I see the Community user on the user page. It seems to edit posts sometimes. What is it?
And why has it downvoted over 1800 times?
1 Answer
Who is the "Community" User?
It is an automated user agent, not a real person. Its profile explains:
Hi, I'm not really a person.
I'm a background process that helps keep this site clean!
I do things like
- Randomly poke old unanswered questions* every hour so they get some attention
- Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them
- Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted
- Own suggested edits from anonymous users
- Remove abandoned questions
* Questions with at least 30 days of no activity, at least one answer scoring zero, and no answers scoring above that. Questions that are locked or closed will not be bumped. The Community User will only bump a maximum of one question per hour.
Randomly poking old unanswered questions might make its name appear as the last editor of a question, but only in some overviews, not in the question itself:
The reason why it has so many downvotes is because it owns all of the downvotes that are being cast automatically when a post is flagged as spam or rude/abusive.
It also:
- Owns tag wikis, privilege wikis, FAQ/about wikis, and election wikis.
- Rejects suggested edits which may involve edit conflicts.
- Approves or rejects a suggested edit when a reviewer chooses to submit their own edit.
- Flags smelly stuff for moderators and/or reviewers.
- Owns certain meta posts, including site evaluation and election meta posts.
- Owns bounties from deleted users.
- Owns up/down votes from very active deleted users.
- Owns accept votes from deleted users.
- Locks and deletes spam/offensive posts.
- Locks migrated posts and rejected migrations.
- Owns the close vote when an asker agrees with a pending duplicate close vote.
- Protects questions if the question has enough deleted answers or enough answers by low-reputation users.