July 2018 Newsletter II

New themes will start rolling out this month!

We’re in the process of rolling out new network site themes this month. This means, if you’re a moderator of one of the 100 sites that currently use the stock ‘beta blue’ site theme, you’re soon getting a whole new look.

This has been announced and discussed well in advance, but we want to let you know just in case your users have questions and you want a resource to point them to. It’s up to you if you feel like you should post something on your meta site, we just want to make sure you and your users aren’t caught off guard.

Leftside Moderator Tooling Moved

Post-related moderator tools that were formerly located on the lefthand margin, have now been moved into the posts themselves. They are now listed vertically beneath the vote display for a post as a series of icons. With this, access to a post’s moderation timeline or comment/flag history can once again be accessed with a single click. By becoming part of a post, this means it will be accessible no matter the window width, even on mobile devices.

Note that no changes to the tools themselves have been done. It’s only the appearance and location that has been changed.

The second draft of the new CoC is now out for comment.

If you didn’t notice it in the community bulletin, there’s a new post on MSE inviting folks to provide any final commentary on our second iteration of the new CoC (code of conduct).

Many moderators provided us with some very valuable feedback, and we feel that you’ll be pleased with the amount of your feedback we’ve incorporated into this second draft. Our goal has always been to make it easier for you to enforce rules that we already have, and we feel that this accomplishes that. If you look closely, you’ll see that we’re not adding anything new, we’re just clarifying what we already have.

Enforcement doesn’t really change much, except that we explicitly call out certain behaviors (like subtle put-downs, sexually suggestive phrasing in chat, etc) that some folks prefer to argue as ‘not technically not nice’ instead of just stopping. We hope this prevents time-consuming conflict by putting a stop to quite a bit of rule-lawyering.

Please have a look, and let us know if you have any thoughts by leaving an answer or a comment (answers are ideal). Tim Post will be in the TL most of next week to answer questions in the context of specific cases that can’t be discussed publicly. You can also contact him directly at tpost@stackoverflow.com.

Juan-at-large: New resources for the network!

In case you missed his post, Juan Garza is going to be transitioning from managing the international Stack Overflow sites to leading a small team tasked just with helping the Stack Exchange network stay healthy and grow.

Juan comes from an ‘old school’ community management background, where he helped companies build communities around topics from the ground up, and all he had to work with was his keyboard and some yucky forum software. He’s done an amazing job with helping our international sites take root, and we’re excited to reinvest his talents back into the entire network.

There will be more from Juan in the coming weeks, we’ll make sure that moderators stay up-to-date on any new initiatives through meta and this newsletter.

Last call to update your contact email address.

In the last newsletter, we asked that everyone take a moment to make sure the email address we have on file to send you mail is actually a valid email address that you check semi-regularly.

We’d like to send our thanks to everyone that made updates, you’re awesome!

We’re going to be sending out more invitational things that are just for moderators (including private links to participate in the new engagement survey) as early as the end of next week. If you have not already done so, please make sure your information is up-to-date.