January/February 2012 Newsletter

Flag Weight is Dead, Long Live Flag Weight!

Due to popular request, flag weight has been removed from user profiles. It is gone.

Instead, when users flag posts, they will see a ‘helpful flags’ count on their profile which links to a flag audit page. This listing contains a breakdown of flag outcomes by flag type (moderator attention, spam, offensive, etc).

Users can only see their own count, but moderators can see the count on every user’s profile page. This allows you to see if a user is doing a good job of flagging posts… or letting you know if they are consistently misusing flags in some way. Now with the transparency of the audit pages, moderators can feel easier about ‘declining’ flags as a learning experience to help users improve their flagging activity.

Moderator Capacity Issues

Moderating is a volunteer activity and everyone needs a vacation once in awhile. If moderation starts to become a daily grind, don’t hesitate to take a break. If you’re going to step away for more than a few days, just let us know. We can cover for you.

And if the moderation overload becomes chronic, please tell us! With 268 moderators, sometimes obvious signs of under-staffing are missed. If we know there’s a problem, we can take corrective measures to address the workload.

Tag Wikis on Your Meta are Now Editable

If you’re a long-time reader of our Moderator Newsletter, you’ll remember the significance of filling out your Tag Wikis. Now you can edit the wikis on your meta site, too. Sometimes the default tag wikis are not right for your site. Now you have full control to design the tag wikis to fit your community.

Direct Links to Comments Now Supported

Did you know you can link directly to a comment for reference? The time stamp following a comment is now a permalink to that comment. Try it out for yourself; it’s been enabled everywhere: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/5436/direct-link-to-a-comment#comment319463_120688.

The Canonical FAQ on Meta SO

I’m not generally a big fan of crowd-sourced FAQs. They tend to accumulate increasingly obscure issues which eventually devolves into the bulleted list from hell. But the Meta Stack Overflow questions tagged ‘faq’ have actually shaped up into a nice collection of the most-asked questions users have. Next time you’re not quite sure how a feature works, use this resource as your “cheat sheet” to find the answers: Meta Stack Overflow Questions Tagged ‘faq’.