October 2011 Newsletter

View History of Flagged Posts

When a post has been flagged, you can now look at the activities (editing, tagging, etc) that occurred before and after the flag. This is useful for determining if corrections have been made to the post.

To see the history of a flagged post, select:

mod > show flag history

This will list the sequence of edits and flags and display any added comments. If the flag is resolved, the timeline will also show which moderators looked at the post.

Adding Annotations to Posts

Moderators can now annotate posts with notices which do not belong in the posts themselves. To annotate a post, select:

mod > add post notice

and choose from the list of available notices:

• Citation needed
  This post does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
• Current event
  Post is related to a rapidly changing event.
• Honeypot question
  We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer: please explain why you recommend it as a solution. Answers that don't explain anything will be deleted.

A list of annotated posts is available at: http://<site-name>/annotated-posts?tab=noticed

Currently, only the annotations shown above can be added. If you have recommendations for additional notices, please suggest them at: Support for banners?

Adding Notices to Locked Posts

Locked posts cannot be voted on or changed in any way. If the locked post is a question, no answers can be added. Now you can add an explanation of why the post was locked:

• Content Dispute
  This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved.
• Historical Significance
  This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.
• Honeypot question
  This post has been locked due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated. For extended discussions, please use chat.

Optionally, you can now configure how long you would like the lock to last so you don’t forget to unlock them after a short cool-off period has elapsed.

More Notices, Network-wide

Other features now allow the addition of action-based notices. Declining flags, posting bounties, and rejecting suggested edits all allow you to add additional information to help educate users.

Lower Rep Needed to View Suggested Edits

The reputation requirement to gain full access to the suggested edit queue has been lowered to 5,000 reputation (1,500 during beta). This should help lessen the workload of approving suggested edits now that more users have access to the full queue.