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Currently, moderators cannot view anything in the "Votes" tab of the profile of other users.

Quite sensibly, we can't view individual up/down votes at all. However, the other four tabs (Deletion, Undelete, Closure, Reopen) are another matter. Moderators can see these votes when looking at a post that they've been cast on, but there is no way to view a list of them.

This causes two main problems:

  • When users decide to rage-quit and delete or destroy as much content as they can, we're entirely reliant on autoflags to find out what they did. If they don't cross the autoflag threshold, we can't see it. The only way to know is to check every deleted post and see when they deleted it. Additionally, even when the autoflag does work, we can't check if anything else wasn't caught.
  • We have no way to find patterns of misuse1 of close and delete votes on other people's content. While we can see individual "misused" votes, we have no way to see if it's a one-off (not a big deal) or a persistent pattern that may warrant action. This means that we can only find the most extreme cases where the misuse is so widespread that a moderator notices the user's name coming up repeatedly, or when a user is able to notice a number of misused votes on questions fitting a certain pattern (a tag, linked from meta, etc.) and flag enough questions to be individually checked to establish a pattern warranting moderator action.

Given that these votes are not confidential in any meaningful sense (moderators can always see them on posts, as can all users once they take effect), moderators should be able to view Deletion/Undelete/Closure/Reopen votes on the votes tab of a user's profile.

1 By misuse, I mean consistent, unjustified votes. "Needs more focus" for simple, focused questions, "Seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more" for questions that don't do that (we had one user do this repeatedly on a large number of questions in a tag), "General computing" for IDE questions, etc.

For delete votes, we're more looking for patterns, often along the lines of using them as a "super downvote." Voting to delete the answers on nearly every question they close (I suspect at least one user of doing this, but can't prove it because of this), voting to delete nearly every closed question asked about on Meta (same), immediately voting to delete every Meta question they close without allowing time to edit (we've had to tell someone to stop doing this).

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  • 5
    I would note that we might need to go beyond just a mere close/delete history. We've had gold badge holders "war" with one another with close/reopen/delete votes (hence this request about delete limits). At least on SO, we need the ability to search by action taken against a user as well. The only way to get that information at present is to ask a CM. It's not cumbersome... yet. I'd gladly accept this as a first step, though.
    – Machavity
    Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 13:12
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    What is your definition of a "misused" close vote? The automated system doesn't seem to take into account the behavior of the poster when looking at the behavior of the voter. I had some votes reversed (I think) when someone posted a slew very low quality questions in a short period of time. I read each one and decided to DV them. If someone consistently posts off-topic questions, I'm going to vote to close them and it's going to look like I'm picking on that person when in fact I'm voting based on content. Mods need a better summary than what is on the profile votes tab IMO.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 16:29
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    @ColleenV I added some examples of what I mean. While I could imagine cases where we'd have an issue with someone consistently voting to close a particular person's posts, that would only ever be if the close votes were also unjustified, which we'd need to check manually. The problem is that we have no visibility at all, so we have no idea if people are doing this or not. Having more context on voting patterns is virtually always going to lead to better reasoning about them.
    – Ryan M
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 5:20
  • The close votes tab on the votes page in the user profile just shows recent closure votes. It doesn't indicate which closure reason was cast. It might help if the type of closure vote was included on that page: both for the ability to see patterns of misuse for a particular type of closure vote, but also for normal users to be able to see what close reason they used on a particular post. Occasionally I can't remember what type of closure reason I used on a particular question and if the question was closed (or closed and reopened) there's currently no way to check.
    – Henry Ecker
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 12:19
  • My point is simply that you don't just need visibility, you need the information presented in a way that is useful for detecting abuse. I don't think mods should be in the business of second guessing people's close votes. You may not like the reason someone chose, or agree that the question should be closed, but it's their vote. I can see a need for better tools to understand the interactions between two users to prevent harassment, and that tool should include close and delete votes.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 12:28
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    @ColleenV Close votes aren't like up/down votes, in that close votes have specific reasons attached. "Good" or "bad" is subjective, and so we don't police up/down voting outside of targeted voting. With close votes, we can assess whether any reasonable person could believe the reasoning applies, or if they're just using it as a "super downvote." Someone can cast 50 complete nonsense close votes a day, clog up the already overflowing close-vote queue, and there is nothing we can currently do to stop that harm, even if every single review is resolved as "Leave Open."
    – Ryan M
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 14:41
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    At the scale of Stack Overflow, a few people using their privileges in a way that wildly diverges from community consensus on how they should be used can cause a real problem. At least if they were casting flags, they'd have some chance of getting flag banned. Users with gold tag badges can simply close questions unilaterally, if they cast duplicate votes (yes, this gets misused). And it only takes three users working together with 3k rep and their own view of how things should work to cause a pretty significant problem. This isn't harassment, it's just misuse of the system.
    – Ryan M
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 14:41
  • It is fairly common for people to mistakenly think quashing outliers improves consensus. It doesn't. It just gives the illusion of consensus. The SE system is robust enough to handle a few outliers. We don't need volunteer mods punishing volunteer users for not conforming closely enough to the community. What harm are you preventing exactly? I understand the impulse to try to reign in 'malicious' voters, but it's misguided. Your job is not to make people vote the right way. If they are harassing another user then you're obligated to step in. Otherwise, ignore it.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 15:01
  • If one person using their privileges according to the rules of the system can completely disrupt a site, then we need to find a fix for the system, not encourage people to force their opinion of reasonableness on others. Pretty much anything a user can do can be undone. If someone is maliciously disrupting the site, that disruption should be obvious enough that being able to see their votes is just confirmation. There shouldn't be a lot of calculating of whether this vote or that vote wasn't reasonable.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 15:13
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    "Pretty much anything a user can do can be undone." I think part of Ryan's point is that, while this is true, mods can't currently see what "was done" to be able to undo it.
    – Henry Ecker
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 16:28
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    @ColleenV What SO moderation changes here are the large number of gold badges. When one person can close a question (especially when another person has answered it), it can sometimes look like a form of targeted action. We have large sub-communities where highly active users are bumping against each other in this way. Validating claims of targeting isn't something we have tooling for. If you want to know what this looks like in practice, here you go
    – Machavity
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 16:33
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    @ColleenV "The SE system is robust enough to handle a few outliers." While this is true on smaller sites, it's really not true at Stack Overflow's scale. We have many, many active close voters. The close vote threshold is a tiny fraction of that, and many of them have gold badges. For every question asked per day on your most active site, we have 200. Even large-scale abuse can get lost in the noise, and moderators/curators cannot be everywhere at once like they can on a smaller site. We have 500 custom flags pending reporting all sorts of abuse. We really need more/better tooling here.
    – Ryan M
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 16:36
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    Even if they're not actually managing to close anything, they're creating a huge mess for others to clean up, requiring disproportionate amounts of effort from volunteers. One close voter can cast 50 close votes per day. That's creating at least 150 review tasks—almost four people doing the maximum number of reviews—in a queue that already allows hundreds of reviews to age out without completion every day. That's a huge waste of everyone's time and is preventing questions that actually need closure from being reviewed.
    – Ryan M
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 17:07
  • I may have given y'all the impression I'm opposed to this... I'm not. I even upvoted it. I do get a little worried by the idea that mods should be wading through someone's close votes and deciding if they're valid. All I hope to accomplish here is to make y'all articulate the problem you're trying to solve and think about how you intend to use your power. If one person can follow the rules and significantly disrupt SO, that is not a problem with humans having too little information to make a judgement call. That's a problem with the system not scaling properly.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 18:20
  • Yeah, I do think SO is too big and should be busted up into smaller communities, so I'm biased. I think that the tooling for mods of all SE sites is woefully inadequate. I also think that SE does not give users enough feedback on how well they are "fitting in" with their community. I don't know how often my votes are out of line with what other people think. I don't know how many times my comments have been flagged as rude, etc. Without that feedback, too much responsibility for keeping the community healthy falls on mods.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 18:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
37

We added the permissions for moderators to see close/reopen/delete/undelete votes of other users by going to their user activity page > [Votes] subtab > [All] tab. We hope it will help you detect the different cases of misuse more efficiently.

Moderator votes page view

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    Just to be certain, "Upvote", "Downvote" tabs are not included, right?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 12:23
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    yes - moderators have no option and no rights to see upvotes and downvotes, only the aformentioned four types.
    – marrados StaffMod
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 12:26
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    Awesome, any improvement in the mod tools greatly helps SE as whole.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 12:28
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    An excellent codebase change. Thank you very much marrados and SE staff in general. More addition of long-requested features, please :-)
    – TylerH
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 13:44
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    @ShadowTheKidWizard This is what the moderator view looks like. FWIW, we've never had a Votes tab of any kind before this.
    – Machavity
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 13:49
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    @marrados Feature Request: when you open the votes tab (i.e. /users/1234/someusername?tab=votes) please default to the All tab. Once you've clicked on a tab it will remember it (I guess it's a profile setting or cookie) but I went to a user's votes profile and it confusingly showed 0 votes initially (when I know they have a lot of votes to show). Not a big deal but possibly a small quality of life improvement
    – Machavity
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 13:59
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    @Machavity nice, and what you get when visiting this URL? (checking server side defense as well.)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 14:03
  • @ShadowTheKidWizard If I'm a mere mortal (as I am on MSE), I get a 404. If I go to your SO profile it shows me a 0 votes page, the same as the screenshot I added previously
    – Machavity
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 14:06
  • @Machavity nice, I double checked my 5,072 upvotes are still there. :P
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 14:17
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    @machiavity we had a discussion on what should be shown for moderators in such cases - 404 vs no results and in the end we went with showing no results. Yes, the site remembers your last filter. Defaulting to "All" tab is a good suggestion - at this moment we didn't change the current behavior (filter is remembered) as it may be unintuitive that in this case the page acts differently than in other cases. Another option would be to switch to default only if an option is chosen where the user has no permission - but that ties back to the first point.
    – marrados StaffMod
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 15:25
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I support this feature request, but a small part of it is already visible, even publicly, via the Data Explorer. It's possible to query the database for successful close votes by a specific user, provided the question hasn't been deleted in the meantime. This query shows all the (non-deleted) questions I've closed here:

enter image description here

(FWIW, that's only 25% of all my close votes. So many lost souls here ...)

You could fork the query for additional data (tags, targeted users) or filtering.

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