@Marthaª - seems silly to me that the same code couldn't just be rolled in here. ... oh well :))

and as of yet, it doesn't seem like Mari-Lou's original request has been acted on? @snailboat - snail, is there a technical difference that defines 'smaller than' ? I thought all the SE sites were cookie cutter, merely with a different face.

@AndrewLeach - I happened to have seen the progression. 1) Initial post (format a bit sloppy but not bad and certainly readable.) As I finished reading, 2) it was down voted - post had existed just a minute or two. Then, 3) user:Cerberus edited it. I (and I'm guessing he) up voted it, as did someone else. My OP above was about that first hit, which the OP would have experienced. Clearly the nuances of the definition "it worked" depend a great deal on who's on the receiving end of the works ...

@TimLymington - that last parenthetical note was meant tongue in cheek. I have no problems with disagreement - the system works precisely because users preen it with clear judgement. What I am pointing out as many others have done elsewhere is the long-term use of self-defeating knee jerk down voting without useful comment. This problem the older experienced users just shrug off, but new users often may feel trampled by one of the biggest elephants in the SE room. (Oh well, such a waste of time going round and round, I'll delete this message in 2 days. Thanks for your time, seriously.)

@GreenAsJade ... 'the system appears to have worked here' and please notice the answer from a user with rep pnts similar to my own? He not only clearly understood my 'completely incomprehensible' question as it stood, but got the deeper gist of it. Further, his answer is fully comprehensible to me and is appropriate, although it doesn't give any specific suggestions per se. I reread what I wrote and it is clear enough to me and with an answer I don't feel the need to explain further. (I am not complaining, btw.) This question will self destruct in 2 days. ...

Well, I properly posted the issue over on se.meta - and got several down votes in a seeming equal number of seconds, revealing two things: there's probably a way of doing this you've not discovered, and, se.meta takes no prisoners ;-P

Hi @Mari-LouA - this is weird. You're rep points are in orbit here ... and I think the top end is 20k ... you are over that, so you should be able to do any permissible task here. Is it merely not available as an option for you? If so, this should be brought to the attention of SE.Meta, I'd say.

Widely recognized yes. Widely dealt with? Not yet as, of course, the issue seems intractable. Likely the reason it replicates ... searching for phenry ... Indeed, I recall some of these discussions.

@medica - I appreciate not being the only one concerned here. Thanks for the additional references - good work! Do you think these should be merged into a wiki / faq page?

At last, a breath of sanity ... and now for something completely different and not insane, though it would be down voted to down below if I posted it as an answer: just solve the problem by merging the two sites and calling it, duh, "English".

UGH I feel like going for a honking big batch of necromancer badges and pull up all the links to this horse-that-shall-never-die topic. Where are the SE Unicorns when you need them? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37328/…

Is this question a humorous joke? ;-P I'm surprised you were surprised that humor and jokes are not synonyms. Many things, like my wayward cat, can be humorous without involving a joke - although my cat might tell you otherwise when I attempt to make a joke about my cat. Sure, a joke could be considered a subset of humor, but something, as perhaps your question, might not be a joke or even a laughing matter. Is this a joke? No I'm serious - or am I being sarcastic? If the latter, then we'd have to make jokes a subset of "Sarcasm" if there is such a tag. Then we have a problem ... :))