I'd like to see if it'd be possible for moderators to get read-only access to moderation information on other Stack Exchange sites.
As a moderator on Programmers.SE, perhaps the single most frequent type of issue I'm pinged about in Teachers' Lounge is potential migrations from the other programming-related Stack Exchange sites to Programmers.SE.
The general conversation goes something like this:
Other moderator: Hey Mark, [this question] on Stack Overflow has 4 close votes, 3 of which are for migrating it to Programmers.SE. Do you want it there?
Me: {I go look at the question} Nope, bad question overall. Voted to close as not a real question.
Other moderator: {5 minutes later} Hey Mark, [this other question] was closed and flagged for migration to Programmers. Want it?
Me: No, it'd be okay on Programmers if it addressed X, Y, and Z.
Other moderator: Can you leave a comment explaining that to the user?
And so on.
Another use-case is when questions get asked on one of the sites related to programming, but really would be better off asked on a more specialist site because they are likely to get far better answers. For example, DBA and GameDev questions getting asked on Stack Overflow or Programmers.
When we moderators are alerted to those questions, we check with the moderators on the more specialist sites, but there are a lot of questions we never see.
A third use-case involves being able to track a user's trends across similar sites. On a few occasions, we've had users go back and forth between Stack Overflow and Programmers asking questions, causing duplication of effort between the moderator teams while we both perform the same forensic analysis of the user's actions on our respective sites. It'd be extremely helpful to see what the user's done and if he's been a problem on another site to get a more holistic picture.
In the situations described above, it'd be helpful for moderators on related sites to have read-only access on other Stack Exchange sites so they can better facilitate the most appropriate resolution for things that affect their sites without having to wait for a ping from a mod on the other site who happens to catch something of mutual interest on his or her own.
This would include being able to see:
- questions with close votes or flags to migrate to our site
- migration rejection stats for questions migrated from our site
- certain information on user profiles, particularly mod history and deleted questions