Moderator Cheat Sheet

Question

As an alternative to the other FAQ format being fleshed out here on Meta Stack Exchange, I'd like to propose something far more terse that covers the bare essential mechanics of being a moderator.

Feel free to add more questions, but keep them short: this isn't the place to get into complex moderation issues, but for an executive summary of what it is to be a moderator.

To add a new section, create a new answer and link to it in the index below.

Index:

• General moderation and flag handling
• Privileges and abilities
• Contacting users
• Migrations and cross-site communication
• Site scopes and FAQs
• Moderating chat
• Moderating comments
• Tags
• Merging Questions
• Vote abuse (sock puppetry, serial downvotes)

See also:

• Stack Exchange Moderator FAQ

Answer 1

General moderation and flag handling

When should I act unilaterally?

In most situations, you don't want to act without regular users prompting you to action, like via a flag. However, you've been given the ability to act unilaterally to deal with serious issues that need immediate attention. Don't be afraid to act when you see something wrong.

I see community moderation going awry. Can I step in?

Yes! Moderators are exception handlers: if the community is doing something outside the norm, step in and resolve it. For example, if the community is voting to migrate an off-topic question to a site where it is also off-topic, close the question normally; if a new user is being berated in comments, step in and cool the air; and so on.

A user flagged something, but I don't agree with the flag. What can I do?

If the user flagged it in good faith, but you don't think anything should be done, dismiss the flag as "helpful." You can also provide a reason why you are taking no action. (Note: For spam and "rude or abusive" flags, do not mark the flag as helpful, as this may cause the post author to be penalized. Instead, clear the flag, which will mark it as "disputed".)

If the user is flagging in bad faith (e.g. revenge flagging) or you believe the flag is incorrect, dismiss the flag as "declined" and select a reason why.

Note: most flags are done in good faith. When in doubt, dismiss the flag as "helpful".

There's a flag or a meta-discussion post that I don't know how to handle. Help!

You're never alone when handling moderation issues. If you need help dealing with something, you have several options:

• Talk to your fellow site moderators about the issue in a private chat room.
• Reach out to moderators on other sites by hopping into Teachers' Lounge, the network-wide, mod-only chat room.
  • Note: If you can't access the Teachers' Lounge, check that your chat profile parent is the site where you have your diamond. See Why don't I have access to the moderator chat room anymore?
• Contact the Stack Exchange Community Team (the "contact community team" option in the diamond menu) for help.

Answer 2

Contacting users

Further reading: How do I contact a user privately, as a moderator?

When should I privately contact a user in my moderator capacity?

When there's a serious site-related issue with the user that can't be handled in public (up to and including suspension). Routine moderation problems should be handled in public by leaving a comment, super-pinging a user in chat, or creating a meta-discussion question to discuss the issue.

How do I send a moderator message to a user?

Go to the user's profile, click the "mod" link in the profile toolbar, and select "contact this user privately (includes suspension)".

Keep in mind that if you opt to suspend the user in addition to contacting them, the contact template you select will determine the publicly shown "reason" for the suspension, so if you want a different reason to be shown, pick a different template, delete the canned text, and copy in your own text.

Are moderator messages the only way to contact a user privately for a moderation issue?

No! You can also use a private chat room. Be sure only to give access to yourself, your fellow moderators, the user in question, and—if needed—members of the Stack Exchange community team.

What is super-pinging? How do I use it?

As a moderator, you can send a message to anyone on the network in chat with the use of a super-ping. This message will appear in the user's inbox, even if they've never been to chat.

To use it, begin by typing @@ in a chat room; you'll get a dialog that'll let you search for the user. Alternatively, if you already know the user's ID, you can type @@<ID>@<sitename>.stackexchange.com to super ping them.

A user's ID can be found by navigating to their profile, looking at the profile's URL, and noting the number that appears after /users/.

Answer 3

Migrations and cross-site communication

You don't need permission to migrate questions, and definitely shouldn't be pinging moderators on another site every time you have something that needs migration. When in doubt, don't migrate; if you want to learn more about the scope of another site, read that site's help center and talk to the moderators for clarification.

How can I contact the moderators on another site?

All moderators have access to the Teachers' Lounge, where you can discuss mod-to-mod issues. This is a private room specifically for this purpose and should be considered confidential (i.e. no migrating out or linking to messages inside the room).

When in the Teachers' Lounge, you can use <sitename> mods: <message>, where <sitename> is the site's short name (e.g. softwareengineering, iot, or math), to send a message to all moderators on the site you want to contact. Note that the bot does not recognize edits, so if you put the wrong site or use the wrong syntax, you'll have to start a new message to fix it.

Use this feature sparingly... Relatively few issues are severe enough to ping an entire moderator team about. In most cases, pinging just one moderator will suffice.

There's an off-topic question on my site. Should I migrate it?

The golden rule of migrations is don't migrate crap. If the question is of very low quality, just delete it. If it should also be closed for a different reason, close it for that reason. If you believe the question is off-topic for the original site but is a great fit for another site, check the other site's help center to see if it would be well-received there. When in doubt, just close the question as "off-topic" and leave it alone.

To migrate

On the question: Close -> Off-Topic -> This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network -> Start typing the name

Some points:

• As a moderator, you can migrate to any site in the Stack Exchange network, including all meta sites, and aren't limited to just the five sites normal users can vote for on graduated sites.
• On beta sites and Meta Stack Exchange, moderators are the only ones who can migrate questions.
• Normally, if the destination site does not have any of the question's tags, it will be automatically blocked. However, moderator migrations aren't subject to this rule, and the destination question will get the tag untagged.
• Be sure to check the other site to see if the same question was cross-posted there. As a moderator, your migration will not be automatically blocked if a cross-post exists on the destination site.
• Your migration will be automatically blocked if the author is not permitted to ask questions on the destination site, i.e., if:
  • they're suspended on the destination site
  • they're subject to a question ban or other quality-related rate limit and the migration would cause them to exceed the limit (once every six months for a question ban)
• If the question was previously already migrated to one site and later rejected, migrating it to the same site again will link it with the prior rejected question, instead of creating another new question there.
• Questions that are already closed or marked as duplicate cannot be migrated immediately. Reopen the question first.
• Questions that are older than 60 days cannot be migrated without employee intervention.

I made a mistake in migrating a question! Can I undo it?

Immediately notify a moderator of the destination site to close the destination question. Closing the migrated question on the target site rejects the migration, unless it is closed as a duplicate. This will automatically unlock the question on the source site and reverse most of the effects of migration. (The original question will remain closed, but you can reopen it.)

Answer 4

Merging questions

See also: What is a "merged" question?

When should I merge questions, as opposed to just closing as a duplicate?

When the exact same question gets asked twice and the answers on both are worth preserving, you should merge one into the other. You should only merge if the answers on the question-to-be-merged make perfect sense on the target question.

How do I merge?

First of all, one of the questions must be closed as a duplicate of the other. Pick one, close it. Then go to mod, merge and select the target question. Click merge. The answers from the post will be moved to the other and the question will be auto-locked, with the notice changed from "marked as duplicate" to "merged".

I am not sure if I should vote to close or merge?

Merging should be much more unusual - it's in the mod menu. The answers must make sense on the target question - hence closing as duplicate first. If in doubt, ask.

What else do I need to be aware of?

It may be worth explaining in a comment why you merged - you might also like to comment on posts where users have answered both questions so they can review their answers in light of the merge and possibly combine them.

Answer 5

Vote abuse

What is a serial downvote?

Serial downvotes are where you start to see all of your questions/answers being downvoted - 10, 20 or 30 downvotes. The odd −2 here and there is not serial downvoting.

A user has complained about being serially downvoted. What can I do?

Like any normal user, votes are anonymous to you and you have no power to alter votes.

If a user has been serially downvoted, there is a vote-correction script which examines these patterns and reverses them if it finds such abuse. Users should wait for this to restore their reputation initially. This should resolve most cases of downvote abuse.

If a user contacts you with concerns that they're currently being serially downvoted, ask them to wait 24 hours for the script to run. If they claim to have already waited 24 hours but the votes have not been reversed, use the "Contact community team" tool from their profile.

What is sockpuppetry?

Sockpuppetry is the creation of multiple accounts for the purpose of deception. This can include for targeting votes or for circumventing suspensions.

Are multiple accounts allowed?

Yes. Provided they are not used to abuse the system, e.g. as sockpuppets.

What action should I take?

If the vote correction script does not reverse serial votes, or you notice voting fraud occurring between two or more users, use the "Contact community team" tool from one of the profiles so someone on the community management team can investigate the full voting record, and possibly invalidate the votes between the users or suspend for voting fraud. You can also just delete all users that were clearly created only to upvote another user involved, instead of contacting the community team. Make sure to use the sockpuppet deletion reason.

Can I manually reverse votes?

No. Only Stack Exchange employees can reverse votes.

Answer 6

Moderating comments

How should I handle comments?

Comments are—for the most part—intended to be ephemeral bits of information used to improve the quality of the post they're found on. If they aren't contributing to that, they generally don't belong.

If you see an ongoing discussion or argument in the comments of a post, consider stepping in and asking the parties involved to roll the fruits of the discussion into the post and take the rest of the conversation to chat. Once resolved, consider cleaning up the comment chain.

If you see personal attacks being thrown in comments, or other unacceptable behavior, delete the comments on sight and consider taking additional action, like warning the parties involved.

Can I migrate comments to chat, or another place?

Yes: from the post's "mod" menu, select "move comments to chat" - this will create a new chat room with all the comments posted there as chat messages, and (optionally) delete the existing comments. Users who participated in the comments conversation but do not have enough reputation to chat will be automatically given write access to the chat room. (This write access may take up to an hour to take effect, as chat profiles are refreshed once an hour.)

Bear in mind that this can only be done once - if the discussion continues in comments after you've moved it to chat, your only options are to delete the comments, edit them, comment yourself, or disable all comments (see below).

Also remember, users who are part of a back-and-forth chain of comments are given the option to "continue" the discussion in chat, if all of them have the chat privilege (20 rep). Users using this feature will not prevent you from moving comments to chat, but if you do so, it will create a new chat room instead of adding the comments to the existing chat room.

Note that you cannot move a post's comments to chat if any of them do not have an account on the site (their account is deleted, they were dissociated from the comment, or they commented on a migrated post before it was migrated and didn't have an account on the target site at the time of migration).

Can I prevent users from commenting on a certain post?

Yes, you can, as of December 2019. Open up the "mod" menu on a post, click the "Lock" option, and select "Comments only". This will prevent all users, except moderators, from commenting on the post.

Even though this is under the "Lock" menu, this does not result in most of the ramifications of locking: answers, edits, votes, etc. are still allowed.

You should only do this if most or all of the comments posted by many different users don't follow the comment guidelines. When using this feature, consider if any potential legitimate clarification requests or suggestions would be locked out too. If there are just a few users who don't seem to regard the commenting rules, consider taking action against those users instead.

Should all comments be deleted when cleaning up a large comment chain?

While comments in general are not supposed to be permanent artifacts, consider not deleting comments that link to related resources or clarify a small, tangential point in the post. On questions, also consider not deleting comments prompting the asker for clarification or information that has not been provided yet.

Can I undo a comment deletion?

Comments can now be undeleted, but only if they were deleted by a user who is currently a moderator. The reason behind this rule is because moderators should generally only use the tool to fix errors on their own or other moderators' part in deleting comments.

This does have a few holes, however: if a comment was deleted by a moderator who later ceased to have diamond privileges, you can't undelete it. Also, as comments that are automatically deleted in response to flags have their deletion attributed to the last user to flag, you can't undelete those. (You can undelete comments that were self-deleted or last flagged by users who later became moderators.)

...After deletion, the standard "deleted content" styles will show the just-deleted comment, along with the "undelete" link.

Also, the "X deleted comments" right side-bar quick link will now load deleted comments inline, allowing for undeletion (in certain cases)

Note that this restriction only applies when undeleting comments from the post page itself; it doesn't apply when looking at the page that lists all of a given user's comments. These are special cases, hence the requirement for additional clicking when viewing a post.

Can I see what comments have been deleted?

To see all the deleted comments on a post, click the mod link, then select show deleted comments. To see them with the undelete link, click the "X deleted comments" box and the deleted comments will appear inline on the post

Answer 7

Tags

A bad tag's sprung up. Can I destroy and/or block it myself?

No: moderators don't have the ability to outright destroy or block tags. For that, you need to create consensus on your meta-discussion site that the tag must not exist and apply the status-review tag to the discussion to escalate the request to Stack Exchange to perform the destruction and/or blocking. Alternatively, you can ask the community to manually clean out the tags, which helps identify off-topic and low-quality questions.

Even for tags that have no questions in them?

Empty tags will automatically be destroyed within 24 hours.

What's the difference between merging a tag and creating a synonym?

When you merge one tag into another, the system automatically removes the old tag and replaces it with the new tag on all questions using the old tag. However, the old tag can still be created again and used on new questions.

When you make one tag a synonym of another, the system does nothing with existing uses of the tag, but ensures all new uses are tagged with the new tag.

When merging one tag into another, you have the option of creating a synonym at the same time.

Note that moderators cannot merge tags if there is a significantly large number of questions using the tag to be merged - in that case, apply the status-review tag to the merge discussion to escalate the request to Stack Exchange to perform the merge. You can, however, create a synonym without merging.

Should I always create synonyms when merging tags?

If a tag has been used incorrectly but has a separate meaning from the tag you're merging it into, do not create a synonym. Instead, just merge and let the old tag get destroyed after 24 hours. For instance, java and javascript represent two different languages, but if nearly all the questions tagged javascript are really about java, you should merge javascript into java and then retag the correct uses, not create a synonym.

If the tag keeps being recreated and used incorrectly even after merging, then consider forming consensus on your meta-discussion site to either have the tag redefined so they mean the same thing and should be synonyms of each other, or to have the tag blocked.

A wrong synonym was created by accident. How can this be reverted?

Deleting the synonym from the Synonyms page will restore the original tag, including its tag wiki. However, all later uses of the tag along with questions using the old tag which were edited after the synonym was created were automatically retagged to the master tag, so those must be retagged manually.

If a merge was performed at the same time as creating a synonym, this cannot be reverted, as prior posts' histories were changed to use the new tag. You can attempt to find prior uses of the old tag through sources such as the Data Explorer (which is only updated once a week) or through archives such as the Wayback Machine and old data dumps.

Answer 8

Moderating chat

There's a colored number on my avatar that isn't a reply notification. What is it?

That's to let you know there's a flag raised somewhere in the chat network. Click on it to get a summary of what the flag is.

I'm getting flags from chat rooms not tied to my main site. Is this normal?

Yes: as a moderator on one site, you are a moderator—for most intents and purposes—across the chat.stackexchange.com network.

How should I handle flags for rooms I'm not familiar with?

If the content of a flag raised shocks the conscience or is blatantly obscene, handle it as you would your own site's chat rooms. Otherwise, ignore it and let a more experienced or involved moderator handle it instead. In the case of localized language chat rooms, let a moderator who's familiar with the language handle it.

How do I migrate messages to another room?

From the "room" menu, choose move/delete messages:

Answer 9

Privileges and abilities

I'm a moderator on a main site. Where else am I a moderator?

In addition to your main site, you're also a moderator on your meta-discussion site and in chat.stackexchange.com. If you're a Stack Overflow or Meta Stack Exchange moderator, you're also a moderator on the respective site-specific chat servers.

Does my reputation affect what I have access to?

No: as a moderator, you gain access to almost every user privilege, regardless of your reputation, in addition to several moderator-only functions and abilities.

Answer 10

Site scopes and Help Centers

Our site gets a lot of low quality or ostensibly off-topic questions. How can I fix this?

If your site is having issues with its scope—whether it's from confused users or otherwise—propose clarifying or amending your site's Help Center by creating a question on your meta-discussion site to allow for feedback. Once you have consensus, you can modify your Help Center to note the new changes.

How do I modify my site's Help Center?

Navigate to your site's Help Center "What topics can I ask about here?" page, and look for the "edit" link at the bottom of the page.