text:
Halp! The favicon is faceless!

I have a Retina display, and the favicon is faceless, plain, and depressing everywhere I go. Can we please fix this?
Easy Repro Steps:

Open Chrome (haven't tested it on anything else)
Zoom in (command-+ on a Mac) to 200%
Go to Arduino.SE
Observe the facelessness of the icon.

'Tis fine on my end.  (Vista, FF 26)

It only does this on a Retina display.

I suppose so, no bug for me either.

Found the bug... when you zoom to 200% the code detects this and change the fav icons sprites file from this (16x16 icons) to that (32x32). (Very smart, team! :))
Now the only problem is, that while in the 16x16 sprite there is icon for
Arduino, in the 32x32 it's just blank as you see yourself.
With proper icon:

And without:

Update:
Fixed by Jin, in revision 2014.2.??.1369.

This was my fault. I've pushed the correct icons. The changes will be on live after our next prod build. (You may still have to hard refresh browser)

Cheers @Jin, thanks!

I'm getting the same issue in chat without a retina display.

The root of the problem appears to be different than what Shadow points out since it's pulling from a different location:
<img class="small-site-logo" title="Arduino" alt="Arduino" width="16" height="16" src="http://cdn.sstatic.net/arduino/img/favicon.ico?v=abcdef">

This may just be an error on your end. I would try to restart your computer and see if this fixes the problem. It may also be a zoom error. Try zooming in or out and see if it fixes the problem.

Nope, just reproed on a different machine. Try the steps above.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
What would you think about broadening the topic to include Raspberry Pi, Robotics and Embedded Systems in general?
I recently participated in the Embedded Systems private beta. It will be closing down next Friday, because there was not enough activity. In the meta post on the closing of the site, Andrew, a Robotics pro-temp moderator suggested that four beta sites are merged together to create one viable Embedded Systems site:

Arduino (542 days in beta)
Raspberry Pi (1151 days in beta)
Robotics (1018 days in beta)
Embedded Systems (10 days in beta, closing down)

I collected some statistics from Area 51 for each beta (as of Aug 8, 2015):
Site      | Q : day | Answered | Users (200+ / 2K+ / 3K+) | A : Q | Visits / day
----------+---------+----------+--------------------------+-------+--------------
Arduino   |   9.5   |   72%    |      150 / 13 / 6        |  1.9  |     5106
Rasp. Pi  |  11.9   |   82%    |      438 / 24 / 17       |  1.8  |    21548
Robotics  |   2.3   |   88%    |       125 / 9 / 3        |  1.8  |     1516
Emb. Sys. |   7.7   |   85%    |        24 / 0 / 0        |  1.6  |      80

Some numbers may be lower than normally due to summer holidays in the northern hemisphere.
Currently, Raspberry Pi seems to be the most viable, followed by Arduino.  However, I think every site could be helped by a merge, because they have actually a lot in common.

A search for "Arduino" on Raspberry Pi.SE yields 215 questions (2.6%), of which only 11 closed
A search for "Raspberry Pi" on Arduino.SE yields 71 questions (1.9%), of which only 3 closed
Robotics.SE most used tag is Arduino (208 Q). It also has a Raspberry-Pi tag (57 Q)
Raspberry Pi.SE has an Arduino tag (100 Q)
Arduino.SE has a robotics tag (35 Q)

To illustrate the great overlap between these sites: I myself am a hobbyist and a computing science student. I own a Raspberry Pi and some other embedded systems like Particle's Photon. I also own  I have worked with LEGO robots and Arduino. I have several modules that can be used with an Arduino which I use with PIC microcontrollers. I am currently working on a PIC32-based standalone text editor.
I do not think we would have many issues defining a scope which is distinguished enough from Electronics, Programmers or Stack Overflow. After all, your site and the others have been doing that already for quite some time. Think of the suggested merge as the least common multiple of the four sites.
I have looked through the questions on all four sites and have the impression that questions on many of these sites are of interest also to users on other sites. I'm most sceptical about Robotics.SE. Anyway, this overlap is what makes me think Andrew's suggestion might be a good idea. But what do I know? I'm not active on any of these sites!
So, what do you think? Would your community benefit of a merge  with (some of) these sites?
Disclaimer: I do not know what SE, Inc. thinks about this. Polling the communities seemed a good idea to me.
I opened the same question on Raspberry Pi Meta and Robotics Meta.

Personally I would vote not to, on the following grounds:

On the figures quoted, the merged site would go from around 10 questions per day (here) to 30, however of those 30 only 10 would be relevant to people interested in Arduino. This effectively dilutes the number an Arduino-enthusiast could answer (percentage wise). There might be some cross-over (eg. from the Embedded Systems site) but I couldn't view it to check, because it was in closed beta.
I've found this site here (the Arduino one) quite friendly, and reasonably helpful to newbies. That is probably one of the reasons it needs to exist. The Arduino is marketed as being intended for anyone making interactive projects. This is one of the reasons why I think a tolerance for beginners is important.
I've found some of the other StackExchange sites a little less friendly to newbies, with posts being closed within minutes of being made as off-topic, irrelevant, already answered, and so on.

Having said that, it looks like a merge between Embedded Systems and Robotics with this site would be the least disruptive, especially if the Robotics site normally talks about Arduinos.
I'm the least in favour of the Raspberry Pi being merged. It is a different processor, it uses a Unix operating system, and is generally quite different to an Arduino. Also, some of it is closed source, unlike the Arduino.

An alternative would be to simply suggest to the (relatively small number of) users at Embedded Systems that they find a new home here.

Thank you for your thoughts. We're shutting down on Friday, but if you would like to have a look around at embedded.SE, you could drop me an email at info@camilstaps.nl and I can invite you to the private beta.

I think merging could be useful.
We've certainly found that there's lots of people with questions about Arduino. However, being Arduino-specific means we have rather awkward and unhelpful boundaries for what is considered "on topic". For example, newcomers to the field don't necessarily understand what constitutes Arduino stuff and what is just general electronics or embedded systems.
That being said, coming up with a sensible boundary for a new merged site will be tricky. The major issue is that a lot of this stuff could easily be covered by the Electronics SE. However, as we've seen, some EE regulars are often not newbie-friendly (and can be downright hostile against Arduino and the like).
A while back, I proposed a "Makers and Tinkerers" site on Area 51. The idea was that it would be something like EE but for hobbyists and occasional users (rather than professionals or serious enthusiasts). It didn't gain any interest though, so I didn't pursue it any further. Perhaps it's something we could try again?

We have similar problems on Robotics, but have both custom close reasons and copy pastable text to help mitigate the problems.

This is a copy of my answer to Camil Staps' copy of this question over on Robotics

Although I am open to the idea, my current preference is against a mega-merge of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Embedded and Robotics.
As I said in my answer to Embedded Systems StackExchange (suggesting merging Embedded and Robotics):

Having had a look at the questions on the site and only been able to identify one, I don't think that any kind of merge would be appropriate, but we should certainly suggest (using that answer) that any questions which are on topic here be migrated here.

I think that part of the problem here is that people seem to think that there is something wrong with a site which is asking good questions, getting good answers and accumulating page views and users, but hasn't yet graduated.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with this situation, and Stack Exchange have finally woken up to the idea that some small, niche sites will never reach graduation criteria, but equally will never disappear, and that we need to handle this state of 'perpetual beta' more gracefully.
See Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites and Should we rename or remove the "beta" label?
As I mentioned in a comment on Andrew's answer to Closing this [Embedded] site on Friday, August 14

The problem is that merging four sites with four scopes and four communities risks destroying all four. In particular, a clash of cultures and alienation of existing users is a big risk. Ultimately any stack exchange site needs to stand on it's own and now that permanent beta is the rule rather than the exception, we have to accept that small workable vertical sites may well be better than broader based, artificial amalgams. In essence, a strong & growing community, even if it is small, is preferable to a weak diminishing one.

In the long term, I hope that perpetual beta sites will start to get some of the benefits of graduated sites, even if it isn't worth Stack Exchange spending time and development resources on a custom site design.

By maintaining a seperate arduino community, what you create is essentialyl a debug/troubleshoot forum for arduino. There is no real definition of arduino besides their simplified peripheral library and the platforms its been ported to. 90% of the questions on this site have no inherent reason to use the arduino besides availability. By expanding the scope to allow for all embedded platforms it allows for the community to grow and solicit questions and answers across platforms

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


text:
When to upvote an answer
What must be the rule for upvoting an answer?
Must I upvoted every good answer or only the best one in a question?
Must I upvoted a minimal correct answer even if trivial answer? I'm thinking about an answer like "use a pull-up resistor" that just solve the problem.
Must I upvote a correct answer in every question I look at?

I don't think there can be any fixed rule, you have to go with you gut.
Normally I wouldn't up vote all answers, because it neutralises the vote if you vote for them all, but sometimes all the answers are good and you have to.
Personally I would down vote the answer "use a pull up resistor".  It doesn't explain why and that's more important.  I come here to learn things, and if I can share what I know, an instruction to do something fixes the immediate problem but doesn't fix the long term problem.
BUT that's just my opinion and you should go with yours. :)

I like your criteria: "instruction to do something fixes the immediate problem but doesn't fix the long term problem"

Must I upvote every good answer or only the best one in a question?

You don't have to up-vote anything. You might do nothing if, for example, the question and answer are not in your area of expertise (eg. the ESP8266). Sometimes people ask questions about some device I know nothing about. Therefore I can't say if the answer is good or bad, so I move on without voting.
If there are two or more answers I would be tempted to up-vote the better one. Sometimes they are both good so I will up-vote both of them.

Must I upvote a correct answer in every question I look at?

No you don't. However remember how the reputation system works. Other users get reputation when you up-vote, and that helps them to get more tools to work with the site (like editing questions).
Up-voting also helps the person asking the question (they will probably choose the answer with the most up votes), and also others who look at the question later.

Down voting is useful if you think an answer is clearly wrong (or maybe doesn't even clearly answer the question). In those cases you can also add a comment (although you are not required to) explaining why you think the answer is wrong. These comments can help other people understand why an answer has down votes.

For really bad answers (like spam, or abuse) you can flag them for moderator attention. However don't flag answers that are just wrong, voting down is the correct approach there.

Help Center left things unexplained, like what "flag" means. I thought "flag" is something you do when you don't have the "close" option due low reputation. In the Help Center main page there is no "flag" entry. Now I know.


text:
How to contribute information (we need a FAQ or wiki)
By accident I found this excelent post by Edgar Bonet, How can I handle the millis() rollover?. That is not exactly a question, rather a tutorial in a question/answer format (his words).
This valuable information is lost among thousand of other questions. I think we need a FAQ or wiki to put this information, to better server our charter.
Second, Is it an acceptable format for posting original/curated material?

I have done similar questions, such as How do you use SPI on an Arduino?. It is certainly OK to post a question and answer it yourself.
The intent of Stack Exchange in general is to become a repository of useful questions and answers. Sometimes a single person will do both the question and answer, and at other times one person will ask a very interesting question, and another person will do an excellent answer.
This site is therefore working as intended. Unfortunately sometimes good questions are swamped by poor ones, but the really poor questions should be closed (by community voting), leaving behind the good ones.


text:
What to do with "company secrets"?
After answering a post today, OP said to me:

Actually, my real code is not as short as it looks in this demo code.
  I am not allowed to post the real code for some privacy reasons of the
  company I work for.

That's after I taking the trouble of actually testing his sketch and timing his execution. I ended working in a posted problem that it is not the real problem. Total waste of time, IMHO.
What must be this site politics with question that involved secret components?

As long as the OP posts a SSCCE that demonstrates the actual problem then I see no problem with it not being their "live" (NDA) code. However if they post an SSCCE that itself works flawlessly (or is broken in some other way than they state, as is often the case) or a snippet of code that can't itself be verified, then yes they are wasting everyone's time (even their own). They should have seen that the SSCCE they posted didn't exhibit the stated problem, which would have given them some more pointers to where the actual problem is (that's one of the points of doing an SSCCE - it helps to track down the problem to a specific cause before asking for help).
Of course, if they don't understand the concept of the SSCCE then they should first be educated by directing them to http://sscce.org/

Should I flag it? Should I vote for closing it? Should you have closed it?

Step 1 is to request better code that demonstrates the problem. If that isn't forthcoming (as is often the case) then vote to close it as "unclear what you're asking". I'll probably come along and close it anyway with my question closing hammer. ;)

You answered the question in good faith, and if you can reproduce a problem in the posted code, and post a solution, then that may help someone some day.
If the OP comes back and says "actually that isn't the real code" then you can request the real code, or say "pffft, in that case I can't help you".
This sort of thing isn't that uncommon. For example, people reduce their sketch size to make it small enough to post, and that frees up enough RAM that the sketch no longer fails due to running out of RAM.

I particularly like the phrasing of "pffft, in that case I can't help you". I may have to get it printed on a T-shirt. :)


text:
What to do with low quality posts?
Yesterday I review several years old question with zero answers, voting to close them, which started a debate with perl1234 and gre_gor.
I voted with this explanation:

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's a year old
  question with no answers.

And perl1234 commented:

not being answered is not a valid reason to close a question. I've
  answered questions that were years old. Just because nobody had an
  answer at the time the question was asked doesn't mean it should be
  closed. The sad thing is that if you would just make a little effort
  to look at these questions you're trying to close you would have found
  valid reasons for closing many of them

Well, I'm really wanting to close them because they are low quality post, but that is subjetive criteria, and I thought better to backup that with a objective parameter. Hence, "one year old, no answer".
Of course, not every year old, no answer question is a low quality post. That's why I read everyone one of them and vote to close the most evident culprits.
I think this a best place to explain what I'm doing and reach a community consensus about how to proceed.
Rationality
The problem with Arduino SE is too many low quality posts, which is evident when you also visit other sites, like Electrical SE or Bicycle SE (long time member there).
There are several markers that identify a low quality post:

First post by a newly create user.
From user that never returns to Arduino SE for a year or more.
No answers, no comments.
No sketch, no schematic, no product identification, poorly written question.
No effort in finding a solution (Arduino SE, Google).
Obvious lack of minimal training in electricity and/or programming.
Demands for complete solution (sketch and/or schematic).

If a question has had no answer for a year or more, it will never have it. There is no point in keeping that question in the site, because even the OP has no interest in the answer.
How to deal with it
The problem is that low quality post isn't one of the reason for closing post, and the other reasons are not fit for the purpose.
A too broad question can be restricted. An unclear what you are asking can be clarified. An off topic can be migrated, and low quality post generally are not duplicated, nor opinion-based.
A low quality post is beyond redemption. There is noting you can do to improve it. They aren't even wrong.
And the question is: What we do to filter out low quality post?

How about voting the question down? That is what voting is for. You could also attach a comment explaining why you did it. That might encourage others to vote it down. With enough downvotes it will be closed.

If you feel strongly enough about it you can flag it for moderator attention, as a very low quality post. Then we can close it.

If I flag this post ... will you close it?

Let's not double the work moderators have to do by first asking if we will close something if you flag it, and then waiting for a reply, and then flagging it. :) If you feel strongly enough just flag it and see what happens.
In that particular question's case the question isn't really all that low quality, and in any case you can't flag questions as very low quality (only answers). (Low quality is for gibberish answers, not just ones that don't answer the question).
The design of Stack Exchange is that it should be self-moderating. That is you, the users, can moderate to a large extent by voting to close, or voting a question down (something you can do without a rep penalty). Moderators are there for extreme cases like insults, spam or things that need to be dealt with quickly.
If only one person down-votes a question, it can't be too bad, right? But if 5 down-vote it then it gets closed. (Caveat: I can't find a reference that proves that particular point, but I think enough down-votes will close a question).
See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down
Another alternative for you is to edit the question and improve it.

I am sympathetic to what you are trying to achieve here. A while back I went through old questions and voted-to-close or downvoted them. If we don't do that we end up with a lot of junk questions with no answers. I think what will happen is, if you down-vote, and comment, the question gets bumped to the home page, and then others may look at it and also down-vote it, so you can get community consensus on them. :)

If I flag this post (https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/45905/how-to-combine-string-variables-to-form-url), will you close it?

After some meditation I think that downvoting is the most visible way to mark something as LQP, because voting for closing has no much effect unless four other people agreed.

What perl1234 meant was, that you should not close question just because they are old and with no answers, because it doesn't mean it's low quality.
Unless they are actually low quality (no effort, too broad, unclear, gimme the codez, etc.), there is nothing wrong with them being left open.
I am not against closing old low quality question, if they are actually bad, just use a valid reason for the close vote.

First post by a newly create user.
From user that never returns to Arduino SE for a year or more.
No answers, no comments.

These by itself are not valid reasons to close it.

No sketch, no schematic, no product identification, poorly written question.

This can be closed as unclear.

No effort in finding a solution (Arduino SE, Google).

This can be closed as too broad.

Obvious lack of minimal training in electricity and/or programming.

This can be closed as unclear or too broad, depending if he can't explain what he wants or he expect from us too much.

Demands for complete solution (sketch and/or schematic).

This can be closed as too broad.

You also seem to have been a little bit sloppy in seeing what is a question without an answer.
This question had an answer by OP edited into the question. I edited that one out of the question and into an answer.
And this question doesn't look like low quality to me. The problem could be replicated with the provided code (assuming it actually does what he says) and a solution could be posted.
Also, if you want to discourage low quality questions, you should not answer them. If you give them what they want, they might come back with another low quality question, even if their previous question was closed.

I'm not saying that first post is LQP. I'm saying that LQP are generally the first post by a new user. I use those as signal of a possible LQP.

You said https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/24470/slice-byte-stream-into-bit-pieces has one answer, but you added that yesterday, after my post. And it's a pure programming question (bit manipulation), totally unrelated to Arduino. And the answer is only applicable to that particular case, and not very useful for anyone else. And the OP's last visit is Jan 2017, which doesn't signal a great interes in Arduiino.

You don't think https://arduino.stackexchange.com/questions/31365/can-i-get-my-rgbw-neopixel-strip-to-loop-perfectly-by-adjusting-rainbowfade2whit is LQP. I respect your opinion, but the fact is that nobody found valuable enough to answer it, and it's adding nothing to Arduino SE:

If you want to work together on this, you can make crafted searches (in the search box at the top of the page). For example:
answers:0 closed:0  isanswered:no votes:0

That shows a whole lot of unclosed questions with no answers and no votes. They might be candidates for:

Trying to answer them
Down-voting
Improving the question
Asking for clarification
Voting to close

You can also add a date range, eg.
created:..2017-01-01

That shows questions created earlier than 2017.

You can't close a question because it doesn't have answers, but you can and should vote to close a question if it has been long abandoned by the asker in a state which makes it unanswerable - and especially if they've failed to respond to comments requesting clarification.
Naturally not having answers (or having only terrible ones) often follows from being unanswerable.  But the closing has to follow from the rule violation of posting and then failing to correct an unanswerable question, not from the community's disinterest in answering.

I think gre_gor has stated it beautifully in his answer. Nick Gammon also makes very good points.
I would just like to add that we don't want to discourage anyone from voting to close a question, providing it is for a valid reason. Even more, I encourage more people to leave a comment on why they think it should be closed. I commend Look Alterno for doing this.


text:
How to deal with dead question?
What we do with dead still-open questions?
By dead I mean that the OP had not return to Arduino SE for over a year (and probably will never come back), and therefore the question will be never closed, even if it had acceptable answers posted.
Case: Where do serialport names come from?.

Just answer for the future visitor that did an internet search for the question and upvote any good answers already on the question.
A large part of SE philosophy is to help the future visitor as much as the current asker.

If the OP never comes back, the question will remain open forever, even with an answer. How do we close it if it was already answered?

It doesn't need to be "closed", when there is a upvoted answer the system will consider it answered in all but name.

Unfortunately, many of these are weak questions where only poor answers not deserving upvotes are likely to be posted.  Often the question itself must be closed as it is either unclear or not a fit for the Stack Exchange model.

I don't think that you necessarily mean closed but rather has an accepted answer, and as such, is thus removed from the list of unanswered questions. I noticed such a question yesterday: HC-12 with Arduino Mega.
It is a reasonably presented question, with code and a schematic, and it seems as if the user had found a solution. However, an answer was never posted, and even though a suitable answer could be extracted from the comments (see What if a comment solve the question?), the OP may never return to mark it as accepted and therefore remove the question from the unanswered list of questions.
Another example, but where there is already an answer, is How to get the server response when I post to a web api
There was a meta question (to which Nick gave an answer to) about having moderators marking an answer which is an obvious solution to a question, as the accepted answer, see Questions with good answers but none accepted.


text:
Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please review them before flagging this post!
Sometimes, when flagging an answer, this message appears:

Attention: some of your recent flags have been declined - please
  review them before flagging this post!

What I am supposed to do? I follow the link to the review, but I can't see any action, button, link or nothing.

What is the nature of your question? Which posts have been flagged, why were they flagged, or what do I do now?

@NickGammon - rather obviously, those are things the system should be directly showing.  The quoted uninformative message is a severe site design error.

There is no particular action to take. I got this message a while back when I was going through the review queues and flagging posts. If the (then) moderators didn't agree I would eventually accrue enough "flag declined" messages that the "system" (Stack Exchange) started automatically warning me.
I think the warnings eventually expire through time.
You might consider doing less flagging of things that should (could?) be handled by community moderation. That is, just vote an answer down if you don't like it. Or, if you don't want to take the reputation hit, post a comment explaining how the answer could be improved, or explain why you think it is wrong.
See my Meta post about not flagging answers as "low quality" just because they are a bit short or you think they are wrong.
Flagging as "not an answer" should be reserved for answers that are simply not answers. Like, gibberish, spam, not in English, or asking another question.
Even link-only answers are marginal, they are answers after all, just not good answers.

It's supposed to make you aware that you have been flagging incorrectly and that way teach you what is considered a good flag and what isn't.
There is no real actions to take on the website except to flag better.

But it keeps appearing, which looks like I haven't complete some action somewhere.

@LookAlterno nah it looks like it alerts you every time you flag (presumably until you are back to being a "good flagger"). On the mod interface you're marked NOT banned from flagging / Warned when flagging.

You can actually view a list of your flags and how they were handled if you would like to review. If you go to your user profile on the Activity tab, you can click on the XX Helpful Flags and you get a list of all of your flags.
I don't know exactly how the algorithm for warning works, as roughly 90% of your flags were deemed "helpful." If you're worried about it, look at your declined posts to look for a pattern (in your case there does seem to be a specific type of flag).
Also, when looking at your flag history, please note that Disputed is not Declined. Here's what it means: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95277/190823

How do I dispute a flag? Not interested in disputing a flag, I just want to know how this UI works.

@LookAlterno you can't. The name is confusing, but a flag is marked "disputed" when it's ambiguous how a moderation responded to it. This post explains it: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/95277/190823

I think all of this is oscure on purpose, to get you spend time here collecting bits of information here and there, like trying to reconstruct the rules of a game long time forgotten. Only the true believers will reach enlightment.


text:
How "on hold" works?
This question have been put on hold (the question itself is not relevant here).
What is the mechanism behind the on-hold lock?
As I understand, any user with the "protect questions" privilege can put question on hold, but certain number of votes by unprivileged users can achieve the same result.
How many votes are needed? What are the fine details of voting for close? Do votes expire?

"on hold" is really just "closed" but renamed to encourage users to edit and improve the question to get it reopened again.
After a while the "on hold" tag gets replaced by "closed"

Any normal user can vote to put a question on hold (I think there may be a rep threshold but can't remember off-hand).  I think it takes 6 votes from normal users for a question to go on hold - or just a single vote from a moderator can do it.
Votes don't expire, but they can be retracted by the casting user - at the cost of not being able to then vote again on that question.
Once a question is on hold it can be voted to be reopened - again I think the same thresholds and quantities apply (and a moderator can reopen it instantly).
After a while, an on-hold question will be closed automatically (again, not sure of the time involved here), and a closed question with no answers will be deleted (after another timeout period I believe).
"protected questions" are another matter entirely. A question can be "protected" so no more answers can be posted unless you have enough rep. That prevents any "me too" answers.  It's not something that is used often, especially around here.

See Help Center > Privileges > Cast close and reopen votes
It's the result of "close" votes being cast.

It takes 5 close votes to reach the closing threshold ...
Close votes age away harmlessly if the threshold is not reach after a number of days. ...
Once a question has been closed, it will no longer accept new answers and the words [on hold] will be appended to the title. After 5 days, if the question remains closed, the word [closed] will instead be appended to the title.

So "on hold" really means "this is going to be marked closed soon, unless you can convince people to re-open it". However it is still actually closed.

... any user with the "protect questions" privilege can put question on hold ...

No, that's different. I've protected a couple of questions which were intended as reference questions, when people were starting to "answer" with their own problems.
Right now, users with 500+ rep will have the "cast close and reopen votes" privilege, which is what is needed for voting to close.

Moderators can also lock questions and answers, like this rather amusing one in order to prevent people altering it.

"If the question has at least 100 views, close votes will age away after 4 days; otherwise close votes will age away after 14 days. " It seems like the same parameters are used across  all Stack Exchange sites.


text:
Lack of Arduino StackExchange logo?
This is more than likely an obvious question but I would still like to confirm my suspicion or perhaps I'm completely wrong and there could be something I'm ignorant about the processes behind StackExchange operations.
Cut to the chase, why isn't a logo or banner for this website? I know we're out of the beta stage but every SE branch out there that is not a beta has their own website (okay, I might have some confirmation bias but you know what I mean, right?). Is it due to the fact of possible copyright infringement if had their logo or pictures of their products on this website? I'm assuming that this place is an unofficial Arduino supported website so perhaps that could explain the lack of branding for this website. The main reason why I ask is to fulfill my own curiosity. I'm not suggesting a call for action or anything.
I mean, even Raspberry Pi SE has something for their website and they don't have the company logo for what I presume the same reason.

[dsp.se] was the last site that got its design, and it was on October 2016. Since then, there's no new site design, and since site logo is one of site design elements...

A relevant post (on this meta) by one of our designers from earlier this week: Custom Arduino Community design and logo - Information gathering :)

It takes times for a theme to be developed, there is a intermediate stage where the beta skin is still used (without actual beta branding) while the graphics designers get around to taking it out of the backlog.

To add to Ratchet Freak's answer the Stack Exchange team wait until a site goes live (from Beta) before they even start on working out a logo and theme. And there is a backlog, quite a considerable one, I believe.
Looking on the bright side, the limits for privileges are not increased until the theme is developed. Compare us to Electronics Stack Exchange privileges for example.
So in many ways, it is in everyone's interests to have them take their time. You get access to somewhat higher moderation tools at a lower reputation level.

Just to back up what has already been said; Ethereum is an example of another site that has graduated from Beta who is also waiting on a logo.

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