March 2013 Newsletter

Calling for Elections – Need More Help? Just Ask!

In the past, the community team was monitoring sites to determine when they needed more mods in order to maintain good coverage. Recently,we realized that we’re usually not the people most qualified to know when there’s a need. You are!

Going forward, the main trigger for us to consider holding elections will be the existing mod team telling us they need more help. As of now, any time you feel that your site is understaffed, either because the workload is increasing or because there aren’t enough active moderators, please get as much team consensus as possible, and then email the Community Team to let us know how many additional mods you think make sense to add.

After reviewing these requests, we may suggest a different number, or offer to reach out to any less active mods first, etc. But most of the time, since you’re in the best position to tell us what your team needs, and we’ll work with you to get an election scheduled.

Review Queue – Advanced Statistics

We have made a more in-depth set of review statistics available to moderators. Each queue now includes the number of times a reviewer has picked each available action, and what percent of their total actions it represents. This should provide you with a much better overview of how your community is using review, as well as a way to detect those who seem to be reviewing in bad faith and may need to be temporarily blocked (see below).

    Go to review via the top navigation bar → Pick any queue » ‘stats’ » ‘Advanced stats’ in the right sidebar

You can change the queue you’re viewing at any time using the dropdown labeled “Queue:”.

Suspending Users from Reviewing

We have implemented a system for blocking users from using the review queues for 1 to 30 days.

Most people using Review do so in a helpful manner, but you may encounter a few users who do not. If someone does not appear to be reviewing in good faith (always choosing the same action, regardless of content, repeatedly approving poor edits, etc.) short time-out may be a gentle reminder to slow down and pay attention.

    From the page top ‘mod’ link → ‘links’ » ‘Review bans’ » Enter user ID or URL

This page also includes a list of user who are currently banned, either by a moderator or due to failing audits. This functionality is available regardless of whether your site has audits enabled.

New Unicode Tag System

Full Unicode support for tags now available and can be turned on for sites that need it. If you think your site would benefit from it, make a meta post, including examples of how it would be beneficial, gather community support, and propose a plan for how you’d use these tags either alongside or instead of “normal” tags. The more information you can provide, the more easily we can implement your request. Once you have all of the information gathered, email the Community Team, and we’ll be happy to review the thread.

How to Contact Users

This is mostly a reminder. It is rare that a moderator should need to directly email a user at their email address, especially with regards to normal moderator duties. Most of your private contact needs should be done through moderator messages – it’s both less intrusive to the user and also automatically informs the rest of the moderators and the Community Team that something is happening. If you find yourself needing to email a user for moderator reasons but not using a moderator message, make sure to also BCC the rest of your team, and the Community Team, on every exchange so that everyone is on the same page.