May 2013 Newsletter

New “Help Center” is Live!

We just rolled out the new ‘help’ center linked at the top of your site. The gist of this project is to consolidate the various FAQs, meta posts, and blog posts into a much more comprehensive, educational resource. See Introducing a brand new, consolidated, Help Center. This is an on-going project, so we’ll be adding many more articles and features addressing your ideas and concerns.

Please note that the article, “what topics can I ask here?” replaces the old on- and off-topic section of the FAQ — so please be sure yours is up to date. If your site has particular needs not addressed by the Help Center, please discuss your ideas with the community in meta, tagged [help-center].

Changes to the Closing System are Rolling Out

After months of discussion, work, and input from the community, we’ve begun rolling out changes to the close system. These changes are designed to improve the closing experience for both the community and the author of the post. Please read through the Closing Changes meta post for more information. The new reasons are being tested on Meta Stack Overflow this week, and we’re aiming to launch them everywhere else early next week.

Suspensions Limited to One Year

We are capping the length of time you can suspend a user to one year. If you are currently using the suspension system to, essentially, lock an account with multi-year suspensions, please simply ‘destroy’ the account instead. We maintain access to account information (IP addresses, email, access logs, etc), even after the account has been destroyed, so there is no need to hold an account hostage just to preserve those records.

If you have clear evidence that an account is being used inappropriately (spam, sock puppets, persistent trolls, circumventing suspensions, etc), continue to message or suspend the user as you see fit. If the account is clearly not made in good faith (i.e. promoting discount gucci handbags), feel free to proceed to deleting it. If there’s any doubt, please contact the community team before deleting the account outright.

Finding Problem Users in Chat

We’ve added a few simple reports to the chat system, listing users with potential problems like ‘multiple flagged messages’, ‘ignored by multiple people’, and ‘users who have invited multiple people’.

These reports are are located in the chat directory:

• For Stack Exchange Sites → http://chat.stackexchange.com/admin/users
• For Stack Overflow → http://chat.stackoverflow.com/admin/users
• For Meta Stack Exchange → http://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/admin/users

Leaving Comments on Deleted Posts

Moderators are now able to leave comments on deleted and locked posts. This will allow you to leave helpful guidance when a post need to be deleted quickly (or has already been deleted). Remember that your comments will appear in a user’s inbox, even after it has been deleted (July 2011), so please leave a short note when a user’s post disappears unexpectedly!

Swag Changes

With the network getting bigger and the number of moderators growing, we unfortunately have to stop doing customized business cards for moderators on graduated sites. Designing and producing those ended up taking more time than anyone had anticipated. We’ll still offer and send out business cards to any moderator who wants them, but they’re going to look a lot more like the cards we have for our employees: front back

On the upside, we are also introducing a new item to show our appreciation for everything you all do:

These will be available exclusively to moderators and employees and should go into production shortly. If you’d like one, please fill out your information here and we’ll have them shipped out ASAP once they’re ready.