March 2012 Newsletter

New Voting Fraud Detection Tools

The primary way to gain reputation is by posting good questions and useful answers. But with any competitive system, there will always be a few people who try to cheat (Vote Fraud and You). We take this very seriously, and provide some serious tools for detecting and dealing with voting fraud. This tool set got a recent upgrade:

'mod' > 'links' > 'Suspicious vote patterns'

If there is suspicious voting activity (an unusual number of votes shared between accounts), the links found in this list will provide some nice visualization tools to see where shared activity might be occurring.

A note of caution — Not everything listed here is necessarily bad. Unless you are familiar with these tools, I would encourage you to bring suspected fraud issues to the Teacher’s Lounge where we’ll walk you through the process to investigate it further. For details, see this fraud detection tools discussion in chat and what to do if you find fraudulent activity.

Reputation Recalc Removed

The ability to recalculate a user’s reputation has been removed from the ‘mod’ menu. The function is no longer necessary because the displayed score is now kept current with all the voting activity.

Up until recently, a user’s reputation score was only an approximation user’s actual score. Actions like deleting posts or removing users (and their votes) weren’t always reflected in the user’s displayed score. Over time, these discrepancies would add up, so a recalculation was the only remediation. That action is no longer necessary.

A system-wide recalculation was performed, so if your users are asking about unexpected changes in their reputation score, you can refer them to this blog post:

Reputation and Historical Archives

New Stack Exchange Beta Theme

If your site is in beta, it’s about to get a much-needed facelift. We are retiring the familiar “Sketchy” theme and rolling out a more-polished and finished design for the beta sites. The blog post below will answer any questions your users may have. It also outlines some of the reasons behind this change and how it will benefit your community.

The New Stack Exchange Beta Theme