I wonder whether this question would be received better if the most common software used for mathematics online conferences worldwide would be unavailable in the US due to sanctions by the EU, China and Russia in response to President Trumps' withdrawal of the Paris agreement, his breach of the Iran nuclear deal, his decision to quit the WHO, and so on.

I think the general question asked here should better be separated from the report of the passing away of a particular person.

So in short: use gm.general-mathematics for mathematics questions which do not fall into a particular subfield of mathematics, and use soft-question for questions interesting to mathematicians which are not mathematics questions?

Let me point out that there is already a better tag for such general questions as you describe -- namely, soft-question. As far as finer categorization of a question is appropriate, just add a subject-specific tag like e.g. gr.group-theory, pr.probability or whatever.

One might consider offering a bounty for the mere purpose of preventing a question from closure as abusive. -- So in such case one might flag as "rude or abusive".

Among the votes by "low-rep" users, 4582 are by Ali Taghavi, who is "low-rep" only because of having offered bounties worth a total of 25600 points.

I’m voting to close this question because it is obsolete now.

I’m voting to close this question because it is obsolete now.

@ToddTrimble It is quite possible that there is a history which I am not aware of, and in fact I hope it is really drastic -- since if it is not, my feeling is that the decision to suspend him was rather not a good service to the community ... .

How can it be that Mark Sapir has been suspended? -- If this has really happened (I hope not), then let me say that suspending such an eminent contributor is likely to harm the community more than any plausible rule violations from his side may do ... .

@MarkSapir It's a real, real pity that you intend to leave the site ... -- your leaving would be a big loss for the community! -- Even if you choose not to contribute for a while (or even at all any more) -- why do you wish to take such drastic action as to irreversably delete your account?

I think automatized edits which don't bump posts to the front page can be done only by SE employees, and not by moderators. -- Anyway, for any such mass edits, I think this is the best way to go.

I think polite ways to articulate criticism tend to depend very much on culture, habits and traditions, and may be not understood in the same way by everybody and everywhere. For close reasons this is likely not much different than e.g. for the famous question "Can I help you?" ...