22
Absolutely not. This is a global site, and StackExchange's location is just a practical detail.
The company that made it happens to be in the US, and yes, the site is in English, but that's because it needs to have a single common language so we can communicate, and it needs to be maintainable by StackExchange. (For practical reasons, this also extends to ...
19
For me, this is still on topic. Our help center states:
Cooking & food preparation methods
Food handling and storage
I would argue that it can even fall into both categories.
We cooks buy lobsters as live animals and storing and ultimately killing them is actually part of the food preparation process. Another example are mussles.
While most ...
18
Question like this one should be closed. Not only are they not about food preparation, answering them is dangerous/doesn't make sense.
We are not medical experts. We only apply a few well defined rules, created by informed authorities explicitly for the context of food preparation, to the situations presented by the people who come to us. Their purpose is ...
17
I believe these questions should be considered off-topic if the gist of the plant identification question is "is this edible?".
Because we're food specialists and not necessarily plant specialists, it's completely possible for us to miss-identify something as "edible" that is not.
As in the question, it's possible that it's a perfectly ...
16
Cooking.Stackexchange may look at first glance like a discussion board, but it is structured differently. Its main principle is that the question and its answers should be useful not only to the asker, but also for everybody else who stumbles on it. To do this, we expect our content to have a very specific structure, different from what you might be ...
15
Any questions on food preparation are on-topic. Indeed, this is our core topic, with a few related ones also being in scope.
English doesn't have a word which is unique to food preparation, so it uses "cooking" instead, even though this is frequently associated with preparing food by using heat. If you keep in mind that it is this broader sense of cooking ...
15
Let me preface this with “I am struggling with this answer”. I truly am. I can only speak for myself and I know that’s probably not enough.
You were asking about the moderators here. We chose to stay quiet for various reasons, or at least not bring the topic up ourselves. But I think your post means it’s time for a statement.
Yes, we have seen, watched ...
14
Firstly, I did not edit your post, I only looked at the edit to know what the nature of the edits were, and from that I come to the conclusion, there was zero censorship but seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Stack Exchange communities like Seasoned Advice. These are communities, which are user edited with the intent of giving searchable ...
13
The community decided long ago that restaurant mimicry questions are allowed. But they were even then considered a "grey" category, because they can be framed as a recipe request. A restaurant mimicry question should be written very carefully, so that it doesn't have the problems normally associated with recipe requests.
The general idea is that you see a ...
12
Statistically, our site receives about 40 upvotes for every downvote, a figure which seems to be loosely applicable across most of the Stack Exchange network.
That means two things:
Chances are, you will receive some downvotes, eventually. Somebody is going to disagree with you for reasons that may or may not be clear at the time. So don't sweat it if you ...
12
In general, the downvoting here is a very good thing. I even think that there isn't enough of it. It is important feedback. Keeping back important negative feedback out of fear to hurt someone's feelings is a terrible strategy, here and everywhere else. It makes the non-critiqued person feel nicer in the short term, but makes learning impossible, effectively ...
12
You may use the contact us link (it's in the footer of every page on the site) if you wish to report potential moderator misconduct. Moderators were elected by the community in the first place, and are not above the law. If we find mistakes we've made, we'll do our best to fix them, and if we egregiously misbehave, SE will take appropriate action.
That said:...
12
Posting on meta is the right way to raise issues like this, but you may also flag for moderator attention (using custom flag text) if you desire privacy.
The edit in question was not "censorship". It was made by one user who has earned some reputation on the site, and approved by two others who have earned even more: they have proved themselves here to some ...
12
Congratulations, Stephie! We're excited to have you join us, and looking forward to working with you.
Also, thanks to Catija and Cindy for entering the race. We'd have loved to have both of y'all as well.
And thank you as well to the 197 voters! It's nice to see how many people out there are interested in the community.
11
"Seasoned" has two meanings, which makes it very appropriate for this site.
One of the main goals of Stack Exchange is to attract professionals and experts in the subjects. One definition of "seasoned" is "experienced".
used to describe someone who has a lot of experience of a particular thing
The other definition relates more to cooking directly, ...
11
Jolenealaska:
Stack Exchange has a structure and rules unlike what most new users have experienced elsewhere. Unfortunately, new users tend to post questions and answers that don't fit in that structure. As a moderator, it will be a part of your job to close or remove those posts. How will you do that but still encourage the new user to "stick out the ...
11
Yes, food science is totally fine, as long as it's the science of something you actually do in practice in cooking.
If you find yourself asking theoretical questions though, or getting to the level of things that have no direct effect on the food, that's probably pushing it. Some of those things might work on the dedicated science sites (chemistry, biology, ...
11
To answer parts of the literal question:
You can’t edit a post after the first few minutes if you aren’t registered. You also can’t comment on it without the “comment everywhere” privilege or delete it. That simple.
Edit to clarify:
The original question about the jar of pasta sauce was posted by an unregistered account, note the turquoise gravatar.
The ...
10
I won't comment further on negative communication because that has already been discussed at length in other answers. However, since the question specifically mentions downvotes, I think it is important to clear the air here.
Voting statistics are public. Anyone can see them by just viewing a user's profile. The current statics for our moderators are:
...
10
Yes! There's even a bounty reason specifically for outstanding answers:
Reward existing answer
One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.
10
Note: Since the response is mostly (but not entirely) positive to this proposal, I'm accepting the answer: I'll be using this policy, erring on the side of not deleting anything of significant value. (See the full answer for discussion of which kinds of situations likely merit deletion.)
What do we do?
This is a real issue (see the second section), so mods ...
10
I'm Catija and here are my responses
Stack Exchange has a structure and rules unlike what most new users have experienced elsewhere. Unfortunately, new users tend to post questions and answers that don't fit in that structure. As a moderator, it will be a part of your job to close or remove those posts. How will you do that but still encourage the new ...
10
The question asks about the effect the food (or drink, in this case) has on your body. Although this might not be what you'd normally think of as health, it's therefore at least a biological question, which is close enough to health to just use that reason: it's about something making you feel bad.
Whether we use the health close reason, or the generic off-...
10
This doesn't sound that useful to me. It doesn't indicate something well-defined about the question, which is pretty much the point of tags.
As rumtscho points out in Can we handle questions about diabetic-friendly food?, questions about cooking for diabetics need to clearly specify goals (e.g. "low-carb"). If we want to tag those questions, we should ...
10
As somebody who has diabetic family members and has attended some lectures on the illness and its management: diabetes questions exhibit all the hallmarks of health questions which generate bad answers.
First, under ideal circumstances, people would know the current state of medical knowledge about diabetes management, and answer based on that. But the ...
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