Archive for July, 2014

Asking Days Badges Implemented

We’ve added new badges (Curious, Inquisitive, Socratic) to all sites on the network in order to help promote healthy question asking behavior. These badges are awarded to users who have a history of asking well-received questions, and who ask such questions on a number of days based on the tier of badge in question. The design of the badge requirements are meant to avoid abusive attempts to gain the badge. Nevertheless, it would be a good idea to keep an eye out for poor question asking behavior and provide guidance to users as appropriate, especially in the first few weeks of the badge’s release. If you have feedback to provide or bugs to report about the new badges, your local Meta is always open.

Read more → Asking Days Badges 

New Moderator-Only Help Center Articles for Moderator Tools

A new section has been added to the Help Center, designed for moderators to find in-depth information about the tools that they wield and guidelines of enforcement without needing to leave the comfort of their home site. These can be found by checking the Help Center under the bottommost heading, “Moderator Abilities”. These pages are only visible to moderators, and currently are not indexed by search, requiring the aforementioned navigation. As they are intended for moderator eyes only, please do not share the contents of these pages in public.

At current, there are only two articles present, but future articles will populate this section soon enough, detailing each of the various tools at your disposal, the purposes of each of the tools, and how best to use them to keep order on your sites. Articles which detail new content or tools that are too sensitive may be announced in the moderator inbox directly, as opposed to the public moderator newsletter. We hope that going forward, this will be a great reference for moderators about the tools they use every day. If you see an article that seems to be missing specific content, let us know via the Contact Us form found at the bottom of every page.

Check out the directory → [your-site-address]/help/mods 

Chat Annotation and Suspension History Implemented

It is now possible to annotate users in chat directly, as well as view a history of moderator incidents with a chat user. Similar to annotations on the main site, this will allow you to keep a track record of a particular chat user, both for your own benefit and for that of other moderators. As all network moderators operate simultaneously across the entirety of chat.stackexchange.com, this should help in finding context regarding a user when an incident arises in chat. Additionally, we have implemented a full viewable history for moderators with regards to chat suspensions for a user, including information on how the suspension was issued.

New annotations can be made via the “moderator tools” button on the chat profile. The history of a user’s suspensions and annotations can be viewed from the user info popup, displayed as a number of annotations/suspensions, or from the chat profile, displayed as a large number in the top corner.

Read more → Moderator annotations for chat users 

Improved Excerpts for Initiating Moderator Messages to Display Template

Since the initial contact for a moderator message is identical for all forms of moderator messages, we have changed the excerpt shown in the moderator diamond inbox to instead specify the template that was used. This will help provide context so that you can determine the nature of the message before clicking on the link. If the template was edited before sending, this will also be indicated. Replies to moderator messages, both to and from the user, will continue to show a short excerpt from the text featured in the reply. 

Newsletter URL Updated to stackmod.blog

We’re moving the newsletter from its current home at http://moderator.stackexchange.com over to http://stackmod.blog, in order to free up the former URL. All existing links on the network have been converted to point at the new address, and all future links will likewise use the new URL. Please be sure to update any bookmarks you may have that point to the original address.