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We have some employee accounts that are erroneously listed as "moderators" on our meta site. This has caused confusion multiple times.

These accounts have no contributions and only a handful of votes. An "easy" way to get them removed from the moderator list would be to simply destroy the meta account. It's trivial to recreate those accounts in the future, should that be desired by either.

But... there is something that feels horribly wrong about destroying multiple accounts belonging to Stack Exchange employees.

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    Yeah, looks like the team gave up on fixing this bug. But I'm pretty sure it's useless, those wrong accounts will keep appearing no matter how many times you'll delete them.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 12:43
  • @ShadowWizard only if either recreates their meta account though, right?
    – enderland
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 12:44
  • On second thought, meta account is created "on the fly" whenever someone is trying to visit it and it does not exist. Since the database itself has wrong data for those employees, marking them as moderators on meta sites, this will just keep happening whenever someone will visit their meta profile i.e. click "meta user" in their main profile.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 12:55
  • @enderland, this should be a caching issue with the is_employee field from the API... Laura had hers turned off when she left SE, but the is_moderator field wasn't turned off. Ping a CM and/or Dev when you get the chance and ask them to clear the cache.
    – Quill
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 13:19
  • @sandwich good point! So guess it's only created when the user himself/herself visits meta for the first time. In such case, deleting the account should be good enough.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 13:24
  • @Quill you mean like this? :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 13:25
  • Destroying employees would probably be a good way to lose your diamond ;-)
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 20:14

1 Answer 1

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No, please don't destroy them. There are some behind-the-scenes things like annotations and such (some of these can also exist at the network level) and I think those would become anonymized - which means we wouldn't be able to tell which (former) employee was working on it.

And, I'm pretty sure you couldn't destroy them - you can't nuke an account with the mod bit flipped - it would just end up in an accounts queue for someone with dev access to review before it was processed by the system.

We're looking at getting the bug fixed, and (I believe) can manually de-diamond these if it shows up again prior to us fixing it.

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    Thing is, it's like the third time it's reported, it just keeps happening and it takes long weeks until someone manually removes them.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 14:10
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    @ShadowWizard I'm pretty sure that's been fixed at least once, I'm making sure it's given a much closer look and (finally) squashed once and for all.
    – user50049
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 15:07
  • Thanks @Adam, it's just one of those bugs which though small, I find annoying.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 15:23

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