text:
I lost 10 reputation today. Our newest moderator, Juraj lost 510, Majenko lost 170. Who was the "deleted" user who was responsible?
When a "sock puppet account" up-votes other users, they should at least have the common courtesy to ask the "up-voted user" whether or not they want the reputation, before they start up-voting them.
I have said publicly that the reputation on the Stack Exchange Networks has absolutely no value, unless collecting fake internet points stimulates that part of your brain which craves it.
Please do not vote for my answers. I help people because I want to, not for the reputation. Last time I checked, Stack Exchange Reputation is NOT accepted at my local gas station, grocery store, or anywhere else in Canada.
FWIW, you can go to each user's public profile page and filter by "reputation" to see who lost the most rep. Here's a good place to start: Arduino Users.

about voting: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote

as I learned in Help Center there are two different messages: "User was removed" and "voting corrected". this time it is "User was removed"

@Juraj - The about voting page says this "Voting is so important that there is a variety of badges associated with different aspects of voting – like casting your first upvote or downvote, using up all of your allotted votes in a day". I agree that there are not enough legitimate votes on this stack, and it's been a 4 year issue: https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2474/are-we-a-little-stingy-about-upvoting-questions With 17,570 votes to date, I am doing my part: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&filter=all

Why is this even troubling you? I lose 10 reputation every now and then, sometimes because an account is deleted, sometimes because someone disagrees with an answer I give, and sometimes because they don't like me.

This is what I posted on MathOverflow Meta: Is it possible to know the list of removed users? Briefly: If the user was deleted after the last update of SEDE, you can download the list of users from there and do the same next week (after the next update). If the user was removed before the most recent update, you won't find out from SEDE.

@Martin - Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction. I've forked your query with minor modifications, and will re-run it next week and see if there is a change. Your answer on MathOverflow Meta is excellent, and should be required reading for every SE moderator. Arduino SE is a small stack, so using 15 rep and up returns far less records then the 50K limit. https://data.stackexchange.com/arduino/query/1440753/find-all-users-above-given-reputation?rep=15

It is impossible for us to know who the deleted user was. But "user was removed" is itself a very loose term.
It may have been a user that was deleted by the system for voting abuse. In general though users are deleted by a manual action by us moderators (destroyed as a spammer, for example) or manual intervention by the community moderators (our bosses).
It is far more likely that the user decided to delete their own account. Maybe a "rage quit" (we've all been there and done that) or just reducing their online presence.
As Nick has noted, reputation is less about personal reward and more about the smooth running of the site. Having to earn privileges through good questions and answers means that only people that have earned some level of trust gain access to more advanced features - which helps reduce abuse by new (or "sock puppet") users.
Voting for questions and answers is not about rewarding the users (the bounty system is for that, which you may notice is seldom, if ever, used), but about grading the quality of content. Once you have earned the amount of reputation you require to unlock the facilities you want there is little point to reputation from a personal perspective, but from the site's point of view the voting that creates that reputation is invaluable.
If people don't vote for your answers (because you told them not to) your answers won't be seen as good answers on the website, since others will have higher votes. Even if your answer is by far the best answer, if it's not been voted up that answer is of less worth (and less likely to be read) than a poorer answer.
In short: voting is the core principle these sites work on. Reputation is merely a side effect and a way of controlling new users' actions.

I just imagined the reputation hurricane if VE7JRO decides to delete his account because he doesn't like how the site works

@Juraj - "hurricane"? That's funny, considering you were the person who lost the most rep (551) from the latest "purge" of fake votes. 551 rep in 30 days from one user to another must be considered excessive by the system, so I see why SE invalidated the rep. I have up-voted at least 132 of your answers over a period of several years, which is what, 1,320 rep? Doesn't sound like you would be affected too much by a VE7JRO exodus "hurricane".

@Majenko - "but from the site's point of view the voting that creates that reputation is invaluable." -  I agree, and I do my part by voting, 17,570 times last time I checked: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&filter=all The lack of legitimate voting seems to be a 4 year old issue with this stack: https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2474/are-we-a-little-stingy-about-upvoting-questions It's a shame that more "veterans" don't up-vote more. It would create a bigger pool of users with the ability to approve edits, vote to close, etc. Thank you for your answer.

@VE7JRO what 30 days? Invalidated rep has "voting corrected" (for example dannyf  Dec 9 2020)

@Juraj - Part 1. The 30 days refers to the period of time when the majority of the lost reputation by a high percentage of the 2,000+ rep users on our network occurred. The removed user who cost you 500 rep yesterday: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users/37622/juraj?tab=reputation&sort=post&page=1 may or may not be the same one you lost rep from on 2020-10-02: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/users/37622/juraj?tab=reputation&sort=post&page=3 To a regular user like myself, it's very likely the account was created a long time ago, and all of a sudden it is being used for nefarious purposes.

@Juraj - Part 2. The "fake votes issue" has been going on for a long time here on our stack, as you are well aware of. To refresh your memory, you said: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/50445713#50445713 and also said: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/50479244#50479244 When you read the entire history of the Pin 13 chat, it would seem that you are the right person to figure out what's really going on here.

@Juraj - Part 3. I see the difference in the message I received "User was removed" and that of user dannyf "Voting corrected". If you read the definitions of each: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/user-was-removed , https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed , you'll see that "User was removed" is a serious offence, where as "voting corrected" says this "Should I be concerned about these correction statements on my profile?...

@Juraj - Part 4. "...No, not at all. It's only an indication of reputation change. After all, we can't control the actions of other users. It's very rare where we'd run across a user who was intentionally using votes to manipulate their own reputation, and most cases you would have already been contacted separately if we thought that was the case. As long as you're not intentionally abusing the system to manipulate someone else's reputation or your own, you do not have to worry about such entries - they're just an indication that the system is doing its job.".

@VE7JRO some time ago users could not delete their account. they had to request a mod to do it it. google search returns old meta answers on this topic. but now maybe because of the GDPR a user can delete their account.

A "sock puppet" account is one which is literally controlled by the same person, like a puppet on your hand. So for example, if I made a second account called "John Gammon" (using a slightly different email address) and then whenever I made a post I got my "John Gammon" account to upvote it, that would be a sock puppet vote. Clearly that would be unethical, as no person, other than myself, was voting for it.
In that case, I would hardly need to get permission from myself to do the upvote, as it was me doing it.
However if a different person, Joe Bloggs, just happens to think I am wonderful and vote all my posts up, then this isn't a sock puppet vote. That is just an admirer. The Stack Exchange algorithm for detecting sock puppet votes might not be able to distinguish between the two, however.

Please do not vote for my answers. I help people because I want to, not for the reputation

That is certainly admirable to want to help people, however the whole idea behind Stack Exchange is that good answers are voted up, and bad ones voted down. Asking people to not vote up your answers, if they are good, defeats that mechanism.
Next, you'll be asking people to not accept your answers, because that also gives you reputation. However accepting answers indicates that your answer solves their problem.
The up-vote is not so much to give you reputation (that is a side-effect) but to mark the answer as good and useful.

Who was the “deleted” user who was responsible?

I don't know the answer to that. Not even moderators can find that out. I suggest, though, that new users don't just go around voting hundreds of posts up willy-nilly. It might look to "the algorithm" that they are sock puppet votes.

You tagged this question "grow-up-se-rep-is-worthless". It isn't worthless — it is the basis of the entire system. Without reputation, you may as well have the to-and-fro of a forum. With a forum, it is hard to see which are the good answers and which are the rubbish ones. The reputation system (and the voting) is specifically designed to let third parties know whether they should trust one answer over another one.

"Next, you'll be asking people to not accept your answers, because that also gives you reputation." - No, I won't be asking them to do that, and I never suggested it either. Where did you come up with that idea?

You said Please do not vote for my answers. I help people because I want to, not for the reputation. Well, if people accept your answers you get reputation. Apparently something you don't want.

No, I did not say "please don't accept my answer, I said Please re-read my first paragraph. Those are two completely different things. Accepting answers closes questions which is a good thing.

"Apparently something you don't want. " - Once again I must ask, where are you getting this from? Show me anything I have written that says I don't want to earn reputation for a good answer.

I have a question about: "However if a different person, Joe Bloggs, just happens to think I am wonderful and vote all my posts up, then this isn't a sock puppet vote. That is just an admirer." When I read this page: https://arduino.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed, it says "intentionally voting merely to reduce or inflate another user's reputation is considered abuse.". My interpretation is that voting for "...just an admirer" or "an admirer just voting for you" because they "like you", is a violation of the TOS with SE. Can you clarify this for me?

Once again I must ask, where are you getting this from? - You said in your original question above: Please do not vote for my answers. I help people because I want to, not for the reputation. Your point is so obscure I don't understand it. You are asking people to not vote for your answers, but then you say you want to earn reputation? How, pray, are you going to earn reputation if you ask people not to vote for your answers?

Can you clarify this for me? - yes I agree, if you collude with another user to vote each other's posts up, that may well be a violation of the TOS. However it is not a "sock puppet" as such. You can't usefully ask a sock puppet not to vote for you because the sock puppet is yourself. Unless you like talking to yourself. See Sock Puppet Account - Wikipedia - they define it as someone who operates a false account pretending to be someone else when they are really themselves under different names.

RE: "how pray..." - You earn 15 rep when your answer is accepted, you earn 10 rep from an up-vote (from a honest user), you earn 2 from editing a post and those with rep for accepting an edit, etc. You can earn up to 1,000 rep without asking or answering a question.

RE: "Joe Bloggs" - In your example, let's assume you havs a 2nd account called Joe Bloggs, your sock puppet account. Joe Bloggs up votes your posts, but he also up votes other users posts (like mine). Maybe Joe Bloggs thinks this will hide what he is doing. The fact that all of the user's posts were deleted, all rep removed from all those up-voted, and the "stronger" message "User was removed", it is quite likely it is a sock puppet account. I remember a user who deleted their account (rage quit) during the period of time I was a moderator. SE kept all the posts and people kept the rep.

RE: "just happens to think I am wonderful and vote all my posts up, then this isn't a sock puppet vote. That is just an admirer."  - Is it against the SE rules to up-vote a persons answer just because they admire them?


text:
Current questions counts based on close state, answered and score and about Roomba
Based on the quality of some of the new question we see every day, some users think we collect trash here on Arduino SE. But we don't collect it all really. Stack Exchange system has a cleaning process nicknamed Roomba (as the robotic vacuum cleaner). Roomba deletes closed question without answer 10 days after asked. Roomba deletes unanswered questions with negative score 30 days after asked.
Today I made for me an overview of questions count based on close state, answered and score. There were 23764 questions total at that time. I used advanced search with queries like closed:yes answers:0 duplicate:no score:1..1.
Questions (not closed) with at least one answer:

score
count
% of all questions

score 2 or more
4570
19%

score 1
5253
22%

score 0
7432
31%

negative score
1189
5%

Questions (not closed) without answers:

score
count
comment

score 1 or more
2877
13% of all questions

score 0
462
one dovnwote will make them ready for deletion

negative score
26
roomba will delete them soon if no upvote happens

Closed questions (not duplicates) without answer:

score
count
comment

score 2 or more
42

score 1
151
one dovnwote will make them ready for deletion

score 0 or less
57
roomba will delete them soon if no upvote happens

We have 437 questions marked as duplicate. Roomba only deletes "closed as duplicate" questions with negative score and no answer. There are 121 duplicate questions for which one dovnwote will make them ready for deletion.
We have 1177 closed (not as duplicate) questions with an answer. It is 5% of all questions.
Voting on questions is important. Their score decides the deletion. Many times one vote makes a difference.

If anyone is interested, then the full conditions to the Roomba cleanup are here: The Community user deleted my question! What gives?

and even a Roomba Forecaster user script exists https://stackapps.com/questions/7239/roomba-forecaster-when-will-the-question-be-roombaed-if-it-wont-why

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
My Answer was Merged with the comments
Today my answer was converted into a comment I do not know the reason why our moderator has changed my answer to the comment. The link to my answer is here. I still do not understand why it was deleted and merged with comments any light to it would be grateful so that if it's a mistake then I don't repeat it.
Thanks and Regards,
Maaz

That question was about compilation error which was solved by answer recommending to use .c_str().
The update turned the question into a troubleshooting case, which is not possible on a Q&A site. Sometimes we help troubleshot but not in answers but in comments. Your 'answer' is such a comment. If it takes many comments, then the session is moved to chat, which is more suitable because it can show source code.
If OP answers your comment, I will move the comments session to chat and you can do the troubleshooting there. But the question was asked 1 year, 4 months ago so I doubt OP still tries to solve this.
Note: strdup allocates string on heap

Yeah, later I checked when the question was asked. Thank you for the clarification

Simply because an answer asking the OP to try something is not an answer - it is one of a stream of comments.
If you want clarification or for the OP to try something out and get back to you then you ask that in comments. Once the cause and solution has been "nailed" in the comments you can flesh that out into a proper answer.

Can you please let me know the full form of OP also. Thank you

@MaazSk Original Poster. The person asking the question.

Okay, Thank you!

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


text:
Arduino SE reviewers, new close reason proposal needs your opinion
Before adding a new close reason, it must be consulted with the community. The new close reason would be "Not reproducible or was caused by a typo". It was already discussed 6 years ago but there was no closure and I think I can't add the new close reason based on the old voting.
EDIT: Now questions which could use this close reason are closed with other reasons so this new close reason gives better explanation for the question poster.
Please vote on this post for this new close reason. You can share your thoughts about it in comments or as answer.
Stack Overflow has this close reason and I would use their texts:
Input Title

Not reproducible or was caused by a typo

Input Guidance

While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a way less likely to help future readers.

It looks like this in close reason selection:

Post Owner Guidance

This question was caused by a typo or a problem that can no longer be reproduced. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a way less likely to help future readers.

Privileged User Guidance

This question was caused by a typo or a problem that can no longer be reproduced. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a way less likely to help future readers.

Concensus Description

Closed. This question is not reproducible or was caused by typos. It is not currently accepting answers.

This post notice looks like this:

EDIT: This close reason and its wording was fine tuned by SO Meta members in collaboration with moderators and CMs.

Would it not be better for someone to create an answer showing the OP what/where the typo is, rather than just closing the question (with potentially no explaination)? It is a good and valid way of getting upvotes in the community.

Admittedly, it would not necessarily be helpful for others searching for answers. It would increase the hay to needle ratio.

@sa_leinad, https://arduino.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2667/trivial-questions-must-be-off-topic

I just closed one that could have been closed as this. However it's no hardship to just do a custom close with your own message. Do we really need a other close reason?

that is the question. some months ago somebody mentioned it in a comment on a just closed question. now exploring the mod tools I found out mods can add community close reasons but have to consult on Meta with the community. While writing the Meta post, Meta suggested the old question about the same close reason. And there are 8 upvotes and no downvote.

a prepared close reason can be tracked in stats

I was uncertain about this, however I must admit that this question is a good case in point. The problem was confusing = with == in code. This is not so much a typo as a misunderstanding of the C++ language, however if the question were to remain it would just be solving one person's coding problem, without really contributing to the general Arduino knowledge-base.
However I do have a problem with this:

This question was caused by a typo or a problem that can no longer be reproduced.

Surely they are widely different things? A typo is just a typing error, for example misspelling a word, using capitals in the wrong way, and so on.
A problem that can no longer reproduced is a totally different beast. You might try the posted code out and not reproduce the results the poster claimed. Surely this is something else? Maybe your environment, or hardware, was different?
Even the question I quoted above wasn't really a typo (unless you accidentally typed = instead of ==) but more likely to be a confusion about how C++ works compared to, say, SQL.
How about three close reasons? :)

A typo (eg. mistyping float as flat).
A lack of understanding of C++, which would apply whether or not you were using the Arduino (eg. using = for an equality test)
A problem that cannot be reproduced. (eg. a = 2 + 2 giving 5, when everyone else gets 4).

this SO Meta describes the "not reproducible" as I understand it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/289151/how-much-longer-can-one-reproduce In this sense the reason is right in both parts for the linked question.

The close reason and its wording was fine tuned by SO Meta members in collaboration with moderators and CMs so I would prefer to leave it as it is. What maybe could be added is a "basic wiring error" for ground not connected or data lines swapped.

I liked: "Not reproducible, or trivial."

I found a comment about "trivial" in the Meta post I linked: "I'd really hate having "trivial" as one of the close reasons. There are so many things that seem trivial to some people..."

I read a “mental typo” counts as a typo too. It was for a question answered with a comment "why would your program print the output you want if you don't issue any printing commands"

"How about three close reasons?" SE sites generally only get 3 off-topic close reasons (some sites may request an additional slot to 4, currently only Stack Overflow has 5). Splitting this into 3 may prevent adding new off-topic close reasons in the future, or at least make it more difficult to adjust.

I would vote for introducing this new closing reason.
While the first sentence in the descriptions (with the "not reproducible" and "typo") leaves a bit open what exactly is meant, the second sentence ("less likely to help future readers") is the important part in most cases. I don't want to advocate against the first sentence though. We need to have a single sentence description part, which can be used as title. Such a short sentence will always leave something open.
Also: From my experience (might be different when looked at from the real numbers) the close votes are mostly done by the more experienced users on this site, which will not be confused by the option. And question writers will get a more fitting close reason. Currently we often only use "off topic" and then write a comment that C/C++ syntax is off topic. These comments might still be necessary to give more details, but more information for the user is better. And it comes with rather little cost.

thank you chrisl. the description avoids the word 'trivial' so it gives two of the most common causes for a trivial question. this is how they fine tuned it on SO and having the exact same wording as SO makes it consistent on network


text:
I lost 100 reputation points
I was quite busy for a few months and did not have any chance to check Arduino Stack Exchange and when I open today I have lost near about 120 points I don't know why and there is a message Serial Voting corrected. Is there any chance I can get back my lost reputation? Or do I need to earn them again?

Hey - yeah, Majenko's answer here is correct. It's seriously unfortunate, but was a necessary voting correction that affected a good number of users. If you or anyone else has questions about it, I'm happy to help answer them. Just poke me in the comments here.

No, thank you @Slate. It is now clear to me if I have any further doubts I will surely let you know. Thank you

I'm late to this question on meta, but I just realized, that I lost a whole 3600 in reputation. I was wondering but this answers it. Must have been a really bad rogue user to give me 3600 points.

Don't worry, you're not alone. We had a rogue user that caused some trouble, and their bad behaviour has been corrected. Those 120 points you had are gone I'm afraid. But don't worry, some people lost thousands of rep.
Keep writing great answers and I'm sure you'll soon enough earn them back.


text:
Searching for proper SE site or others forum for the < finding Arduino alternative for IRIG2 cable > question
I am trying to split my work to some small parts and ask some question about them o the Internet, for example I have tried to find some Arduino project for playing YouTube music on clubhouse form PC as you can see below:
About playing YouTube audio from my computer into Clubhouse (hack and DIY) [closed]
So I have asked it on the electronic SE site and the lifehack SE site and the Arduino SE site, and it has been recognized as Off topic question!, now If possible I like to find out some alternative Forum like SE or other SE site to ask this question.
Thanks.

Your problem seems to be that this is not an open discussion forum. This is a question and answer site. You come with a specific problem and ask a specific question, and we answer it. Instead you seem to be asking general advice and "how to proceed" kind of questions that invite long-winded discussion.
Maybe the Arduino Project Discussion forum (https://forum.arduino.cc/c/projects/7) would be better for you.


text:
Vale Robert Patterson (Crossroads)
It is with sadness that I inform everyone that Robert Patterson (known here, and on the Arduino Forum, as Crossroads) died on 17 November 2021 after a short illness. His obituary is here.
Bob was a very prolific contributor to the Arduino Forum, where he was a moderator, making 47,600+ posts.
Bob also joined Arduino Stack Exchange in February 2018, where he answered a few hundred questions.
Bob was keen on electronics, producing boards for the Arduino and other devices. His site was http://www.crossroadsfencing.com/.
In collaboration with his wife Kathy he wrote a book Arduino for teens.
He was also interested in fencing (with swords, not making fences) and aviation. He obtained his private pilot's licence and purchased his own aircraft, eventually getting an instrument rating.
His contributions to both Arduino Forum and Arduino Stack Exchange were invariably to help people with their electronics problems and suggest solutions. He will be sorely missed.


text:
No more project showcases?
I saw that there was a Project Showcase '14 but I could not find other project showcases. I also could not find reasons why it should not be repeated every year.
I really liked the projects from that showcase. Any chance that such an event is repeated?


text:
Comments deleted on a closed question
I noticed that some of my comments on a question of mine were deleted.
These comments were answering (now also deleted) comments by someone who asked me about why I thought that the question is on-topic.
Is there a good reason why my comments were deleted?

I am sorry. I deleted the comments before the question was closed. I thought you convinced jsotola that the question is on topic and I didn't expect other members would think the question is off topic.
It is normal to delete obsolete comments, because purpose of comments on SE posts is to clarify things and then the comments should be removed.
The question is on topic of course. Fritzing is a tool used in Arduino world.
To answer the question, I asked one more clarification in a comment 2 days ago, but you were distracted by the off topic discussion.

Hm, after my question was re-opened ~ 2 weeks ago, it was closed again today (with reason: 'off-topic'). I remember that you left a comment there some time ago telling close-voters to consider the question as on-topic. But this comment was removed, in the meantime. Perhaps you are somebody else considered that comment as obsolete. But given the fact that the question was closed again, perhaps it wasn't obsolete after all.

@maxschlepzig, I can't write an answer on Arduino SE about bug in a Fritzing component. We found the problem and it is not an Arduino based problem.

Well, usually the question itself determines whether it's on-topic or not. Not its possible answer. Answering it with: no, it's not a feature/misuse of fritzing but a bug in the component would be a valid answer btw. Funny how my question was first closed than re-opened and now closed again while it didn't change. Perhaps  the Feel free to ask about anything related to Arduino. sentence doesn't really reflect reality.

@maxschlepzig, Using Fritzing is on topic. Fixing Fritzing is not. Even fixing some Arduino IDE bug is not on topic.

Couldn't disagree more. Imagine a stackoverflow question inquiring about some GCC behavior. Someone knows that the behavior is due to a GCC bug - and instead of just answering along the lines of 'the behavior you observe is caused by this bug, cf. link/bug number/etc.' that someone votes to close that question. Because it's a bug, you see. Since stackoverflow isn't about fixing bugs etc. This would be quite out of space.


text:
2021: a year in moderation

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

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

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Arduino over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
2
13

Users destroyed³
24
0

Users deleted
1
0

Users contacted
6
0

User banned from review
1
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
65
621

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
28
223

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
1
478

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
12
340

Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue
1
491

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
0
1,521

Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue
2
182

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
18
1,325

Revisions redacted
5
0

Questions reopened
35
9

Questions protected
22
19

Questions migrated
35
0

Questions merged
1
0

Questions flagged⁵
21
180

Questions closed
1,052
225

Question flags handled⁵
102
89

Posts unlocked
4
8

Posts undeleted
14
45

Posts locked
4
46

Posts deleted⁶
403
2,547

Posts bumped
0
2,023

Comments undeleted
43
0

Comments flagged
0
93

Comments deleted⁷
1,057
1,072

Comment flags handled
79
14

Answers flagged
6
486

Answer flags handled
424
68

All comments on a post moved to chat
26
0

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

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2020: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^


text:
Congratulation to Majenko for reaching 100k reputation points
Congratulation to Majenko to be the first Arduino SE member reaching 100k reputation points. These points were collected on his 3,819 answers in 7 years and 5 months.

Well, that's impressive! Well done, Majenko.

Well done Majenko!!!
The whole community thanks you for your contributions over the past 7+ years. We are wiser because of your contributions.
Thank you!


text:
Are questions about widgets used with an Arduino on-topic?
This topic has been discussed previously but not seemingly clearly resolved. (ref. Are questions that are only related to Arduino by the parts used on topic?).
Recently (early 2022) some community members have been implementing a strict policy that seems to me to have low utility, and to be somewhat harsh (ref. Looking for vibration sensor, Continuous servo motor).
I would argue that questions about using Arduino MCU's often relate to the parts selected and interfaced. That's why the community has tags to identify these topics. Some of the tag info wiki's specifically encourage such questions. (e.g., Sensors tag, "Use this tag for questions about selecting, connecting, using, and debugging sensors.") If the spirit of the question is about using the arduino ecosystem, then I think the community should start the conversation in as friendly and as tolerant a way as possible in the spirit of exploring what might be a useful question.
Currently the on-topic help says (regarding General Electronics being off-topic) that, "If knowledge of Arduino would improve a question, it's on topic.". If an OP is asking about connecting a widget to an Arduino board then while they might not know if the issues are specific to Arduino, I believe they are hoping that we as a community might. Similarly, if a widget might possibly be connected to something other than an Arduino that shouldn't automatically make it off-topic.
Is the community able to:

agree a more objective policy
if so update the help page
follow a more tolerant implementation strategy?

My suggestions regarding implementation are:

Leave a couple of days before closing doubtful questions of this type
If the question generates useful on-topic comments or answers, then it should be deemed on-topic
If there is a history of similar questions and answers being on-topic, then the question should be deemed on-topic (but may possibly be a duplicate)
That the community should focus on the OP intent more than the letter of the "on-topic" law

I've seen literally most of the question posted here downvoted or closed, which doesn't help anyone. It's probably the "problem of small authority" in an over-zealous mod, but perhaps the acceptability criteria need loosened. Or whomever is just being a jerk needs to chill a bit...

What is on topic on Arduino SE is in Help Center in What topics can I ask about here?. Some type of questions, even on-topic, is not suitable for Q&A format. There is Help Center article What types of questions should I avoid asking?.
Some questions are in the gray zone for on-topic and/or Q&A format. Then it is on community members with close vote privilege to decide about the question with close votes.
On-topicness should not be discussed in comments under the question. The right place is the Meta. If you see such a comment, flag it as "no longer needed".
On-topicness of the question about the vibration sensor linked in question, depends on the solution. I for example don't know if there is a couple of established ways to measure vibration with Arduino or the answer is generic and opinion based.
I don't see a reason to change the Help pages about scope of Arduino SE.
Your suggestions are valid but it is on the community members to implement them. As a moderator I only close questions which are clearly off topic or miss important details and could attract low quality answers (Then I follow the question to reopen after it is completed).

Keep up the great work you are doing here on Arduino SE :)


text:
Pinned post in the Arduino forum?
I've been browsing the Arduino forums for years. I have no idea why I find it so fun, but after all this time, I see the same frikin problem over and over with posts!
People never include schematics/drawings! 90% of the questions the OP asks why his code isn't working, and the first 4 comments are "Please post schematics". Most new people don't understand how it's usually quite helpful to have the entire scope of the project laid out for those trying to help.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a pinned post at the top of the forum that outlines how to ask a question? It might save these new users as well as the helpers a little frustration. Or, when creating your first post as so many folks are, there's a template that you are presented with to overview before creating your first post.
Just my thoughts.

The Arduino forum? Or here?

The Arduino Stack Exchange...

There is no such thing as a pinned post on stack exchange. It's not a forum in the traditional sense but a question and answer site.

This isn't a forum, but assuming you are referring to Arduino Stack Exchange, I have a post How to ask a good question for Arduino Stack Exchange. That mentions, amongst other things, posting your code and a schematic (and your error messages!).
I did a similar thing for the Arduino Forum here.
What can I say? People don't read these posts, or if they do they ignore them.
I'll tell you what the problem is. You [1] are in a hurry to get a problem solved. You want an answer and you want it now. You don't have time to read boring lectures about  how to make a good post, you don't have time to post a schematic, or your code, or to tell us what parts you are using. You don't even have time to report what the error messages are, or what the problem actually is.
You just want answers and you hope that with minimal effort you will get them.
I don't want to sound negative, but, hey, if you are planning to ask a question here don't be that person.

[1] Not you personally, AJ_Smoothie.


text:
Custom Arduino Community design and logo - Information gathering
Congratulations, Arduino community! We’re going to be creating a custom site design for you that we hope will represent your subject and we want you all to really love it. You’ve been waiting almost 5 years and we really want to do this well. To facilitate this, we’re reaching out now to ask you for what you’d really love to see in the design and logo.
I’m Paul, one of the Product Designers here at Stack. I'll be working with our community managers in order to ensure that your custom theme reflects your community. I’m not an Arduino expert (though I did join the Makey Makey bandwagon and had a Tessel) - so I’ll be relying on you to help guide this process. Looking forward to it!
A quick history lesson about site theming
Originally, site designs were part of the site graduation process. When a site left beta, they'd get their design. But, at the time we only had one designer who was working on designs and the designs were very specialized and often involved a lot of custom illustrations. We got into a situation where several sites were in queue for graduation but the designer didn't have the bandwidth to actually create the designs.
Before she worked here, Catija asked the question Can Beta sites slated for graduation get full-site abilities without site design upgrade? - on MSE. This kicked off several discussions within the CM team of the time and community members and the eventual decision was to implement "Design-independent graduation" in September 2015. This meant that many sites were finally able to leave beta without waiting on a design - including Arduino!
At that time we also had much more strict guidelines for when a site could graduate - they had to consistently get 10 new questions per day. This level of volume made graduation impossible or very unlikely for many sites - meaning many would stay in beta forever. As such, the CM team considered another request - Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels - and that's what eventually happened, too. In 2019, we removed the beta label from 29 sites and another 59 in December 2021.
We've also gone through several design systems changes, including launching Stacks version 1.0, which make creating and building in designs much simpler for both our design team and the developers. In fact, we showed off how flexible it could be in our April Fools prank this year "Filters for Stack Overflow".
What to expect
Over the next few weeks, we'll be communicating with you about your site design, so please help us out as much as you can. While we may not be experts on the Arduino, we know that you are and that you likely have great ideas about what you want this site to look like - so share them with us! You've got a week now to pool up your thoughts in answers to this question, at which point I'll start working on this site.
I'll spend some time working on a design based on your guidance, and we'll be back when it's ready to show you what the design and logo look like. At that point, y'all will have a week to make suggestions for adjustments to the design. Our hope is that there will be little that needs adjusting but, due to the size of our backlog, we can't allow more than one phase of feedback, so any changes will need to be recommended at this point.
We'll then consider the changes proposed and make any adjustments that we feel are beneficial. Changes that are too big or are out of scope likely won't be possible, but we'll make sure to explain why we opted against making a change should that happen. Please understand that design is often a subjective thing and we may end up with community members differing in their opinions, so we'll be taking that into account when deciding. Decisions about the final design will be made by the design team and CMs with the concerns of the community taken into account.
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that the goal of these designs is to make something topical, unique, and attractive, but we'll be designing within the scope of our newer site theming. We'll be able to create a logo, background colors, and textures in addition to your logo - but please don't expect illustrations like what you may have seen on some of the older site designs.
Process
Over the next month or so, we’ll be going through a few steps to get your site design up and running. This post is the first of those steps. I’ll also be using this post to track the phases in the table below.

Step
Status

Information Gathering
complete

Design V1
complete

V1 Feedback
complete

Design adjustments (if needed)
complete

Developer cleanup and shipping of final design
complete

What we need from you
As I've mentioned already, we need some inspiration from you so that we can get started on this design and create something you'll really be proud of. So far, I was able to find a couple older discussions about logos and site designs here on Meta. Feel free to reference them if there are ideas you like already - or give us new ones! We're really looking for design ideas rather than needing you to design anything for us.
When you're answering this question, think about:

What symbols or images are important to the subject of this site?

Especially things that speak to insiders that we might not find on our own

Are there any colors that are tied to your subject?
What tone/mood/feeling would you like your theme to emit? While this is subjective, it helps to set some design guardrails. So, when answering with your thoughts, some good information to mention is where the theme might sit inside these axes:

From fun to serious
From classic to modern
From simple to complex

How could a good logo represent your subject? The Arduino logo is trademarked so we can't use it. There is the Arduino Community logo and colors. Or should we come up with something else?
What are things to avoid?

If you have any questions, let me know! We're really looking forward to hearing from you and getting your site design underway.

See this followup post for the proposed design: Site design and logo — Draft

The final design is now live! See this post for more details: New site design launched

I think we should use the Arduino Community Logo and the colors from the logo.
It is exactly the use for what the Community Logo was intended and it makes a strong association between Arduino SE and the worldwide Arduino community.

Reference site and permission: https://www.arduino.cc/en/trademark/community-logo

There is a paragraph in bold there: The Arduino Community Logo can NOT be used on products or services that are sold commercially and in no case on electronic boards (also non commercial). I'm  not sure if Arduino SE counts as an "electronic board". But if not, what is it?

Maybe they mean printed circuit boards. However forums and similar used to be known as Electronic Bulletin Boards so perhaps there is room for confusion there.

@NickGammon, the link is in the Q so I didn't repeat it

Yeah, I think they did a good job with this logo. Would be nice to use if you all like it

I interpreted the caveat on the Arduino Community Logo as that it can't be used on products or services that are paid, but that it would be ok here on SE. Is that your understanding too?

@paintedbicycle, maybe the best would be if SE Inc could ask Arduino (BCMI US LLC)

@Juraj Cool, we're going to do that. Thanks!

@paintedbicycle  I think their sentence "The customised logo can be used on ... any public platform you are using to self-organize and communicate" would reasonably be taken as giving us permission, as we are a public platform and we communicate.

Thanks for all your feedback and thoughts! I got the go-ahead from our community team to start the design using the Arduino Community logo and colors. Seems to be a bit of a consensus here

The final design is now live! See this post for more details: New site design launched

What symbols or images are important to the subject of this site?

As Juraj mentioned, the Arduino "Community" logo would be a good starting point. Then, perhaps, something related to electronics.

Are there any colors that are tied to your subject?

The colours from https://www.arduino.cc/en/trademark/community-logo (as mentioned by Juraj) would be reasonable colour to theme with.

What tone/mood/feeling would you like your theme to emit?

From fun to serious

Arduino is targeted at beginners. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino — some of their original projects showed off quirky ideas like a cat feeder based on a re-purposed CD-ROM drive, where the drawer would open, covering the food, and close to allow the cat access to it. So I would aim for fun/quirky/educational. :)

From classic to modern

Modern.

From simple to complex

Since we are aiming at beginners I would lean towards simple.

How could a good logo represent your subject? The Arduino logo is trademarked so we can't use it. There is the Arduino Community logo and colors. Or should we come up with something else?

I would lean towards the Community Logo, or maybe a stylized and simplified version of it.

What are things to avoid?

Cats. Nah, just kidding! Cats are adorable fluffy things — until they bite you! (Like mine does).
More seriously, take a look at Electronics Stack Exchange. They use some electronics logos (for example, a diode symbol with a circle around it). You would want to avoid making this site look too similar to theirs.

Other ideas

The classic thing people start off with is the Blink sketch which blinks an LED or two. So maybe LEDs or their representation could feature somewhere.

Arduinos tend to use "shields" which are basically printed circuit boards vertically plugged into the one below. Perhaps that could be used somewhere.

Thanks, paintedbicycle, for your post. We are looking forwards to the ideas you come up with!

Appreciate your thoughts! Very helpful, thanks


text:
Site design and logo — Draft
Update - revisions posted at the bottom

I'm Paul, a designer here at Stack Overflow and the designer working on the upcoming Arduino site theme for you. I reviewed your responses to my first post - and below you'll find the site design I came up with based on your ideas and input.
Your site design
From the answers and comments on the original post, I understood that you wanted a simple and modern design that also has a bit of fun. There was also agreement that using the Arduino Community logo and colors was a good starting point.
Color scheme

Logo

The Arduino community logo offers a space to customize which I used to insert the ? icon hinting at questions and answers here on Stack Exchange. The typeface is Inter, which is a feature-rich, clear typeface that is also open-source and available on GitHub. I hope you agree those qualities seem to fit the open-source nature of the Arduino project.
Page Design
I used these elements and I set them against a custom background that I hope does two things:

It hints at a breadboard (white background with small holes) used with Arduinos
It also hints at other technical SE sites, including Math and Electrical Engineering, Ubuntu, and maybe even Cryptography.

I hope it has a sort of "maker" or "DIY" or "behind-the-scenes" vibe to you.
For a bit of fun, I found this lovely little LED illustration created by Giacomo Alessandroni and released under CC licence to the community.

Following the SE custom of making the meta theme similar, but "greyscale", you can see what Arduino Meta would look like below.

We hope you enjoy this design, but if something doesn’t feel right, now is your chance to share your feedback. This window for feedback will be open for one week. We will then work to incorporate feedback as best as we can, finalize things on our end, and lastly, deliver the design to your site.

Update

The final design is now live! See this post for more details: New site design launched

I like the main site design. The breadboard idea is neat. I tried to make it look more breadboard-like by making a gap every 5 rows (like a real breadboard, there are gaps), however that made it look fussy so I think I prefer your original.
As for Meta, having the logo grey makes it look a bit "dirty" to me. Could we have the logo still coloured but the words "Arduino Meta" in grey? I mean, the grey seems to blend into the background too much, making it looks a bit of a mess.
Or maybe, like Electronics SE, make the logo lighter grey to make it stand out? I'm not sure. Maybe use the coloured logo but desaturate it, but not totally.

Having said the above, I like the design, yes. And even unchanged it is great! Thanks, Paul.

Thank you Nick. And yes I can absolutely take a look at tweaking the Meta logo and report back

I updated the logo and background to hopefully take care of your concerns. Posted the tweaks at the bottom of the original post

@paintedbicycle Looks great!

I like the idea of using breadboard pattern as background, but to be recognized as breadboard it needs square holes with the right proportion of space between holes.

Couldn't the SE logo be used instead of the ? bubble? Or a Q&A text instead of the ? in a bubble more similar to the SE logo shape?

I see on other sites that the header with logo and site name can have a different background to not to interfere with the logo and picture at the right.

The picture you took the LED from is created in Fritzing, a popular application to create wiring and breadboard designs. The components in Fritzing have CC license, but I think we should not use the Fritzing LED.
I like the header on Academia. If we can have a picture in the right upper part, there could be more than a LED. For inspiration, the Arduino IDE splash screen and the Arduino site have illustrations with electronic component symbols as characters and ornaments.

Maybe the Ask Question button could be orange.

I think the teal colored question titles don't go well with the green color of accepted question label.

Thank you for your thoughts - it feels like we're pointing to very different themes. I think there is a bit of a consensus about "simple" and "modern" so I'm not sure I'll land where you're hoping. Having said that I will definitely take your point about square holes for the background. And I'm going to change the logo a little bit too, to not use the "?". I tried the SE logo but the colors look a little weird together so I may use words instead. Thanks again

@paintedbicycle, I like the updated logo. Did you try orange for the Ask button?

I did! Sorry I forgot to mention that. The color contrast was really bad (~3:1) with the orange and worse with the yellow so I ended up staying with the teal here

@paintedbicycle, thank you for trying

I'm not personally a fan of noisy backgrounds. I'd much rather a plain, more simple, background.
The LED I find a bit silly and very much out of place.
The main logo though I have no real problems with.
Like Nick I think the meta logo looks muddy and dull. It could be brightened up a little.

Thank you - I'll dial down the background just a touch which should help your first point and your last point. I think the LED was about a bit of "fun" and "quirky". I'll try moving it to the footer. Thanks for your thoughts!

Have now posted the updated screenshots in the original post

@paintedbicycle That looks much  better to my eye. It gets my vote :)


text:
New site design launched
As you can see, the new site design just went live! At this point, we are done with major revisions to the design (although you can still report CSS/styling bugs by starting a new post and tagging it with site-design and bug). Thank you for your valuable design feedback.
I have enjoyed working with you to create this theme. Thank you for being engaged in the process, and I hope you enjoy the new design!

I browse pages of the site to enjoy the new design. :-). thank you.

I very like the light teal for visited links

Really appreciate your words @Juraj. I'm glad you like it :)

Very nice, thank you @paintedbicycle! Thank you for your efforts.

3 LEDs at the very bottom of pages

even the 404 page is customized :-)

Cool! Amazing attention to detail!


text:
Is dark mode coming for Arduino SE?
Stack Overflow has a setting in the preferences for Light/Dark mode for quite some time now.
I would like to also have a dark mode in Arduino SE.
I don't know how such things are handled in the Stack Exchange environment. Is it planned to provide this feature on Arduino SE? If not, why? Is there some kind of hindrance for this to come to Arduino SE?

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/359739/plans-for-dark-mode-for-all-stack-exchange-sites

Mhh, that sounds like "not in the next 5 to 10 years". Sad thing. Should I delete this question, since already answered on meta SE?

Judging by the link that Juraj posted it would be a massive effort to redesign the multiple Stack Exchange sites. They would have carefully chosen palettes of colours in the existing design, and the whole thing would have to be reworked to make a dark theme.
You will notice that this site graduated in 2017, and in that post they said:

Later, the site will still receive a full custom design from one of our staff designers ...

Five years later, this site got its custom design. So even if Stack Exchange agreed to rework each site to have a dark theme, you might be waiting a long time for it to actually happen. There are around 180 sites they would have to work on.


text:
How a question related to modules connected to Arduino and programmed with ArduinoIDE to achieve a technical spec can be offtopic?
I'm doing an Arduino based project but I'm struggling to achieve a long range with RF communication, searching ended up to many questions related to long range communication with a problem analogous to mine but different requirements so I have asked this question
My question has been instantly downvoted and a bandwagon effect followed and someone blamed the question as offtopic and closed with the motivation that "same kind of modules could be used also with something different than Arduino, so Arduino is not relevant".
Maybe it is my opinion that problems like the one of question I have asked, may be useful also to other Arduino users that have to deal with remote controlling and long range communication but sure if applies the rule "if the modules you are dealing with Arduino could be used regardless Arduino the question should be closed" an humongous number of questions as a matter of fact should be cleared (basically the most related to modules and sensors without a specific ino code sketch attached) with a negative effect for this stackexchange section.
Certainly I don't

Feel free to ask about anything related to Arduino.

as stated in guideline.
I frequent many different stackexchange websites related to different tech and science areas and I have the growing impression stackexchange areas related to arduino and electronic seems too much prone to hostile attitude toward questions, and probably is not a coincidence these communities don't grow well as other Stackexchange areas despite the relevance of the respective community topics.
Maybe guidelines that avoid certain ambiguities would either tame "compulsive downvote shooters" or preventing "victims" to waste time asking here.

You question is not above interacting Arduino with a module. You seek recommendation about long range RF communication technology.

It was about RF modules to use with arduino not about RF theory. There are many questions of same type as said. What is the difference with this question? https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/44326/very-long-range-wireless-communication-between-two-arduinos500-1000-km or this https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/gibson-girl-emergency-beacon-built-from-a-wind-up-flashlight/ or https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/67281/increasing-distance-of-ir-remote-transmitter and many many question of this kind  not even mentioning those relates to other kind of tasks?

questions in the 'gray zone'. the community answers some and closes others.

There is a distinction between "I have this module and I can't get it to work with my Arduino" and "What technology would fulfill these requirements?"
This site is geared towards answering specific technical questions, not discussing the pros and cons of different technologies or products.
Your question amounts to little more than a shopping question (asking for recommendations of products), and as such is for this site. This is not specifically an Arduino policy but a general policy across all (or most) of the technology related exchanges.
In short: if your question is related to Arduino and has a specific "this is what is wrong" answer it is on topic. If an answer is little more than the opinions of people then it really isn't on topic.


text:
What can we do with questions 'bumped' by Community bot?
The home page of Arduino SE and the Active tab of the Questions page have old questions modified by the Community bot. The bot periodically bumps some old questions to our attention.
How can we resolve those bumped questions to prevent the bot to bump them again and again?

We should read, evaluate and handle those bumped Q&A pairs. The criteria for bumping by the bot are criteria for Q&A pairs ignored by community members in the past. So look at the question and answers the same way you read and evaluate new questions and answers.
The Community bot bumps Q&A pairs where the answer has score 0. In case of multiple answers, the highest scored answer has score 0. Excluded are Q&A pairs with accepted answer, closed questions and questions with negative score.
So what can we do to remove these Q&A pairs from this 'ignored zone' so they are not bumped over and over?
If a positive score of the question is not deserved, downvote the question. Sometimes bad questions have a random upvote. And if the question is incomplete or off topic, vote/flag it to close as usual.
If the question is OK, then it deserves a good answer. If there is one, upvote it. If the answer is not good, downvote it. If you can write a good answer, please write it. And if the existing answer with score 0 is 'not an answer' which got under our radar, flag it.

I agree with Juraj here. Often these bumped questions actually have a reasonable answer,  but no-one has voted for the answer. Voting for the answer(s) can help.

The asking persons could need a bit more motivation to accept answeres as well. The style of asking (so many low-quality questions here on arduino) sometimes shows they have not yet grasped how SE is intended to work :(

"The Community bot bumps Q&A pairs where the answer has score 0." Even if it has an accepted answer? Why did the bot bring back this one? https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/78552/wiring-up-an-esp-01-to-nano   Even if all of those upvotes were made since it was brought back, it already had an accepted answer.

@JRobert, it wasn't bumped. it was edited 2 days ago. you can see the history with the 'time back' icon below the vote buttons

I see - thank you.


text:
2022: a year in moderation

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

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

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

Action
Moderators
Community¹

All comments on a post moved to chat
6
0

Answer flags handled
233
35

Answers flagged
4
264

Comment flags handled
35
5

Comments deleted⁷
735
576

Comments flagged
0
40

Comments undeleted
28
0

Escalations to the Community Manager team
1
0

Posts bumped
0
1,620

Posts deleted⁶
425
1,221

Posts locked
1
36

Posts undeleted
11
31

Posts unlocked
0
4

Question flags handled⁵
40
34

Questions closed
459
212

Questions flagged⁵
14
78

Questions migrated
24
0

Questions protected
8
16

Questions reopened
50
6

Questions unprotected
1
0

Revisions redacted
2
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue
4
358

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue
0
540

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue
0
1,433

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue
2
201

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue
1
201

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue
14
83

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue
39
323

Users contacted
4
0

Users destroyed³
222
0

Users suspended²
2
15

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

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2021: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^


text:
Middle Sidebar Advertising
As you all know, advertising is an important source of revenue for Stack Overflow and it helps us support all the sites across the Stack Exchange Network and the resources that go into maintaining and improving the experience on the platform. We are going to be introducing middle sidebar ads, which have been on the main Stack Overflow site for years, to some of the tech sites including Arduino.
The middle sidebar ads have the same standards as any other ads on the platform. Ads are non-intrusive and static. Ads go through a vetting process to ensure they are appropriate for the communities on Stack Exchange. If you see an ad that may not follow our established standards and guidelines, you can let us know by using the "report this ad" functionality. Here is a mockup of what these will look like when two ads are showed (the existing ad placement and the new middle sidebar ad placement):

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Borderline off topic questions / alternative forum recommendation
Often we see a question which is not really handled on Arduino Stack Exchange because, for example, a solution may involve some electronics in addition to Arduino know how or, in some other way, is not regarded as a pure Arduino matter. Usually, such questions would be a good candidate for forum.arduino.cc . The question is, is it good form to say so so explicitly to the OP ?

Personally I have no problem with people being politely referred to a place which may be able to help them better, such as Electronics Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow or the Arduino Forum.
Bear in mind that beginners may not know what it is that they don't know (for example, it is fairly common for them not to know the Arduino is programmed using C++).
Plus, the idea of things being "pure" Arduino are a little hard to quantify. After all, most problems have some elements of programming in them, some elements of electronics, and some elements of simple debugging and problem solving.
My personal approach is to help people as much as I can, even if a question is largely about C++ or electronics, unless the question doesn't seem to have any relationship at all to the Arduino. And I don't try quite so hard for questions that seem to be "here is my homework assignment, please do it for me ... and I'm in a hurry, it is due tonight".

Step-by-step debugging where the OP gets asked dozens of questions, given things to try, and report the results are better suited to a forum than Stack Exchange. If a question is heading down that path it could be a good time to suggest that the forum format is better suited to solving their problem.

Very few questions will not be "borderline off-topic". I have to agree with @NickGammon that whether we're hobbyists, experimenters, engineers acquiring a new skill-set, etc., very few problems fit compactly into "Arduino" or "not-Arduino". Can't we just try to be helpful before - or instead of - looking down our noses at the newcomer? Are we here to help our them? Or to posture before each other? Are we a community, or a collection of egos showing off what we know? Should ASE to be a welcoming place for people to learn or a group of elitists who might tolerate a newcomer if they figure out The Right Way to ask a question? I see a lot of responses to newcomers, even to knowledgeable ones that didn't write a question in the One True Way. that could send anybody walking, muttering to themselves about how unfriendly ASE is.
It doesn't have to be this way. But it will need the mods setting a friendly example and taking a firm stance on unfriendly & unhelpful replies toward newcomers by ASE members. Sure, if a question is a better fit for another SE (or non-SE) group, by all means, suggest it and in a helpful way. But why not welcome newcomers with a more friendly stance (yes, some do, but not all) and a more liberal interpretation of what fits here?

My belief is that the problem here is that the primary goal of ASE is to build a searchable question and answer database. If users are helped here, then that is only a side effect of this primary goal. This concept works very well for a well structured domain like say the C++ language but does not work so well IMHO for Arduino which can be a very broad area and often cannot yield a good clean question and answer pair. . . .

. . . Having said that, I agree, however, that more effort could be made to help users who are, after all, creating content on this site even if their issue is of no general interest and therefore does not contribute much to the primary goal of the site. This could be achieved, while still maintaining the site quality, by simply marking the question down and giving the user sufficient information to send them on their way.


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Should Arduino SE participate in the '1-rep voting' test?
Stack Exchange plans to test '1-rep voting':

Reputation required to cast upvotes is changing from 15 to 1
Reputation required to cast downvotes is changing from 125 to 1
The 1 reputation cost to downvote answers will be removed

Link to the Meta question: If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites
Should our Arduino SE participate in the test?

I think more people voting would better indicate quality of the posts.
Arduino is for beginners so most of our users ask questions which members with higher reputation don't find interesting. Many of the answers are only interesting for beginners without reputation points on SE, so now there is not enough voting and many times a random upvote or downvote is the only vote and not balanced by more voters.

Personally, I think this is probably a bad idea.
It's practically an invitation for new users to create a few sock-puppet accounts in order to boost their reputation and gain access to other site features.  And if they have even a basic knowledge of how to use a VPN that would be very hard to detect and/or prove.
Moreover, I suspect that the change would encourage "revenge downvoting".  If someone is upset or angry about a comment on, or criticism of, their question they can simply search for questions / answers by the commenter and downvote them.  Having been a mod on another site, I know this already happens.  At the moment it's relatively rare, but if those restrictions were removed I think it's almost inevitable to become a lot more common.
Even good questions and answers on Arduino:SE don't attract that many votes, so it wouldn't take too much to devalue the score of those questions / answers.

I'd also ask whether SE will help rollback any damage caused during the trial period if/when the trial is deemed to have been unsuccessful?  Or is that something that Arduino:SE would just have to live with going forward.

thank you for your answer. obviously I will not upvote it :-), but thank you. We have now better tools to detect voting fraud and with more fraud they can be developed further. Now we don't have any vote fraud cases on Arduino SE. We fight only 'charity' voting. In answer to comments on Meta Catija stated that if there is damage it can be fixed.

@Juraj  We don't have any vote fraud cases on Arduino:SE that we know of.  We were only able to spot the cases we did find when I was a mod because they were lazy, careless, and blatant about what they were doing.  If they had been a bit more careful, and a bit less obvious, we would never have caught them.  No matter how good the tools are, a reasonably careful, tech-savvy individual will get away with it.  Now, that shouldn't impact the wider community much - unless there are a lot of people doing it.

@Juraj how is charity voting fought?

@NikeDattani as usual. reverting votes, sending warnings, eventually suspension

@Juraj but how is "charity voting" defined and detected? Also are you sure that the votes can be reverted? Votes can be reverted when actual serial voting is detected by the nightly scripts, but cannot be "manually" reverted in any other case, other than sockpuppet voting in which all votes between the sockpuppet master's multiple accounts will be reverted. But if I vote for your answers for "charity", it won't be possible to revert unless I do it serially and obviously enough for the nightly scripts to detect it, right?

@NikeDattani any irregular voting can be reverted by CM (Inauthentic usage policy)

@Juraj not only does it seem that you completely ignored my question, but what you said in your response is also wrong.

@NikeDattani sorry. The charity voting is just visible as any unusual voting. at least on Arduino SE. It was reverted so it must be possible.

@Juraj the screenshot literally says that the votes cannot be reverted, manually. They can only be reverted if the voting fraud is caught by the nightly scripts, which was not what happened in this case. I can show you the rest of the conversation if you need to see it. Also, you still haven't explained what you mean by "charity voting". It's surely not just any unusual voting, because when someone unusually downvotes a bunch of questions from one user, there's no "charity", but it's still considered voting fraud because it's targeted against one user.

@NikeDattani that is not what the screenshot says. it says they require a larger scale of targeted votes to revert them. and I stop responding about this topic here. If you want to know more, please open a new Meta question

If you don't want to reply anymore, that's up to you, but that does not make you right. You literally said "any irregular voting can be reverted by a CM" and you have also admitted that you were wrong about that when you said irregular voting can only be reverted if it's on a "large enough scale". So it's not true that any irregular voting can be reverted. Irregular voting can only be reverted in certain circumstances. Also, the screenshot literally says "we lack the technical capabilities to remove these votes". The "larger scale" part is about nightly scripts detecting fraud.

My 2 cents worth: If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites
What SE should do, is just turn the "feature" on and see if anyone here notices any changes.

"Just doing it" without consultation is what caused the last several instances of backlash against SE.  I'd imagine they'd want to avoid any more.  And on a related note, I probably wouldn't go around volunteering a community for something like this without consulting them first.

@sempaiscuba - If SE uses Arduino SE as a test site, what are you going to do? Delete your account?

No.  Although I may just stop using the the site.  And I have no idea what others would do.  But that isn't the point.  You are just one member of the community.  You don't get to make those kinds of decisions.  Even the site mods don't get to do that without consulting - which is why Juraj posted the question here.

@sempaiscuba - The question was asked on meta.stackexchange.com. That is where I answered it first. The "decision" to answer the question is mine alone to make, not a group decision. I do not need anyone's permission to comment on SE meta sites. Please read: https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/whats-meta If you really want your voice heard, then this is the place: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/393127/if-more-users-could-vote-would-they-engage-more-testing-1-reputation-voting-on/393141#393141

I can see where it was asked, and I know what Meta is (I've used it in the past, and I'm pretty sure it shows up on my profile).  That question asks for sites to volunteer, and you said "Arduino SE would be a great place to test this out".  That's effectively volunteering this community for the trial.  The phrase "In my opinion" exists for a reason, and prefixing your answer with that would have made it clear that you were expressing your personal opinion, and not a community consensus.

@sempaiscuba - I never "volunteered" Arduino SE. 1. Your comment "That's effectively volunteering..." is not true. If you feel strongly about it, why not answer / comment on the SE meta question? 2. The phrase "In my opinion" is implied. Isn't that what all answers on SE are; users individual opinions? Once again, "I do not need anyone's permission to comment on SE meta sites.".

"Arduino is for beginners" (@juraj). Yet the tone of responses by the more experienced, toward beginners who haven't caught on to the differences between an SE site and a forum, or who haven't formulated a "good, answerable, question" in the "ASE approved way", is too often off-putting. They are to me, just reading them, and I'm not a beginner with ASE or Arduinos. Sometimes it reminds me of [a related SE site] that could get outright hostile to any but the "elite", for anything less than a question that was deemed "Proper".
Taking a more helpful and personal/educational tone with new members, guiding them toward the culture of up/down/best-answer voting will likely go a lot farther toward making the site work than tweaking scoring formulas will. Guiding those whose comments or answers are less charitable, and setting a consistent example, would do, as well.

As with essentially everyone in the network that has commented on this issue, I strongly think that it's a very bad idea to lower the reputation thresholds for voting. It seems that Arduino.SE is the only site considering this, and that the score for the answer suggesting support for doing this on Arduino.SE  is the 26th highest out of all answers which suggests that it's not really supported by the rest of the network's community.
If Arduino.SE does decide to go ahead with this experiment, I strongly, strongly suggest only the first experiment is done:

"Reputation required to cast upvotes is changing from 15 to 1"

The other two experiments:

"Reputation required to cast downvotes is changing from 125 to 1
The 1 reputation cost to downvote answers will be removed"

are in my opinion a very, very bad idea. If this community really wants to carry out the second and third experiments, I would recommend to first see how things go with the first experiment.


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Who is downvoting each and every question?
Four years ago I asked this: Why there's so many down votes in question list?
The problem is still there and clearly the "downvote so they understand their question is terrible" guide is not working in this sub.

Maybe we should try not to kick and push people out of this sub to other platforms like Reddit. Can we not downvote them? If the question isn't well formatted or is not clear or whatever, just leave a comment and ignore the question without downvoting it.

I agree with you. As a moderator it irritates me when many questions quickly get downvoted, rather than an attempt being made to improve the question, or to simply ask for clarifications.
People are allowed to downvote questions, and they don't have to explain themselves, so they are working within the rules.
Egregious multiple downvotes (or upvotes) can be detected and reversed, however modest amounts are hard to fix.
Maybe the downvoters are simply trying to be annoying. The best way to combat that is to just ignore them. Ignore the downvotes unless there are a lot of them. If there are a lot, perhaps consider what could be done to improve the question.

Someone down-voted both yours and my question, seems like we have troll on this site.

I stick my tongue out at the trolls! :P


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2023: a year in moderation

It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

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

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks — folks like you. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference in ensuring Stack Exchange sites remain a valuable source of high-quality content on the web.
So as we say goodbye to 2023 (and January 2024… ahem) and move into 2024, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Arduino over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community User¹
Community²

All comments on a post moved to chat
7
0
0

Answer flags handled
306
31
0

Answers flagged
12
158
164

Bounties canceled
0
0
0

Comment flags handled
65
7
2

Comments deleted⁸
536
1
572

Comments flagged
0
0
74

Comments undeleted
15
0
0

Escalations to the Community Manager team
2
0
0

Posts bumped
0
770
0

Posts deleted⁷
486
1,053
293

Posts locked
2
24
0

Posts undeleted
16
0
30

Posts unlocked
0
3
0

Question flags handled⁶
32
148
6

Questions closed
258
474
0

Questions flagged⁶
1
5
168

Questions merged
1
0
0

Questions migrated
11
0
0

Questions protected
3
13
0

Questions reopened
19
3
0

Questions unprotected
0
0
0

Revisions redacted
0
0
0

Tag highlight language set
0
0
0

Tag synonyms created
1
0
0

Tag synonyms proposed
1
0
0

Tags merged
1
0
0

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Close votes" queue
1
0
426

Tasks reviewed⁵: "First answers" queue
0
0
636

Tasks reviewed⁵: "First questions" queue
0
0
1,449

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Late answers" queue
0
0
286

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Low quality posts" queue
0
0
334

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Reopen votes" queue
2
0
94

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Suggested edits" queue
49
32
560

Tasks reviewed⁵: "Triage" queue
0
0
0

User banned from review
0
0
0

User review-bans lifted early
0
0
0

User suspensions lifted early
0
0
0

Users contacted
6
0
0

Users deleted
0
0
0

Users destroyed⁴
44
0
0

Users suspended³
1
38
0

Footnotes
¹ This refers to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² This refers to the membership of Arduino without diamonds next to their names.
³ The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
⁴ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁵ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁶ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). The community² can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁷ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁸ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2022: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2024! ^_^


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10th Anniversary of Arduino SE!
In February Arduino SE turned 10 years old. Congratulations on asking, answering, voting, and building this community for a whole decade!
Whenever a Stack Exchange site turns 10 we like to celebrate by encouraging users to reflect on their experiences here.
How did you first discover the site? Do you have a favorite question or answer that helped you solve a problem? Any funny anecdotes or other insights on your time here, that you would like to share? We want to hear it all!