I have noticed that some old and new questions (tagged as feature-request or bug) including mine (on meta.SO) with many votes are not reviewed (tagged as status-review) by moderators.
How long does it take so by a moderator to review it? Or it is never reviewed after some time?
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56-8 hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades.– Shadow WizardCommented Aug 4, 2019 at 12:46
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Oof. Years and months? But are moderators not active on Meta?– NoumanCommented Aug 4, 2019 at 12:46
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6Moderators are totally not relevant. They don't and can't fix bugs or implement new feature requests. Also, very related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263662/….– Shadow WizardCommented Aug 4, 2019 at 12:49
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1Small team, a lot of bugs. So, a lot of reports they even hasn't looked on.– Suvitruf - Andrei ApanasikCommented Aug 4, 2019 at 13:50
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Ping SE devs/CMs periodically, there is nothing else you can do.– Suvitruf - Andrei ApanasikCommented Aug 4, 2019 at 13:50
2 Answers
♦ moderators don't review bugs and feature requests (they might read them and comment on or answer them, but regular users do so as well). They are able to add red tags like status-review but do so rarely; most of the time when this happens they add a status-completed to a question which has been fixed more or less by accident (example), or where the developer somehow got sidetracked after fixing the issue. That's usually done after somebody casts a custom moderator flag asking for the tag to be added; moderators don't actively search for those kind of questions.
As described e.g. here, all feature requests and bugs (whether they're posted here or on one of the site-specific Meta sites, like Meta Stack Overflow) are monitored and read by the Stack Exchange team, but they don't always provide immediate feedback. For example, when the community, through downvotes, comments and/or answers provide enough feedback why a feature request should not be implemented, a status-declined tag doesn't really help. Note that status-review doesn't mean "we've reviewed your request"; it rather means "we've reviewed your request and we'll likely take some action in the future":
Indicates that the circumstances behind a bug report are set to be internally reviewed, or that the feature request contains merit to consider but the decision on its approval or decline requires more investigation.
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I've seen a dev (Adam?) says review tag means they added the bug into their internal "TO-DO" list. Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 12:58
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1@ShaWiz but that doesn't mean, that they will fix it (¬‿¬ ) Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 13:49
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@Suvitruf suppose the list has 100 items, and each takes 6-8 weeks to complete. Do the math. ;) Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 14:05
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@ShaWiz it's not about math, some bugs just have low priority, so they will never been fixed. Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 14:08
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@ShaWiz or will use tag status-bugdesign. Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 14:10
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Actually: if a SO moderator feels a bug is somewhat urgent and has high impact, we are encouraged to add
status-review
to raise awareness with the dev team. This is recent, and I haven’t seen it in action yet. Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 15:37 -
1I may be alone in this but I add
status-bydesign
orstatus-norepro
to bug reports when it is clear the bug report was due to a misunderstanding of how the site works or local reporter-only-problem and I don’t see a reason to just edit the report into a generalsupport
tag post instead. Example: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/388107/… Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 15:42 -
1If we weren't supposed to add these tags, we wouldn't be able to, I guess. I've added status-planned in the past: apple.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/3384/revisions– Glorfindel ModCommented Aug 4, 2019 at 16:45
status-review is totally something for the dev team to do. A community manager might set those.Mods like myself would not set those flags - we are regular members of the community for most part. We have no insight into the development process, unlike staff.
As such it's not going to get reviewed by mods at all, and even if we did, we have no direct influence on the bug triage and feature development process.