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Is there a way as a moderator to see a list of site changes since you last moderated?

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To clarify, are you looking for a list of all posts added/edited since the moderator last logged on? Or something else? – Robert Cartaino♦ Mar 13 at 22:36
A recent changes list might be enough - but it needs to list everything in chronological order - whether it's question, comment, answer, tag, or user related. A list of recent questions isn't enough to make moderation easier because you also want to check new answers and comments on old questions. – Mike Mar 14 at 11:29
A typical problem: The Activity tab lists a question as having been modified 18 hours ago. Look at the question, and nothing is listed as so recent. Look at tags recently created etc. and again no show. So now I have a very puzzled moderator. – Mike Mar 14 at 12:00
If you want to link to a specific instance on your site where "recent activity" seems to be wrong, I'm sure we can trouble-shoot it. Perhaps its only a bit of confusion about the "Community" user bumping older questions: (meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4398/…). – Robert Cartaino♦ Mar 14 at 23:51

1 Answer

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StackExchange has shown to be an effective model for a much broader range of sites than its original target audience (i.e. Q&A sites with professional interests). There is almost certainly a need to extend the functionality to allow users to follow everything that happens in the system (for example, to provide reliable, comprehensive technical support).

Stack Overflow (the original site from which StackExchange is derived) had a well-defined purpose: to compile an archive of questions with the best possible answers thoroughly vetted by a community of experts. The primary use case of Stack Overflow was that people using search engines (like Google) would find the best possible answers to narrow technical questions on Stack Overflow. That is in contrast to traditional discussion forums where you visit daily to chit-chat, branch existing conversations into new threads, and follow the newest content added daily.

But the Stack Exchange audience has extended (very successfully) into a much wider scope than pure Q&A. Technical support, bug reporting, customer feedback, community building, to name a few. There are plenty of methods to provide a "chronological view" and to help users track new posts. The challenge is to extend the existing model to integrate these new features without creating "feature bloat" or disrupting the balance of "information exchange" tools that make these sites work.

As for your concerns about moderation, I don't believe your request applies specifically to Moderators, per se. At the very core of the design, Stack Exchange is a community-moderated site. The users who are specifically appointed as "Diamond Moderators ♦" are there to handle the "human exception" -- that rare case where community self-moderation fails (for technical or social reasons) -- to maintain that human touch. The issue with relying on appointed Moderators to "watch over everything" is that they don't scale. If you create a system where a few people need to watch over everything, then the very premise of Stack Exchange has failed.

(Again, I am not talking about a technical support scenario where a business wants to see every post)

Back to Your Question

With the current tools, I have been reasonably successful at following all the new posts on this site. My techniques aren't all-encompassing and probably would not scale to a larger system but I've been pretty happy with them.

In the 'question' view, I switch to the 'active' tab. The setting is sticky so I always see the latest posts (both questions and answers) at the top of the question summary. When viewing a question, I switch to the 'newest' tab. Again, it's a sticky setting so I always see the most recent posts on the top.

Every so often, I click on the user notification icon (the envelope alt text next to your name at the top). It tells me how many votes I am getting on my posts. It tells me of any new answers to my questions. It shows any new comments to my posts and lets me know if there are any edits to my posts.

It's not a perfect solution:

  • Sometimes I have to search a bit to find recently edited posts. That's not generally too difficult.
  • It doesn't let me track new tags. There's a 'questions with newly created tags' in the moderator tools.
  • It doesn't track new comments. I don't see a need to do this, personally. Comments are supposed to be "meta" to a specific post. If you are not the author of the post (or a fellow commenter) the comments probably don't concern you. Community moderation should take care of "offensive" comments and the new notification tools being migrated from Stack Overflow will notify you of comments that are addressed to you. But maybe a "chronological view" would incorporate new comments in some fashion.
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 Thanks for such a thoughtful response. We chose to pilot Stack Exchange on a schools mathematics site because we want a more hands-off, less didactic approach. We like that aspect a lot, but we're not comfortable with the idea that there is going to be one best answer to a question. A best answer in our case would be one that suggests good approaches to a problem without saying 'The answer is 42'. The site is young, and we need to moderate to engender this approach in a young community that loves to rush to conclusions. PS Part of our confusion is that we don't believe the modification times – Mike Mar 14 at 19:57
I don't know the specifics of your site but I don't agree that StackExchange promotes the idea of "one best answer." StackExchange works more along the lines of "deliberative assembly" where each participant weighs in with a carefully-thought-out response and people vote on each entry based on its merits. You can read more here (meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/36818#36828). There is the concept of "accepted answer." It's the post that best helped the author but it's not supposed to imply any suggestion of "best." You might want to simply want to ignore that feature, if you can. – Robert Cartaino♦ Mar 14 at 23:59

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