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Somewhat over a month ago I flagged a posted by Dr. Jake Beale and explained that he had been stalking and harrassing me and had posted an irrational and dishonest ad hominem attack against me in extraordinarily rude language in comments under a question.

The user called "StrongBad" later wrote this about that flag:

We saw the flag, discussed it amongst ourselves and the SE employees. We decided that it would be best if an SE employee handled the issue. I believe when the flag was cleared, you received a message saying essentially "give us some time". The SE employees are busy, but I am sure they will get to the issue.

I haven't heard anything from them.

Let us note Jake Beale's words:

@MichaelHardy Is this about your same rant on mathematical fraud? Because it sure sounds like it, and you're ranting in the comments again as well. Please go set yourself up a blog or something where you can explain your views in a clear long-form format rather than trying to shoehorn them into the StackExchange format. – jakebeal May 18 at 5:12

That is about as rude as people ever get, with no apparent motive besides the fact that he didn't like an opinion I expressed in a DIFFERENT question on a DIFFERENT topic. And it referred to a question in which I made no attempt to defend the opinion he considered "ranting" but I was only asking for advice about where to publish it. Nonetheless he considered the question "ranting".

At one point I was told I should not contact Jake Beale by email. The fact is, I did so exactly once, on May 18, 2015, and the email was polite and very short. It said this:

Dr. Beale,

You need to understand this answer:

Should one down-vote a question because one disagrees with the questioner's views expressed on a past occasion not mentioned in the question?

That was my entire and only email to him. It apparently inspired him to complain to moderators that I was "stalking and harrassing" him. "Stalking" and "harrassing" correctly describe what he did, quoted above.

"StrongBad" wrote the words I attribute to him or her above: "I am sure they will get to the issue". I haven't heard from them. Will the matter be dealt with?

PS: I now find a moderator mistakenly informing me in comments below that I had some other means to contact the moderators besides posting this present question. That same moderator earlier actually recommended posting here as a way of contacting the moderators.

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  • Is there a reason for the down-vote here? I was quite emphatically told by several of the moderators that the proper way to contact the moderators about a concern was by a posting here on meta.
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 7:48
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    I need to make two small corrections: 1) I've been following the standard advice of simply disengaging and trusting the community to handle your accusations (thank you community!); even your out-of-band email to me I simply deleted. I don't know who reported you as stalking and harassing, but it wasn't me. 2) If you are going to continue your sequence of complaints about me, can you please at least get my name right?
    – jakebeal
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 10:38
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    It would be great of you could split your meta questions into smaller more mangle chunks. As for the "request" to me, looks like ff524 is following up on it. Hopefully, you or the mod team, will hear something back this time. As for the other stuff about the other user, I am not sure it is relevant to the issue of the SE team not responding. I currently do not see question or discussion topic, so I am going to ignore it for now. Although part of me is inclined to edit out the rant.
    – StrongBad Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 12:05
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    The reason for my downvote is that this is a somewhat private issue you have with a single moderator and a single users, and both you and the mod team have discussed this issue in a number of emails. If you have a further problem, or if you feel that the mod team isn't meeting your needs, you can just email us again and we can bring it up with the SE mods again. Posting this here and calling out users seems pretty bad form and fairly "rude", for lack of a better word; hence the downvote.
    – eykanal Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 18:15
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    @eykanal The ability to respond to mod messages is limited. There are some meta posts about it, but it is like one response per message. I don't feel like I was being called out, but the comments about the other user do seem rude.
    – StrongBad Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 19:27
  • @eykanal : The options for contacting "StrongBad" appeared to be these: (1) find some post to flag that I hadn't flagged before, and (2) post here. The latter course of action was in fact recommended by you, eykanal.
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 19:53
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    You can reply to the emails you receive from the mod messages as many times as you like. We have a few instances here on Academia where there were far more than one email on the chain (@StrongBad - see here) (mod-only link, sorry). If you reply to the email, we'll all see it.
    – eykanal Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 20:46
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    The only "trick" on the mod message system is that the messages need to be done in turns, alternated between mod team and user. That means that if the mod team does not send a reply back to the user, the user will not be able to message the team again. This was also explained in the message I sent to @MichaelHardy over a month ago.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 20:56
  • @eykanal : If you mean the system by which private messages are exchanged between a user and moderators, then as of last time I encountered that, one could not reply as many times as desired. Rather, one could reply once provided the moderators allowed it, and then as soon as a moderator decided the matter was closed, the system was no longer available and no reply could be sent.
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 20:56
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    @eykanal : I was surprised when I first learned that you were not aware of the fact that JNat's comment above informs you of. Apparently you're still not aware of it. It is NOT TRUE that I can reply as many times as I choose. The system prevents me from contacting moderators in that way.
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 20:58
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    @JNat - Thanks for clarifying, wasn't aware of that.
    – eykanal Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 22:49
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    @MichaelHardy and whoever else comes by. I'm upvoting solely for the PS as that's the public issue here. As far as I'm concerned the rest can be deleted.
    – Joshua
    Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 20:30

3 Answers 3

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I’ve reviewed all the posts involved once again, and it seems that there were actually no updates at all since I had last checked aside from this new meta post. The text quoted above from StrogBad was from an answer posted on June 4th, and I did reply to your messages sent to our team via the contact us page. I replied to two of them, each pertaining to different matters. I sent these replies back to you on June 5th, and you replied back to one of them on the next day and got a reply back to that one two days later (the weekend got in the way). I ended one of the messages with the following paragraph:

I hope to, together with the moderator message exchange and the feedback you got on the Meta post you created, have addressed all of your concerns. But please let me know if there's anything else I can help make clearer.

That still stands: if there’s anything I can help make clearer, please let me know.

I’m not sure if the messages got sent to your spam folder, or if something else happened, but they did get sent. If you cannot find them, let me know and I’ll personally make sure to send them out again. That being said, I think most of the issues were indeed addressed either on the message I sent to you, on the previous replies to your earlier meta post, or on the message exchange between you and the moderators. Once again, though, do let me know if there was anything left unaddressed or unclear.

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    I am so glad to hear that the SE team was/is on top of this.
    – StrongBad Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 19:28
  • @JNat : I did receive an email from you on June 5, but it dealt only with other topics than the one I was referring to when I wrote " Will the matter be dealt with?". There I was referring to my complaint about the abusive behavior of Jake Beal. You didn't mention anything about that in your email.
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 10, 2015 at 4:35
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    @StrongBad : They're not on top of this; see my comment above.
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 10, 2015 at 4:35
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    "if there’s anything I can help make clearer, please let me know", "do let me know if there was anything left unaddressed or unclear." The only email I can find that you sent me was on the 5th of June and simply does not mention or even hint at this matter at all. Are you claiming to have sent me more than one email on that day?
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Jul 12, 2015 at 19:16
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    I am not claiming to have sent you e-mails, I did send you two e-mails on June 5th. One at 17:56 UTC, to which you replied on the next day and got another reply back on the 8th (and that little to do with this situation); and another one at 19:15 UTC, to which you never replied back, and that had that final paragraph I quoted above. As I mentioned before, I'll be happy to forward it to you again if you cannot find it, just let me know.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Jul 13, 2015 at 11:21
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We as mods have been lucky to have not had to deal with too many sticky situations where we have had to communicate with users via mod messages so we are not experts on the process. I apologize for this short coming and we have created a new FAQ covering how to get in touch with moderators and CMs.

In regards to the issues leading up to and following on from your suspension, we think the issue is being well handled by the SE team and are handing off future issues arising from this incident to them. You are still welcome use AC.SE and we hope you will continue to offer your expertise. If you have new questions and issues unrelated to the above mentioned incident, feel free to post on meta or in chat. For new issues related to or arising from your suspension, please use the contact us link to contact the SE team directly. We are happy to accept any recommendations by the CMs after they have reviewed any new information.

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Regarding

"I am sure they [StackExchange community team] will get to the issue". I haven't heard from them.

I have just flagged your profile for attention from the community team (my first time using this new feature!) so hopefully they will reach out to you as a result.

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