October 2016

Bookmark of the room meeting.

Agenda

1. How do we handle motivated users with poor English skills?
2. "Be Nice" topic
3. Let's stop arguing daily about the appropriateness of close votes on specific questions
4. Should room owners be moderating room members actions outside of the room?
5. Room owner coverage

Resolutions

1. How do we handle motivated users with poor English skills?

The room is not an English learning site and there was no real issue with this in the past. Each user needs to decide if their English skill is good enough for them to properly operate on Stack Overflow (answering is part of that also). We can always point them at canned reason.

2. "Be Nice" topic

This was a single isolated incident that evolved into a big drama for really nothing. I think every party involved, including the RO team, understood what went wrong and learned from it. In the future, the ROs will try to be more responding to issues currently rising in chat, but it is important to add that everyone leads by example.

Just be nice. If you see something flagged and it could be inappropriate respect that someone felt that way and move on. We deal with people of all types from all over the world. There are going to be clashes and people are going to view things differently. Moving forward we just need to be more mindful of what we are saying and we need to not overreact if something gets flagged.

3. Let's stop arguing daily about the appropriateness of close votes on specific questions

This is pretty much already covered in the FAQ: "4. Avoid extended discussion about a cv-pls. We don’t have to agree about a close request. We’re not a democracy. However, users that are posting cv-pls’es that are blatantly wrong will be told so. The final verdict is on the RO team."

If you're having a back-and-forth between two well-defined 'teams', it's gone too long. You know when you hit that point. A blanket ban on discussion about cv-pls requests would defeat the purpose of the room and be unhealthy. Once you start repeating reasons for open or close you are just hitting a dead horse. No reason to keep going on.

4. Should room owners be moderating room members actions outside of the room?

The room owners are not moderators. If something needs moderating, get a moderator. If it's a room issue, handle it in the room.

Let alone we can't do that effectively, we don't even want to do that. People outside of the room can do as they want, as long as they follow SO rules and guidelines. Of course, when links to questions are left in the room, it is expected that they follow the room's rules. But we can't kick a user because we disagree with something they commented on Main or Meta.

5. Room owner coverage

If we need an RO in the room 24/7 then something is rotten in the room, and if we can't make this room work with all of us it is not going to work with just some RO's around.