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I can spot a huge difference between how his site was two years ago and how it is now, these differences are listed below:

  • Off topic and silly questions that are related to culture rather than Islam. (I.E Can I sacrifice a goat if it had no horns)
  • Lots of "I think...", "My opinion...", "I was told..." answers that do not cite any references. (I.E my uncle told me that this Imam said its okay, so its Halal)

This appears to be due to lack of moderation, no disrespect, I know that some of the moderators are very active however I don't think there is enough of you.

Back to the question, is this site being given up on by senior users and moderators?

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    What you consider as "silly question" seems to be a "reasonable question" for others. That's because of the knowledge of everyone, the controversy of the different sources of Islamic jurisprudence. You can't blame them and SE Islam is one place that doesn't push "the Truth theory" rather than just answer the question.
    – user19208
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 9:11
  • @cerberus23 I agree, I wasn't being arrogant or claiming to have superior knowledge, the type of questions I'm referring to, are similar to the example you gave in your profile "is brushing my teeth with the lefthand haram?..." questions that do not state the reason for asking them and show absolutly no effort to research or cite anything that support the claims in their questions :)
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 16:49
  • For example "we know that we cant get rid of interest money by giving it as charity, how should I get rid of it" here the OP made a claim without any indication of why he thinks so! islam.stackexchange.com/questions/35412/…
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 17:03
  • 1
    I agree with you and I wasn't criticising you. It's an issue I faced myself. However this issue is a lot bigger than SE Islam. SE Islam is merely a platform that reflect how confusing it is out there and of course by the nature of SE and its rules you can't do much about it.
    – user19208
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 17:55
  • @cerberus23 True, what is sad about this is that most Muslims out there are blind to this, they blindly follow in the foot steps of their fathers and cultural norms, something that Allah warns us of over and over in the Quran. the solution is there, ponder reflect and study, knowledge is an ocean without a shore, ........ Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. And when Allah intends for a people ill, there is no repelling it. And there is not for them besides Him any patron 13:11
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 18:40
  • "My uncle told me that this Imam said its okay" may be a really crappy reference, but it's still a better reference than you're likely to find in a lot of places (here or elsewhere).
    – goldPseudo Mod
    Commented Sep 21, 2016 at 5:31
  • @goldPseudo Yes it is a really crappy reference but is it valid? The whole point behind providing a reference is to allow the reader to carry out further investigation to verify the truthfulness and authenticity of such claim.
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 22, 2016 at 17:36
  • @Aboudi That really depends: Is the questioner even willing or able to "carry out further investigation to verify the truthfulness and authenticity of such claim"? Or is he more than happy to just trust the SE peer review to let him know the best answer?
    – goldPseudo Mod
    Commented Sep 22, 2016 at 19:43
  • What if 90% of the SE Islam peer review was also based on "the imam said" ?
    – user19208
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 14:41
  • @cerberus23 Then you've done a terrible job of building an expert community and should probably work on that: meta.islam.stackexchange.com/q/712/22
    – goldPseudo Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 17:38

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Welcome to the club!

If you toke a look at most of my later posts here on meta you will find me indicating this. And it's the predominant subject in my discussions with goldPseudo in the chat!

For example would our main chat room get frozen if there was an active community? Can anybody unfreeze our main chat room?

Would the review chains increase to a level of ~70 in an active community? Pending reviews: Is everybody fasting or what?

Do we need just more users or do we need more active users or do we need active users who understand the SE policies is what I would conclude from this: On hold and closing of new user's questions

You will find me often quoting the lack of activity on the site (maybe not directly) and quoting my reasons for not answering etc.: like in Answers on comment section?, Arabic StackExchange [Re-Proposed] and Should I use (pbuh) when mentioning Muhammad?

What I'd like to say is we need a working active community (as in SE it's not the only job of mods to care for the site but in a working community -according SE policies- mods wouldn't need to intervene that much, but we don't have such a community right now!). A community that tries it's best to keep this site alive, but not with any rubbish, we need questions that may attract experts, we would need a fast community reaction on bad posts not just down-votes because a girl confesses in her Question that she committed a sin (zina or anything which may lead to it) or a none Muslim asks about the relationship between Islam and terrorism etc. , we need well elaborated answers, we need more understanding of SE policies, it's not important who we are or to which sect we belong the most important matter should be the Question and whether it fits to the site policies and the answers too (Don't make assumptions about the beliefs of any user by just reading the post they author)... we should fight answers or questions which may inflame useless discussions on the superiority or truth of one special sect... we should fight the laziness in ourselves and try to attract users who were active and became lazy these days... a lot of questions and answers need edits (maybe the longest review queue is the low quality posts queue, unfortunately some users use none English or none common words) ... and we need a lot more which didn't come to my mind!

Maybe one should think about reviewing old answers as lots of them IMO are not bad at all, but lack a lot of what I might call a well elaborated answer.

What seems to me a problem is that Q&A sites on theological or religious matter will at a time reach a certain limit of valid questions (we already have a lot of duplicates!), from that time on only new circumstances can create new (valid) questions.
And even if we do our best we can't avoid sectarianism.

People should also understand this is our page and we are asked to take care for it not the moderators only. If we reached that level we may have a chance to go further!

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  • I agree, "down-votes because a girl confesses in her Question that she committed a sin" unfortunately being closed minded and judgemental is a symptom that many within the Ummah suffer from, another example would be a child asking their parents why do we pray 5 times a day, and the parent replies with a slap and takes his child to the exorcist
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 16:58
  • @Aboudi this question islam.stackexchange.com/questions/25975/… shows that users don't care for the (objective) validity of the question but react in a more subjective way on questions!
    – Medi1Saif Mod
    Commented Sep 21, 2016 at 11:34
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…I don't think there is enough of you.

…enough of you.

…you.

See, there's your problem right there. Why are you talking about moderators as if they're a "you" instead of an "us"?

Moderation is the responsibility of everyone on this site (see: "A Theory of Moderation"). Have you been downvoting "silly questions", or poorly referenced answers? Have you been voting to close posts that aren't welcome here? Have you been going through the review queue to weigh in on things that need action? Have you been discussing in meta what should and should not be on-topic at all? Have you been leaving comments explaining how the site works to new users so they don't think that such posts are welcome?

For the most part, and this has been an issue for pretty much the entire lifetime of the site, the community can't be bothered to moderate itself. Half the community just expects diamond mods to step in and fix every little problem, and the other half of the community just yells at diamond mods for stepping in and fixing every little problem. And except for the diamond moderators and a very small percentage of regular users, nobody seems to care enough about the site to actually do anything about maintaining it themselves.

Multiply that by ten thousand-odd visitors per day, and yes, I agree: This appears to be due to lack of moderation.

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  • I do submit edits to help and make questions more clear, I also down vote and criticise questions by leaving comments, however that's all I could do :( hoever I do see a lot of downvotes with no explanation
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 18, 2016 at 20:42
  • Maybe we should add a feature that only allows you to downvote if you leave a comment as well, that well the community can be a bit more constructive?
    – Aboudi
    Commented Sep 18, 2016 at 20:43
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    @Aboudi I don't mean to imply that you, personally, aren't doing your share. This post is targetted more at the community at large; we're just too big for any one or two people to be able to handle it alone. We need everyone to be doing their share, not just the diamond mods and senior users.
    – goldPseudo Mod
    Commented Sep 18, 2016 at 21:58

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