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.

Asking Days Badges Implemented

We’ve added new badges (Curious, Inquisitive, Socratic) to all sites on the network in order to help promote healthy question asking behavior. These badges are awarded to users who have a history of asking well-received questions, and who ask such questions on a number of days based on the tier of badge in question. The design of the badge requirements are meant to avoid abusive attempts to gain the badge. Nevertheless, it would be a good idea to keep an eye out for poor question asking behavior and provide guidance to users as appropriate, especially in the first few weeks of the badge’s release. If you have feedback to provide or bugs to report about the new badges, your local Meta is always open.

Read more → Asking Days Badges 

New Moderator-Only Help Center Articles for Moderator Tools

A new section has been added to the Help Center, designed for moderators to find in-depth information about the tools that they wield and guidelines of enforcement without needing to leave the comfort of their home site. These can be found by checking the Help Center under the bottommost heading, “Moderator Abilities”. These pages are only visible to moderators, and currently are not indexed by search, requiring the aforementioned navigation. As they are intended for moderator eyes only, please do not share the contents of these pages in public.

At current, there are only two articles present, but future articles will populate this section soon enough, detailing each of the various tools at your disposal, the purposes of each of the tools, and how best to use them to keep order on your sites. Articles which detail new content or tools that are too sensitive may be announced in the moderator inbox directly, as opposed to the public moderator newsletter. We hope that going forward, this will be a great reference for moderators about the tools they use every day. If you see an article that seems to be missing specific content, let us know via the Contact Us form found at the bottom of every page.

Check out the directory → [your-site-address]/help/mods 

Chat Annotation and Suspension History Implemented

It is now possible to annotate users in chat directly, as well as view a history of moderator incidents with a chat user. Similar to annotations on the main site, this will allow you to keep a track record of a particular chat user, both for your own benefit and for that of other moderators. As all network moderators operate simultaneously across the entirety of chat.stackexchange.com, this should help in finding context regarding a user when an incident arises in chat. Additionally, we have implemented a full viewable history for moderators with regards to chat suspensions for a user, including information on how the suspension was issued.

New annotations can be made via the “moderator tools” button on the chat profile. The history of a user’s suspensions and annotations can be viewed from the user info popup, displayed as a number of annotations/suspensions, or from the chat profile, displayed as a large number in the top corner.

Read more → Moderator annotations for chat users 

Improved Excerpts for Initiating Moderator Messages to Display Template

Since the initial contact for a moderator message is identical for all forms of moderator messages, we have changed the excerpt shown in the moderator diamond inbox to instead specify the template that was used. This will help provide context so that you can determine the nature of the message before clicking on the link. If the template was edited before sending, this will also be indicated. Replies to moderator messages, both to and from the user, will continue to show a short excerpt from the text featured in the reply. 

Newsletter URL Updated to stackmod.blog

We’re moving the newsletter from its current home at http://moderator.stackexchange.com over to http://stackmod.blog, in order to free up the former URL. All existing links on the network have been converted to point at the new address, and all future links will likewise use the new URL. Please be sure to update any bookmarks you may have that point to the original address.

Enhanced Duplicate Closure for Tag Top Users

We have increased the ability for the top users in tags to be able to curate duplicate questions on their site. A user who has the gold tag badge for a tag, which requires at least 1000 score across 200 answers, can mark questions within their tag as duplicates using a single vote, bypassing the normal 5 vote requirement similar to a moderator. The question must have had the tag in its original revision, and the target duplicate must have an answer. These users may also reopen questions within their tag that are marked duplicate, be it that the question shouldn’t have been closed, or that there is a more appropriate or complete question that should be pointed to instead. When such a top user closes a question, a gold badge icon will be displayed after their name in the close reason message.

This change is mostly designed for the larger sites who have tangled trains of duplicates, allowing the main participants in the heftier tags to better manage where all the duplicates are pointing. The votes are still part of the normal closure process, abiding by the same rules of only one vote per person per direction, and allowing the votes to be contested by the rest of the community. Should a question undergo at least two cycles of closure and reopening while a top user is involved, a moderator attention flag will be generated called “Contested duplicate question”, signalling that a moderator should step in and investigate the question.

  Read more → Increase close vote weight for gold tag badge holders

Anti-Recidivism System Added

We’ve added some new systems that deal with users who request deletion in order to evade restrictions that are placed on their accounts at the time of deletion. We log data on such accounts at time of deletion, which is then referenced should a new account from the same individual be created. If the user was suspended at the time of deletion, then the new account will inherit the remainder of the original suspension. If the user was blocked from posting questions at the time of deletion, then the recreated account will be restricted to posting only one question per week until the quality of their contributions is demonstrated. Both cases of these can be found in the moderator-accessible user history of the new account, and you can see whether a user is restricted in question frequency by looking near the question and answer block status on the user’s profile page.

No More Community Wiki Auto-Conversion

We have removed all of the formerly existing triggers that automatically converted a post to Community Wiki. In their place, there are now flags for moderator attention that are raised automatically by the system. These flags will be raised when an author makes over 10 edits to their post, when 10 users edit a single post, when a question received 10 answers within a week, and when a question receives 30 answers. Note that these last two are site-specific and some sites that have higher answer count expectations will have these thresholds increased.

The removal of the automatic community wiki was not meant as a means to shift this from being automatic to “review for community wiki”. Rather, our goal is to end the idea of community wiki as a punitive tool. These flags, like the rest of the automatic flags, are warning signs meant to incite investigation. A question that attracts many answers may need some cleanup in the answers, be it the incoming or the existing. An editor may need to be contacted, via comment or mod message, depending on how abusive their edits are. You may most often not have to do anything when the flags come up.

Putting the Community back in Wiki discusses our plans and idealogy in greater detail, but community wiki is something that really should be born from community decision – as the name implies. It exists not as a tool to police the potential traffic a post may get compared to its alleged value, or to prevent abuse. It is a tool meant for collaboration between users in a comfortable ease of access beyond what suggested edits can already enable. Users who see a post that is more geared for people working together, be it short term or long term, they should start a discussion on the merits of conversion – ideally including the individual who owns the post in question. While the new flags are geared towards identifying system abuse scenarios, they will occasionally point out a question that may warrant such a discussion. What they will never point at, is a post that you will need to directly and immediately apply community wiki on. 

What Meta Stack Exchange Means for You

As, fittingly, announced at Announcing The Launch Of Meta Stack Exchange, we have now split off the “Network-wide” meta from Meta Stack Overflow, to the new Meta Stack Exchange. With the establishment of a more proper home for network-wide issues, how does it affect you as a moderator? Very little. Feel free to drop by the site as you feel comfortable, but we do not intend Meta Stack Exchange as a place that you should be constantly monitoring.

Your own sites will remain your main home and place of operations. Important discussions on Meta Stack Exchange will be broadcast to the Community Bulletin of all sites, allowing you to keep up to date similar to this newsletter. On the flip side of the equation, the guidelines regarding migrating posts from a child meta to Meta Stack Exchange remain the same as with Meta Stack Overflow – if you think that the post is ready and will benefit from the scrutiny of the network-wide community, it should be moved. Otherwise, no matter the scope of the subject being discussed, it should stick around on the child meta – there it will not only allow site specific concerns and applications be addressed, but it remains in the comfort zone of the people discussing it. We will continue to patrol child metas for bugs, support, and feature-request as before, so they will not receive different levels of attention than if asked on Meta Stack Exchange. 

10k Flag Queue has been Removed

We have removed the 10k flag queue. Now, Not an Answer flags will generate review tasks in the Low Quality review queue, same as Very Low Quality flags do. These flags will appear simultaneously in the moderator flag queue – if either flag is cleared in one queue, it will be immediately removed from the other. To aid in the review efforts, we’ve now added indicators to the top bar for review tasks on the site, allowing users with the access to moderator tools privilege to quickly observe the state of the review queue. Should the flags persist in either queue for over a day, step in to handle them.

If enough users review a post but do not come to a consensus on the appropriate (in)action, the original flag will be dismissed and a new flag, “disputed low quality review (auto)”, will be generated instead. This is a moderator-only flag, signalling that a moderator should look at the situation and decide the final course of action.

  Read more → Let’s get rid of the 10K flag queue 

Giving Guidance with Review Bans

We’ve added better feedback to the review queue ban system. Users who trigger an automatic ban from failing audits will be pointed to the audits that they failed. For cases outside of audits (approval of egregious spam, “robo-reviewing”, etc.), moderators now have the ability to provide an optional comment when applying a manual ban, including a link to any particular reviews relevant to the ban. When leaving a comment, please remember to be as thorough and helpful as possible. The reviewer will be able to see these messages when they visit the review queue, in lieu of the former message that merely explained that they were barred. A moderator can find past review-ban messages for a given user in their user history.

  Read more → Could we make the review-banned-by-a-mod notice say something more descriptive? 

Auto-Protection and Protection Privilege Changes

We’ve made a couple changes to the protection system. A question that receives over a certain threshold of answers by users under 10 reputation, within 24 hours, will become automatically protected. The default threshold is 5, though some sites have increased or decreased limits in accordance to the nature of the site. This trigger will run alongside the existing trigger that happens when at least 3 answers from users under 10 reputation have been deleted. You can read up more on the site-specific adjustments at Auto-protect questions that get more than N answers from new users in a 24-hour period.

To accommodate the increased frequency of automatic protection, we have removed the original restriction that only allowed community members to remove protection that was set by that individual. Now, anyone who has the protection privilege (15,000 reputation on graduated sites, 3,500 reputation on beta sites) can act to remove protection on any protected question, manual or automatic. This should allow the community to act on these situations, rather than leaving it solely on the moderator’s shoulders to fix. 

Improved Annotation and Moderator Message Tracking

We’ve addressed a number of inconsistencies with how annotations and moderator messages are reported on user profiles. When viewing the user history page, via the mod menu or by the numeric indicator labelled “total annotations”, the top section will now display all moderator records relating to the user – all annotations as well as all moderator messages. Each entry will additionally note whether it was an annotation, a normal moderator message, or a moderator message with an associated suspension. We’ve also fixed the aforementioned numeric display; this number will now accurately reflect the number of moderator records stored in this top section.

  Read more → Moderator messages without suspension don’t appear under “Annotations” in the user history

New Moderator Inbox Announcements

We’re pleased to announce that we now have the ability to push announcements to moderators across the network via the Moderator Inbox in the top bar. These will contain a quick tagline summarizing the change, and a link that can be followed. With this implemented, we hope to keep the moderator teams informed of big discussions and changes to the network while they are actively on their own sites, rather than reaching out via external services or requiring moderators to check in to Meta Stack Overflow. The announcement will show up as an orange diamond rather than the typical blue one, to inform you of the nature as a global announcement.

We’ll use these announcements as an extension of the moderator newsletter. We will broadcast when there are new changes or upgrades to the tools you use every day, as well as keep you up-to-date on important changes for the whole network. The end-of-month summary emails will still be sent, reiterating all of the changes done over the month. We see this as a big step towards keeping everyone in-the-loop.

Individual Moderator Flag Handling

Moderators are now able to provide separate resolutions for flags on the same post. When viewing a post with several flags, you can click on the individual flags in order to generate a pop-up for handling that specific flag. This will allow you to deal with situations where some flags are valid and others not, or instances where different manners of guidance must be given. This will also enable you to handle disputed flags by directly marking the appropriate flags as helpful or declined. Flags can still be handled on a post-by-post basis using the regular UI. You can handle full posts when the flags are all aligned to each other, and can granularize things when the situation calls for it.

Site Switcher Now Configurable

The site-switcher on the far left of the universal top bar can now be configured to display a custom list of sites. You can choose which sites to add, as well as the order in which they are displayed, as you see fit. Meta sites can be added as well as main sites, allowing you the ability to reach one site’s meta directly from any other site. The number of sites is also not limited, allowing you to have a comfortable mix and organization of all sites that interest you, including those that you moderate.

Flag Privilege Suspension Implemented

We’ve now implemented visible warnings for users whose flagging privileges are blocked or in danger of being blocked. Whenever a user attempts to flag a post, they will be presented one of three different warning notices if they have had flags declined recently. If a user has had a flag just declined while having cast fewer than 10 flags, or if they have had at least 10% of their flags declined while having cast 10 or more flags, they will receive a warning message. Users who have had at least 25% of their flags declined amongst over 10 flags cast will have their flagging privileges temporarily revoked. All of these checks are performed over a rolling 7 day period.

  Read more → Allow recovery from flag hell ban

Election Comment Flags Disabled

We have disabled the ability for users to flag comments on election nominations, due to various conflicts in the election system and the flag UI. The Community Team will be paying extra attention to comments in order to cut out on noise and abusive commentary. Moderators are encouraged to use their best judgement to remove spam and outright offensive comments. If a nomination thread begins getting out of hand, feel free to contact the community team.

Helpful Flag Allows Comments

It is now possible to provide commentary with helpful flags, similar to handling declined flags. Providing a comment for a helpful flag is not required when handling the flag. This avenue exists to provide instruction to users who flagged a post that did need attention but the reasoning behind the flagging was off-mark, or other situations where additional guidance would be helpful in the context of the flag. As with declined flags, there is currently no overt notification that a comment was given to a helpful flag.

Analytics UI Updated

A number of quality-of-life changes have been added to the moderator analytics tools for you to use. Set time periods such as “the last month”, “the last 3 months”, and “the last year” have been added as quick links under the date range selection. Furthermore, the X axis on the graphs can be broken down into a weekly or monthly basis in addition to the default daily basis. Finally, we’ve grouped together various similar graphs such as Questions and Answers into singular graphs, and the contents of these graphs can be toggled as a set of checkboxes above the graph.

Check it out from the page top ‘mod’ link → ‘analytics’

User Deletions now Delayed

We’ve added an automated queue to handle user deletions in the scenario that a user requests manual deletion, as illustrated at Delay user requests for account deletion by 24 hours. When a moderator deletes a user and selects the “This user requested deletion while logged into the site” reason, it will place the user’s account into the queue for deletion 24 hours later. The user or a moderator may, at any time before 24 hours pass, elect to cancel the deletion via a large red banner at the top of the user’s profile page. The events of entering the queue and cancelling will be logged in the user’s history appropriately.

This change will not alter the normal protocol, as outlined in the Help Center, which requires the user to confirm their ownership of the account and the intent for deletion. However, this will allow for a much smoother system for handling deletions, as well as enable normal users to rescind their deletion requests without moderator intervention.

Universal Stack Exchange Top Bar

We have rolled out a new universal top bar for the entire Stack Exchange Network. Reputation and badge notifications update in real-time and show consolidated events from across the network. Additionally, moderators see some new functionality: moderator-relevant notifications are stored in a separate inbox that appears only on the site(s) you moderate. We may be expanding moderator functionality in the future to include additional information that is relevant to the moderator teams.

  Read more on the features of the top bar as a whole → A New Top Bar for Stack Exchange

Upcoming Meta Stack Exchange Splitting from Meta Stack Overflow

We are finally progressing towards our long hinted-at separation of a general network-wide meta site from Meta Stack Overflow. While nothing has been implemented yet, you can read up on how we plan to execute this change and how the site will be managed at Stack Overflow is getting a place of its own.

Question and Answer Block Visibility

Moderators can view on a user’s profile whether or not that user is blocked from posting questions and/or answers. A simple yes or no will indicate their current status. In the event that a blocked user has attempted to post, the last such timestamp will also be included. Note that only the answer block is enabled network-wide, to take care of spammers. The question block is only enabled on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, Mathematics, and Programmers. On other sites, it will list the asking block as “disabled” appropriately.

Spam and Offensive Automunging

When a post is deleted by accumulating enough spam and/or offensive flags, the post’s contents will now be automatically hidden and replaced with the following text.

This answer was marked as spam or offensive and is therefore not shown – you can see the revision history for details

Note that moderators will not see this message and instead will continue to see the post in its latest state. As such, do not feel obligated to personally censor naughtiness that gets flagged, and be sure to use these flags yourself when handling these kinds of posts.

Reopen Queue Now Includes Popular Closed Questions

We have added new a trigger for the reopen queue. Questions with relatively high scores (on the question or its answers,) and those with extremely high views per month are now added to the queue to ensure that posts whose value to the community may be significant get an opportunity for get broader review and potential improvement.

Additionally, we’ve widened the scope of edits that push questions into the queue to include users who haven’t flagged or voted to close the question. This way, users who find a question that they can patch up, but lack the ability to vote themselves, can help push the question into the eyes of those who can.

    Read more → Lots of questions in the reopen queue

Clarified Convert-to-Comment Guidance

We have modified our guidance for the moderator tool for converting answers to comments, as follows:

Answers should be converted to comments when they do not attempt to answer the question. A comment should ask for more information or suggest improvements to the post; poor or incomplete answers should simply be downvoted or improved.

Conversion is a tool meant for preserving posts meant for deletion that have value as comments. This new wording is intended to make that purpose clearer and less confusing.

Revamped Moderator Message UI

Moderator messages now include links to user profiles of the sender and recipient (when the recipient is not the moderators as a whole) in a new header preceding the message. Timestamps for when the message was sent, and when the recipient read the message, are also included in this header for easier organization.

Search for Duplicate Posts

Duplicates can now be filtered in searches using the phrase duplicate: in the search string. This was designed to re-enable the ability to avoid or isolate duplicates during search, which was lost when we overhauled the close system and how the duplicate message is relayed. As with similar search functions: “yes”, “true”, or “1” will yield only duplicates while “no”, “false”, or “0” will yield all results that are not duplicates.

Moderator Timeline View

Moderators now have access to a ‘timeline’ view on posts which lists activities that have happened to the post in chronological order. The timeline includes edits (suggested and otherwise), deletions, migrations, comments posted, flags, close votes, entries into the review queue, and answers posted (when looking at a question).This new view is designed to help unravel the events of a post: who was involved in the action, when it happened, and the hows and whys of the action’s resolution. You can access this timeline on any post as follows.

    On any post → ‘mod’ » ‘actions’ » ‘timeline’

On any post which has had flags or deleted comments, you’ll also be able to find a link to the timeline on the left side margin.

About Me History Tracking

We added an edit history to the ‘about me’ section of user profiles. Although rare, there are occasions when a moderator must intervene to edit a user’s profile (for instance, to remove extremely abusive language). We do not track the day-to-day changes from users, but when a moderator is forced to make a change to a user profile, it is useful to know what actions were taken. These entries can be found in the user’s history, and link to the associated revision history.

    From a user’s profile page → ‘mod’ » ‘info’ » ‘history’

Deletion and Destruction Reasons

Deletion and destruction now have reasons stored for record-keeping. When deleting a user, a moderator is required to select a pre-established reason (such as the deletion being requested by the user), as well as fill in details regarding specifics that led to a case. Destruction similarly requires the moderator to select a reason, though the free-form field is optional in this case.

In hand with this, moderators are now capable of viewing deleted user entries when viewing the profile of a deleted user. These logs will include background on the deletion event as well as all of the details provided by the deleting moderator as described in the earlier paragraph. Delete logs are only available for users deleted starting a few months ago – earlier entries will appropriately note the lack of a log entry.