, I've seen two answers that look (at least to me) as if they are answering by questioning my motivation for asking in the first place.
Is that kind of answers acceptable?
As far as I know, this site is not a place for preaching, and this kind of answers seems like a kind of indirect preach (because I don't feel that such questions are asked to make more precise and clear the OP).
I'm not saying that the advice given isn't useful or well-intended, because I think it is: under buddhist criteria, letting go is a really good advice, instead of mere "brain-masturbation" about philosophical questions that could only lead to vexation and proliferation. I agree on that.
But in my specific post, I'm not asking for advice for myself. If the ones advicing (if that's what they are doing in their answers, and if I'm misunderstanding) want to know about purpose of my question: I was trying to gain some perspective on the issue mentioned in the OP in order to have better informed answers in the future, specifically for people with inclination for philosophical discussion. If I were to say to him "let go, stop that brain-masturbation" to his question (on my justification on my conviction on Nibbana), that would not help him, or could even be counterproductive.
I know the above given information about my motivation is irrelevant and beyond the point of this general question on meta. I just wanted to inform you.
What should be done in these cases?
Should this kind of answers be critized, discouraged and/or downvoted? Are they ok and they are allowed as one of the recommended ways to answer a question? Am I misunderstading those answers?
I'd appreciate any indication on this matter.
Thanks in advance for your time!

Very fine questions; perhaps to clarify, facts are simply facts, & requiring documentation for puposes other than for additional research is might be confrontational/ argumentative: eg, then the references get challenged etc etc; Buddhism is based on (ostensibly) empirically obtained facts & sincere objective sharing of those facts, so, engaging with presentations of what may be inferred as confrontational/ argumentative, eg downvoting, could be contrary to The Noble Eightfold Path: maybe simply ignore such posts, and simply notvote them, that's also the mangement technique of

...positive reinforcement, or simply don'treward such behaviours, norpunish it either; making a mild differing comment might be ok though, so that tacit agreement wouldn't be construed: yet simply nonupvotes is fairly clear, since votes are simply +/- increments which lack content, and add little or nothing to the information presented, just are inconsistent possible indication of popularity, since they're sporadic & anonymous; votes don't contribute any facts to do with the subject, merely how much it's 'liked': maybe, ask someone who Knows the Answer, but again, they can be challenged etc

@MH Please try to post questions and answers instead of comments.

I suppose our site-specific policy which most clearly matches this case is Answers vs Advice which I summarise as,

The best answers deal directly and solely with the question(s) specifically asked
Avoid invalidating the question with answers of the form "That's the wrong question..."
In general, unless you actually are the questioner's teacher, don't assume a teacher's mantle.

This was very popular policy so "we" (users who answer questions here) should try to implement it.
As a moderator however I have been reluctant to enforce it unilaterally (i.e. by deciding by myself to delete "answers" which seem to offer advice like this). My reluctance is for several reasons:

Moderators aren't supposed to be a judge of whether an answer is correct
The canon itself (e.g. sutta) sometimes gives this kind of advice instead of trying to answer directly (as you mentioned in the OP about "vexation" etc.), for example in MN 2 -- so IMO that is or might be seen as a canonical answer or type of answer for certain types of question
I see my role as moderator as trying to let the site run, to let people ask and answer questions, with a minimum of hostility, ill-feeling, argument. I think sometimes it's easier to ignore (or tolerate, overlook) what you might consider to be a not-very-satisfying non-answer, than it would be to censor/delete that answer and then justify or explain why you did that. My experience has been that if someone's answer is deleted even once they may not accept that willingly, and carry a grudge for months etc.
Sometimes I too wonder why a user is asking a question, in case that helps to understand what they're asking. Although, asking the user, "What and why are you asking?" ought to be a comment under the question, it's not an answer.

The one time I will act to delete that kind of answer unilaterally is when it's based on sectarianism, for example an answer like, "You shouldn't ask a question about Mahayana doctrine because only Theravada doctrine is true" or vice versa.
Given that I sometimes (or often) don't choose to enforce this as a policy:

Perhaps another moderator will
I'm more inclined to delete an answer if the community downvotes it -- see the answers to Moderating answers which don't answer the question? -- in any case if you think an answer isn't useful then you as a user should downvote it
The person who asked the question is especially able to decide whether their question was answered, whether they found an answer useful or not useful. If something isn't an answer to your question then you might try to flag it for moderator's attention, as well as downvoting it, if you do then perhaps then I will reconsider whether to delete it.


text:
Why do Dharmafarer URL links to Piya Tan's publications not work anymore?
For example, in this answer, the Dharmafarer URL does not work anymore (as of today):
http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/14.13-Khemaka-S-s22.89-piya.pdf
How can we fix it?

You might accept Catija's answer if your testing shows you that the URLs are working correctly again now.

Thanks to some work by Shog9, all 466 of these links have been updated for you, so even if the dharmafarer site doesn't update their links, you won't need to worry about editing them all manually.
He used the suggested replacement ruben2020 mentioned, so hopefully there shouldn't be any problems. If there are, please let us know and we'll try to fix it.

To fix the Dharmafarer URLs, change from:
http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/14.13-Khemaka-S-s22.89-piya.pdf
To:
http://www.themindingcentre.org/dharmafarer/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/14.13-Khemaka-S-s22.89-piya.pdf
This means that dharmafarer.org/wordpress must be changed to www.themindingcentre.org/dharmafarer
I'm not sure if the moderators have some special admin tools to change this automatically throughout Buddhism.SE. If there isn't such a tool, then this would be a good feature request for StackExchange.

I asked about that a couple of weeks ago ...
How to find and/or change a set of hyperlinks on a site?
... this has happened before but there isn't such a tool.
It's easy to find all the links (with an already-existing query -- i.e. there are about 460 posts affected), but the edits must be done manually (because there's no existing tool), or someone needs to write a tool to do the edits semi-automatically (using the Stack Exchange API), or someone needs to ask one of the Stack Exchange developers to do it.
I also wrote to The Minding Centre (also on July 27), to tell them of the problem and suggest they fix this at their end (by supporting their old URLs, by implementing redirection) -- someone there wrote back, saying they had forwarded my email to their technical volunteer, but nothing after that.

To test whether they're fixed now look at some of the 400+ hyperlinks which now start with www.themindingcentre.org e.g. found by this query:
https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Athemindingcentre.org
I haven't tested them all, but the first and last ones on the list seem to work now, so, thank you.


text:
2020 Moderator Election - Announcement
Buddhism Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on October 5 to bring in one more moderator.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:

Starting on October 5, users can nominate themselves. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)

On October 19, if there are two or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll simply appoint the candidate. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)

If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on October 20.

(Note for current moderators: there's no need to nominate yourself even though you'll likely get an email saying you should. The system assumes the first election is a graduation election, which would mean moderators would need to be re-elected. This isn't that sort of election.)
If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.

The nomination period for the 2020 election was scheduled to end in 30 minutes. However, since we only had one candidate, I've extended the nomination period for another week.
On October 19, if there are two or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll simply appoint the candidate. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)


text:
2020 Community Moderator Election
The 2020 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://buddhism.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:
Buddhism.SE -- Potential Moderator Election -- Community Interest Check
Lanka stepped down as moderator.
So now the site has two moderators -- Andrei Volkov, and ChrisW -- where it's usual to have three.
Because this site is still in Beta, we have never had a moderator election yet -- SE Community Managers suggested that we might organise a first election now, to choose that third volunteer.
Now to avoid finding ourselves in a situation where an election would fail due to an insufficient number of candidates, I was asked to post this to try to assess community members' willingness to step up and nominate themselves, if and when an actual election's nomination period starts.
There needn't be very much work to being a moderator, especially with two others helping, and this is a relatively small SE site -- see also Who are the site moderators, and what is their role here?
But I think it is important to volunteer -- there were not many volunteers, when we were asked in 2015, and according to this answer SE sites depend on whether users are willing to moderate.
Please leave an answer if you'd be willing to run for a moderator position, should we decide to run an election.
NOTE: This is not an official election nomination thread, just a "pulse check" to get a notion of how many people here would be willing to step up.

Very helpful & clear post re the functioning of this site, just as post is written! And, as always, Asker's ongoing very helpful, conscientious, & substantial contributions to the siteare much appreciated, as well as Asker's consistently excellent posts & contributions on the main site! Thank you :)

@MH I reposted your other comments here as another topic.

just shared this link to some Temples' members. See anyone from them interested.

I'm surprised to see no nominations (including self-nominations) since 5 days from the time this was posted. In comparison, in 2015, six nominations were made within 7 hours of the posting.
I would like to volunteer myself to be a moderator of Buddhism.SE, as I wish to see this site maintained and sustained. I don't have a lot of time on my hands, but with load shared between moderators, I think this should be ok.

just a friendly ping letting you know that an election is now open :)


text:
The Buddhism site and moderators
As I've understood this forum is govern by the community. The moderators get elected in forums like SO. But here it seems some are selected as moderators, which has no issue as they are maintaining the ethics and other practices in this forum. But the main problem I saw is, even Budhha come and answer a question here, some of the moderators and highest scored profiles will reject him. Why? Because all the people here who think they know everything, are not open minded.
So let me tell this, Buddha didn't write a book on buddhism. He preached this verbally not using english. So the words which today dhamma is explained has deeper meaning which doesn't understand by translating to another language. As an example 'anicca'. I saw someone has said this is an opposite of 'nicca' but not the opposite of 'icca'. We still use the word icca in our day today life.
Anyway, what all specially the moderators should keep in mind is this Buddhism is not a game as mentioned by Buddha if someone tries to interpret something falsely and saying this is said by Buddha, it's 'anantariya papa karma' which means a worst sin a one can do which will cause them to suffer in hell. (Killing parents is also one of 5 among those sins). So I'm writing this with millions of Metta to the moderators and high score users do not close the path to Nivana with tge life you got as a human. The main reason, I'm posting this is to make everyone understand how serious this is. It doesn't matter whether a child doesn't know a poison drink kills him or not; if a child drinks a poison he will die. Whether you know this or not you may do these sins. Buddhism is not programming, buddhism is not maths just to understand the theories and answer. Buddhism is not simple as just to meditate and keep the mind calm and answer. Because Nivana is far beyond this. If you've heard Alarakalama, Uddakarama putta (Siddhartha's teachers) were also capable of reaching dhyana but they didnt know the Nivana. So just because someone has dhyana it doesn't mean he is in right path. Only the first entrant is in right path whether he has dhyana or not it doesnt matter.
So the question is, are you sure is this the correct way of governing buddhism related knowledge? I was asked once not to put some site reference as it conflicts with some high score profile here who even doesn't know whats the meaning of 'uggatithagna'. All these are said with Metta, not to harm anyone or not to make myself a high profile here. Because each and everyone of us are alone in our journey of sansara, don't block your path to Nivana when its the time of real dhamma has risen.

Moderator should be seen as a brahma? Have a look SN-4 Samana Sutta to find out who is the brahma (bamuna) in Buddhism. I'm not talking about respect here or age. If tge community is trated them as 'bamuna' they should not over power it. They can only if they are real 'bamuna' in buddhism. If not they are in a danger. Thats all I wanted to highlight. So if some moderator act wrongly it harms him back as karma. This not happens only to moderators for all of us its the case.

about the age. I've heard a story about a daughter who is about to die, addressing to her father as younger brother. Then this person asked about this from Buddha and the response was yes she is correct. Because she is once return and you are stream entrant. From that you may understand how the age matters in Buddhism. Not to offense anyone but with millions of metta.

I haven't disrespect anyone here. I've just highlighted the risk. So I don't know what to correct. And what action should I ask pardon for. You may have misunderstood my words above. I should say this; pardon me if someone feel bad because of above. Because english is not my mother tongue. And I didn't mean harm to any one by saying above. Just wanted to highlight the risk.

I guess I am "a senior", then, in the sense that I've been a user of this site since 2014 -- though I'm not one of the very first users -- and I read everything posted on Meta to find out what policies "the community" wanted moderators to implement on this site. It's not complicated: 1) It's a question-and-answer site 2) Comments and other chat which distract readers from the Q&A might be deleted from the main site 3) Moderators generally won't delete answers, if you want to post answers to other people's questions. 4) Please avoid being hostile to other users and/or other schools of Buddhism.

I'm really worried what you mean by this. This is not about seniority in the site. I know you on SO too. I know who you are! (Of course you are a senior) That's not what I meant. Anyway let's wrap up this here. I'm fed up. But need to add one thing. Have I ever being hostile to anyone? I may have argued in order to direct or find towards the truth. By just remembering a  phrase from the book on how to swim doesn't make no one swim (I'm very calmly saying this, please don't get mad at me). And as I said even a child get died if he eats poison with or without knowing it is. Millions of Metta..!

Samana Johann was likening a moderator to Brahma! There's a sutta in which Brahma is the first-born into the realm, and therefore thinks that he created it ... I don't remember being even one of the "first born" into this realm (but I do think I have a duty to the people who asked me to act as a moderator). And, no, you haven't been hostile.

@ChrisW: If you can remember I've thanked you many times saying, thanks for the support to keep the community or helping to organize the content Anyway where I got worried was, some highscored profile asked me do not refer to puredhamma site. https://puredhamma.net/key-hidden-dhamma-concepts/anicca-dukkha-anatta-2/anicca-dukkha-anatta/ Which is an act of hostile right? I tried to find that reference but I couldn't. That's where it started to seem like this is bias community. With Metta..!

@follower I think I remember which user said that. He is (how can I put this politely?) more outspoken than most other users of this site. I guess I allowed that comment to pass, without editing it, as an opinion (like someone might say, "I don't think that's a good translation", or something, without meaning to be too offensive or trolling) but if you do see a post which you find hostile you can flag it or comment on it here on Meta so I can inspect it closely and maybe edit it. And though he posts quite prolifically, they're not necessarily representative of the bias of the whole community.

@ChrisW Thanks as always..!

@ChrisW: And that person is very rude and had been hostile to me. I took a screenshot of it, from the phone. You may find it here. And after few mins he has change it to some text and then had deleted it completely. But these are not acceptable from a buddhist. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PFYpFgH6qKT4lMkc3NeoMpRW4i8-ArNH

@SamanaJohann No anger at all. If I was I would report it here back then. Now got a chance to mention this. So thought of sharing it, if it helps to improve the community. Thanks   for the advice by the way

Moderators don't see everything that's posted, especially if it's deleted. Also moderators don't approve of everything that's posted, sometimes barely tolerate it. Also we have limited control over what other people post -- we can ask users to be nice, edit or a delete a post, suspend an account, and that's about all. I think the moderators agree that the post you screenshotted was rude, but it's deleted now, and that if we will censor a user it's better to do that right there and then instead of too late.

Also I can't guarantee that you'll like everything that everyone posts -- I don't "like" everything myself, that's posted -- but it's not exactly "my" site, so I don't think I should edit every last word to my liking, and try to punish people for posting anything I dislike. Instead I guess I'm supposed to make it possible for other different people to post -- and that it may be beneficial generally to get different answers from different people even including some unpopular ones sometimes.

Agree on all, as I said I didn't complain about it as I understood what kind of a person he is. Thanks for your time.

I can understand that you have a different opinion on what "anicca" means.
But to rant here that we're going to hell for saying "anicca" means "impermanence" is forcing your views upon the community and trying to censor others.
How Buddhism.SE works, is that if you think an answer is wrong or of low quality, you can vote it down. If you think an answer is right or good, you can vote it up. There is freedom of speech in Buddhism.SE in this way.
For e.g. this answer received a lot of downvotes because the community thought that it's not good. But that answer did not get deleted, because it is not really hate speech or spam etc. The moderators did not censor this legitimate answer even if it was not a good one. The moderators should only censor answers that are not an answer (e.g. comment), hate or abusive speech, spam, very low quality (e.g. one-liners) etc.
This answer expressed the view that "anicca" means "insatiable", but it was still allowed, although downvoted, because it is a legitimate answer even if the community did not agree with it.
In fact, I think Buddhism.SE supports freedom of speech more than other Buddhism sites. For e.g. expressing the view that "anicca" does not mean "impermanence" is not allowed on SuttaCentral.
On the SuttaCentral page "Extremist views are banned on this forum", Bhikkhu Sujato, a well-known translator and scholar of the Pali Canon, wrote the following text (see below). This means that if you try to express the view that "anicca" does not mean "impermanence" on SuttaCentral, you may get banned because SuttaCentral considers that a non-hateful extremist view. Also see this comment by Bhikkhu Sujato.
This does not apply here on Buddhism.SE. I think you should be grateful that you can freely express your opinions here and not try to censor the fellow members of Buddhism.SE.
From the SuttaCentral page "Extremist views are banned on this forum":

Advocating extremist views is banned on this forum.

Anyone advocating hateful views will be banned without warning.
Anyone advocating non-hateful extremist views will be warned, and if they persist, banned.

What is an extremist view?
Generally it refers to views that blithely reject well-established
  facts. The views themselves may or may not be hateful, but they are
  always delusional. Such views seem like an innocuous theory, but they
  often aim at creating a nationalist, sectarian fundamentalism.
It is not possible to define these with precision, so I will decide on
  a case by case basis, with consultation if necessary.
We are concerned primarily with Buddhist extremist views, but other
  forms of anti-reality extremism are included, such as climate change
  denial.
Examples of hateful views include anti-semitic, homophobic,
  misogynist, racist, and pro-nazi ideas.
Examples of non-hateful extremist views include:

The Buddha was born in Sri Lanka.
Anicca doesn’t mean impermanence.
The original Pali manuscripts at Aluvihara exist.
Pali fundamentalism (Chinese texts are all Mahayana, etc.).

I've just now understood what this post is about.
In a now-deleted comment under this question you posted the following comment ...

This is a good example to prove the buddhism's core is not impermanence which some mistkenly interpret the meaning of the word 'anicca'. Its correct meaning is 'insatiable'. When something is insatiable it always cause dukkha. This is not tge exact noble dukkha. But its (anicca, which is not the impermanence) the the root cause to noble dukkha. In this forum explaining this would just adds down votes.

... which I deleted.
You then commented ...

see my previous comment is deleted. This community is not open minded. Without knowing they are doing a big sin to them selves. They may see the right path some day. With Metta

... and I replied ....

Here is a description of how to use the site's "comment" feature. If you want to answer the question then please post it as an answer (not a comment) -- or if you don't want to answer the question then don't. A comment on the question is for e.g. when you don't understand the question or want to suggest an improvement to how it's worded.

Your comment was related to this post -- Is "impermanence" a bad translation of "anicca"?

Anyway, if you refer to The Tour it says,

This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.
Just questions...
  ...and answers.

My function here as moderator is not to decide what's Buddhist or orthodox -- it's not because I know a lot about Buddhism that I was asked to act as moderator -- instead I should help to explain ...

The policies defined by Stack Exchange (for all SE sites) -- see e.g. the Help pages
And defined by the "community" of users (for this site) -- see e.g. FAQ index (summary of site policies)

... (and to implement those policies, sometimes by deleting posts).
Apart from the Help page about comments which I already linked to, see also:

When my answer is short, shall I post it as a comment instead?
When should comments be deleted

Regular users can't delete other users' comments, but as a moderator I can and may -- I assume that:

Someone -- who may be a regular user of the site, and/or a naive reader -- might find the Is Jhana considered dukkha and/or conditioned? page because they're interested in that specific topic
They don't know you nor what you've posted previously
Your comment as posted is therefore more-or-less incomprehensible -- a distraction

If you want to answer the question then post an answer:

Don't try to answer by posting a comment
Don't assume that the person reading has already read what you posted previously
Also avoid criticising other users -- see Code of Conduct and Be nice
And, avoid making "this site" the topic of your post -- talk about the site belongs on Meta

Anyway I deleted the comment because:

It wasn't a clear answer
It was a reference to a previous topic which most readers might not have read
It was commentary about the site, and voting, and so on

You could post an answer if you wanted to -- but, you said you didn't want to, because ...

In this forum explaining this would just adds down votes.

That seemed to be saying "I could answer this but I refuse to explain it" which isn't a comment that might help the OP.
I guess that -- "why is a post down-voted and does it matter?" -- is a different topic altogether.
For what it's worth if I try to post an answer, then I hope that what I post might be true and on-topic. If it helps a reader that's more important than how users vote on it. I don't answer every question, and when I do I usually include a reference (e.g. a quote from a sutta or other writing).
As for your original thesis, people seemed to agree that the various views like ...

Inability to Keep What We Like
Repeated Arising/Destruction
Worthlessness of Worldly Things

... were not untrue, and were a useful and orthodox understanding -- I think they're paraphrases from various suttas. The less popular part of the message, in case you do want to avoid downvotes in future, was saying "Everyone who translates anicca as 'impermanent' is wrong".

You may can relate the question here to the comments / questions and answers I'm related to. Which was not I tried to highlight. If I wanted to highlight those, I would directly raise it here. When I saw you the moon by pointing my finger towards the moon, please don't look at the finger try to see the moon. Again I'm saying Buddhism is not a simple thing to play with. Just understand if u drink poison u die no matter whether u did it purposely or not. So dear Sir, I'm not blaming any moderators here. I just wanted to highlight the risk. Finally its your car (life journey) your petrol.

@SamanaJohann Thank you for the suggestion. I usually "move to chat" if the comments are already a conversation between users (so that users can continue the conversation in chat if they want to), but you're right that I could do that more i.e. even with single comments. So I've done that now with the comments under this question.