June 2015 Newsletter

New Option “contact community team” Added to Mod Menu on Users

For convenience, we’ve now added a direct channel for contacting the community team when you encounter a problem your moderator team is ill-equipped to handle. There’s a new option on the mod menu for the user page, called “contact community team”. Fill this out and it’ll generate a ticket in our support system, automatically including your profile as a moderator and the profile of the user you’re contacting us about, along with the custom message you provide containing the details of the problem. Once received, our Community Ops team will handle it, or will contact you (the moderator) via the email in your profile if any follow-up is necessary. This will allow you to deal with situations like user merges, underage users, and network spammers without needing to leave the page you are performing your investigations from.

  Read more → Can we have a moderator only “flag for community team/developer attention” link on posts?

Revision Redaction Implemented to Replace Revision Destruction

We introduced a new tool for the Community Team which allows us to directly modify a specific revision in a post history in order to remove elements such as private credentials. This replaces the previous system where we simply destroyed the revisions that contained such information. Redacted revisions will be marked in red text (visible to moderators only) as “redacted by [Team member]” in the revision history of the post. We will be using this tool going forward whenever you contact us to remove sensitive information from a post’s history – something you can now do using the “contact” option described above!

Closing Statistics Now Available for Moderators and 10k Users

Statistics on closing on your site can now be found as part of the 10k tools. You can find these either by heading to /tools/question-close-stats. Alternatively, you can find them from “question close stats” found in the links section at the bottom of the Close view in the 10k tools.

It’s important to keep an eye on how off-topic is being used on a site. If good questions are being closed incorrectly, the predefined reasons may be too vague; if too many bad questions are being left open or closed with “other” (custom comments left by the close-voter), then you may have picked the wrong reasons. If you see something amiss, don’t hesitate to bring it up for discussion on your meta.

More information on the specific statistics can be found at New 10K tool: question close statistics.