September 2014 Newsletter

Migrate Comments to Chat Feature Implemented

Moderators can now manually move an exchange of comments to a chat room once it reaches the autoflag threshold of 20+ recent comments. This option will appear as part of the flag handling UI, both at the bottom of the page and when viewing these flags within the moderator dashboard’s queue. Note that performing this action does not in itself dismiss the associated flag. In addition to creating a new room and creating a comment that links to said room, this process will also automatically assign write permissions to all users whose comments were moved. In general, you should only move comments to chat when there appears to be an ongoing constructive discussion involving two or more individuals that has lost its direct relevance to the post.

  Read more → Provide a tool for moderators to migrate comments to chat

Chat Kick Upgraded to Kick-Mute to Prevent Re-entry

We’ve transformed our original “kick” action to a new “kick-mute” action, a new tool for moderation designed for those situations where a user in chat is misbehaving in ways such as being completely off-topic or being disrespectful to other users but not in enough of a degree to warrant a chat ban. This action, accessible as “kick-mute this user” on the user’s chat pop-up, will remove the user from the room, send them to a page warning them about behavior in chat rooms, and prevents them from re-entering the room for a period of time. This duration starts off as a single minute for the first kick in a 24 hour period, but increases to 5 minutes and then 30 minutes after subsequent kicks.

This functionality is not solely available to moderators – it has also been given to room owners to use within their rooms. This will help relieve the need of moderators to observe and solve problems in all of their site chat rooms, as it will allow the trusted users of their chat rooms to manage the load when someone’s lightly misbehaving. However, in case the situation starts to repeat, there are some cases that will raise a chat flag for moderators to investigate. These flags will be cast if, within 24 hours, a single user was kicked at least 3 times out of a room, or if a single room owner has kicked at least 3 users out of a room, or if there are at least 5 kicks happening within a single room. Keep an eye out for these not only to be aware of the events in your chat, but also if there may be situations that a moderator may need to take more severe measures.

  Read more → Impose a re-entry delay on users kicked out of a chat room

Incremental Question Rate Limiting Implemented for Problem Askers

The former question block system, which simply outright blocked users indefinitely after hitting certain thresholds of poor question asking behavior, has been replaced with a more robust system that uses an incremental set of temporary bans. It is designed to slow down question asking in accordance to the user’s performance – if they continue to post poor questions then the length and frequency of the blocks will increase accordingly. These measures are based on a lot more factors than previously examined, including average question score, time between questions asked, participation elsewhere on the site, and most importantly whether or not the user revisits their content and fixes it up.

As with the original system, this is intended to guide users towards learning that they’re doing something wrong, and empowering them to save themselves. By shifting to an incremental system, it should help users properly acclimate to the style of the network over time, rather than shutting them out completely due to a few early missteps. We’re setting this up on Stack Overflow to begin with, but hope to be able to spread it to the rest of the network soon, so keep aware of it. Status of these blocks will be visible to moderators in the same fashion as the old question blocks were.

  Read more → Why won’t the system allow me to ask questions for several days?

  Check out the Help Center Article → Why is the system asking me to wait a day or more before asking another question?

Chat Text Window Highlighted for Mod-only Rooms

We’ve added a simple red border to the text input for a chatroom if the room you are in is a Private room. This red color will be present regardless of the site’s normal design theme. This will help you identify at a quick glance whether the room you’re speaking in is visible to the general public, or only to those with explicit reading permissions.