March 2014 Newsletter

New Moderator Inbox Announcements

We’re pleased to announce that we now have the ability to push announcements to moderators across the network via the Moderator Inbox in the top bar. These will contain a quick tagline summarizing the change, and a link that can be followed. With this implemented, we hope to keep the moderator teams informed of big discussions and changes to the network while they are actively on their own sites, rather than reaching out via external services or requiring moderators to check in to Meta Stack Overflow. The announcement will show up as an orange diamond rather than the typical blue one, to inform you of the nature as a global announcement.

We’ll use these announcements as an extension of the moderator newsletter. We will broadcast when there are new changes or upgrades to the tools you use every day, as well as keep you up-to-date on important changes for the whole network. The end-of-month summary emails will still be sent, reiterating all of the changes done over the month. We see this as a big step towards keeping everyone in-the-loop.

Individual Moderator Flag Handling

Moderators are now able to provide separate resolutions for flags on the same post. When viewing a post with several flags, you can click on the individual flags in order to generate a pop-up for handling that specific flag. This will allow you to deal with situations where some flags are valid and others not, or instances where different manners of guidance must be given. This will also enable you to handle disputed flags by directly marking the appropriate flags as helpful or declined. Flags can still be handled on a post-by-post basis using the regular UI. You can handle full posts when the flags are all aligned to each other, and can granularize things when the situation calls for it.