June 2018 – The Welcome Wagon, Hiring, New Stuff And The Last GDPR Mention (We Hope!)

The Welcome Wagon Welcomes You!

As you’ve probably heard, we’re working on the problems surrounding inclusivity on Stack Overflow. We realize that these certainly aren’t problems that are exclusive to Stack Overflow and want to get as many perspectives as we can from users that tend to be some of the first that new users encounter. Naturally, this list includes any moderators that have ideas on how we could improve the new user experience, and help us promote new ways of thinking about these problems to our communities

The group primarily serves as a discussion panel and sounding board; here’s a list of things you might expect to see asked of the group:

• What immediate changes to tools would have the most impact for new users? Okay, maybe not specific feature requests, but broader groups of them?
• We know this sounds crazy, but what could really go wrong if we let new users do [thing]?
• Here’s some draft copy for a stronger code of conduct, does anyone have any feedback?
• Here’s some shiny new UX mock ups, anyone feel like testing the flow?
• Anyone free to do a Skype / Hangout interview about [topic]?

Of course, there will be more stuff, but that’s the gist of it. The group is super informal and your participation there is strictly voluntary. However, we want to limit the size of the group to the extent that it remains effective and all that have things to say have a chance to do so. To that, we can only accept groups of up to 15 people at a time, in the order that they express interest. We also ask that anyone not able to contribute for more than a week or two let us know, so we can let some others in. If you’re interested, contact Tim Post directly at tpost@stackoverflow.com. If you have a Slack username, please include it in your email. We’re using Slack for a tucked-in corner over Stack Exchange Chat , as we do not encourage the creation of private rooms for personal cliques, even the ones we are championing for the cause of our site.

We Wish We Had A Bigger Budget

We had no idea how strong the response would be to our latest job opening on the Community Growth team here at Stack Overflow, and we’re quite honestly taken back by just how many of some of the smartest people we’ve ever met (that’s strongly directed at all of you) want to work here full-time. We really didn’t think more than a few folks would apply.

Now, we have to make some choices that will whittle down a large group of applicants to a small candidate pool, and then whittle that pool down to a single choice of the person we’re going to hire. That’s not going to be easy, and while we can’t wait for someone to start, we’re surely not looking forward to the number of times we’re going to need to tell many people ‘no’ just so we can tell one person ‘yes’.

If you applied and don’t make it through, it’s our fault for not being able to broaden the number of positions we have available to better fit the presentation of a qualified candidate pool that’s much larger than we anticipated. All of you are amazing and as things progress, it’s turning out to be one of the toughest decisions we’ll ever have to make.

We are sincerely humbled that so many of you jumped at the chance to put your career future in our hands; we’re truly fortunate to have you, even if we can’t hire as many of you as we’d like.

We Mostly Survived The GDPR Kicking In!

Some other sites didn’t do so well; we’re pretty thrilled to have the bulk of the work behind us and not be on that list. We wanted to give some guidance on GDPR-related questions that might be lingering, as far as the best place to post them.

We don’t anticipate any lingering problems because we’ve done quite a bit of testing, but just in case:

• I have a question about a specific user  → Use the ‘contact cm’ feature for any individual user questions (e.g. age related).
• I have a question about how SE implemented something related to the GDPR → If it requires knowledge of a tool that isn’t public, ask on the Moderator team, or ping Tim directly. If it doesn’t require knowledge of tools, just post on MSE.
• The [foo] tool exploded and didn’t explode prior to the GDPR work →  Bug-related stuff about the tools going wonky post-GDPR can just be filed using the contact form with any steps / account links needed to reproduce the issue. In almost all cases these should probably be handled privately, but we trust your judgement if you think it’s fine to post on MSE.

Reiterating that the GDPR is new, we’re sure to see more changes come down the road as the teeth in the law get tested in the courts. We’ll keep everyoen apprised of any new changes in this newsletter that aren’t big enough to announce on the meta sites, when it comes to your tools and how you manage your sites.

New Mod Tool: Recently Redacted Revisions

The “redact revision” tool has been available to moderators for a while now, but oversight of past redactions has been limited to employees. Now, a list of the last 100 redactions can be found via /admin/links under the name “Recently redacted revisions”. This lists the posts that were redacted, the moderator or employee who initiated the redaction, the reason given for each redaction and a link to the flag raised for confirmation (if any; employee redactions do not require confirmation). In keeping with the intent of the tool, any text that was redacted is not shown.

The goal here is to provide additional visibility into how this tool is being used. If you have any concerns about how redactions are performed on your site, please talk about it with the rest of your team. If you have any questions about the use of the tool itself, ask them on the Stack Moderators Team.