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