September 2013 Newsletter

Reopen Queue Now Includes Popular Closed Questions

We have added new a trigger for the reopen queue. Questions with relatively high scores (on the question or its answers,) and those with extremely high views per month are now added to the queue to ensure that posts whose value to the community may be significant get an opportunity for get broader review and potential improvement.

Additionally, we’ve widened the scope of edits that push questions into the queue to include users who haven’t flagged or voted to close the question. This way, users who find a question that they can patch up, but lack the ability to vote themselves, can help push the question into the eyes of those who can.

    Read more → Lots of questions in the reopen queue

Clarified Convert-to-Comment Guidance

We have modified our guidance for the moderator tool for converting answers to comments, as follows:

Answers should be converted to comments when they do not attempt to answer the question. A comment should ask for more information or suggest improvements to the post; poor or incomplete answers should simply be downvoted or improved.

Conversion is a tool meant for preserving posts meant for deletion that have value as comments. This new wording is intended to make that purpose clearer and less confusing.

Revamped Moderator Message UI

Moderator messages now include links to user profiles of the sender and recipient (when the recipient is not the moderators as a whole) in a new header preceding the message. Timestamps for when the message was sent, and when the recipient read the message, are also included in this header for easier organization.

Search for Duplicate Posts

Duplicates can now be filtered in searches using the phrase duplicate: in the search string. This was designed to re-enable the ability to avoid or isolate duplicates during search, which was lost when we overhauled the close system and how the duplicate message is relayed. As with similar search functions: “yes”, “true”, or “1” will yield only duplicates while “no”, “false”, or “0” will yield all results that are not duplicates.