May/June 2012 Newsletter

Wow, Moderator FAQs and Cheat Sheets

We have never published a “Moderator Manual” for Stack Exchange. Learning the ins and outs of moderation is largely done “on the job.” But our intrepid Moderator community has stepped up and produced some fantastic compilations that should be part of every moderator toolbox:

Stack Exchange Moderator FAQ

Moderator Cheat Sheet

These posts include many common issues raised by Moderators in the Teachers’ Lounge. Give these a once-over and bookmark them for later; you’ll no doubt find them useful.

Community Bulletin Board

We’ve discouraged the use of system-message banners for general announcements and non-critical events. As the Emergency Broadcast System for your site, it must remain clear under normal circumstances. But long last, we have a feature explicitly designed for you to post announcements, events, site news and such:

Nailing it upon your Community Bulletin Board

The Community Bulletin Board is a place for you to post scheduled events, featured meta posts, or to simply highlight anything of interest to your community. The basic guidelines for using this are:

• Items should generally involve the scope of your site.
• Descriptions (separate from titles for scheduled events) should be short but descriptive.
• Add your scheduled events far enough ahead of time to allow folks to make time for them.

Also, please remember to remove the [featured] tags from posts once they are no longer relevant. This happens automatically if you wait long enough, but let’s try to keep the ‘featured’ posts both relevant and timely.

View Deleted Comments

You can now display all the comments left by a specific user in one listing, including those comments which have been deleted.

To view a user’s comments, navigate to their profile and click the ‘mod’ link. Select the ‘info’ tab and click ‘comments’.

Using the tabs across the top, you can view ‘active’, ‘deleted’, or ‘all’ comments. This is a useful feature when you are looking into the general behavior of a user, or investigating a reported pattern of abuse.

A More-Readable Privacy Policy

Have you seen our reformatted, easier-to-read Privacy Policy?

Stack Exchange Inc. Official Privacy Policy

While updating the Safe Harbor/EU privacy requirements, we went ahead and included a much-welcomed “English for the rest of us” description for each section. These headings make it easier to find what you need when privacy issues come up.