February 2015 Newsletter

Duplicate Targets Now Blocked from Deletion

Users, including moderators, are now prohibited from deleting a question which is currently the target of one or more duplicate closures. This will help prevent unusual dead ends where a user comes across a duplicate question, only to be confronted with a non-existent page being pointed to. This prevention is absolute and can only be resolved by removing the duplicates that are pointing to the question – whether this would entail reopening the questions or deleting them will be based on the particular situation.

Upon attempting to delete a question that is shielded in this fashion, the user will be presented with a pop up informing them of the inability to delete the post and the means to which it can be alleviated. The pop up also includes the option to view all posts that currently contain a link that points to the post they attempted to delete. This does include posts which are not actually pointing to the question as a duplicate – the ones that do, however, are easily identified by their status as being closed with [duplicate] in their titles.

  Read more → Auto-flag duplicates of deleted questions for reopening / deletion

Very Low Quality and Not An Answer Flags Temporarily Suppressed In Moderator Queue

Very Low Quality and Not An Answer flags do not enter the moderator queue for 15 minutes after they’re raised. This applies network-wide, except on Stack Overflow, Mathematics, TeX, Salesforce and Stack Overflow em Português (where the delay is a full hour) and meta sites (where they enter the queue immediately).

This delay gives the community a chance to handle these flags first. If that doesn’t happen, or if it can’t happen, then it is made available to moderators for resolution. Keep in mind, not all posts can be processed via review, and when a post is processed through review but continues to garner flags the system reserves these for moderators. Therefore, when you do see these flags in the mod queue, you should handle them – it’s unlikely anyone else will.

How to Find a Chat User from their Site User Profile

You can now reach a user’s chat profile by heading to http://chat.stackexchange.com/accounts/[networkid], where [networkid] corresponds to the user’s Stack Exchange Network ID. You can determine that value from a user when visiting their profile page on any site by clicking “network profile” in the top right (or if your browser supports it, hovering over the link to view the URL), and copying the number from the resulting address. If the user does not actually have a chat profile linked to their account, you will instead be directed to a 404 page when you input that network ID.

This route is available for anyone to use, it is not moderator-only. It is, however, most likely to be of use to moderators when trying to determine a user’s chat identity for the purposes of superpings. We’re considering how to integrate this directly into the profiles, rather than requiring a manually input URL.