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A user today is making many suggested edits removing spurious "thanks, --George"-style closing signatures from questions. This is perfectly legitimate and helpful. However, as you might imagine, most of the questions in this style are from new users and many are low quality and could be improved.

I hate to reject all his edits as too minor outright, because he's taking the time to find questions that do need cleanup, but on the other hand if he's going to clean up a post it should be thoroughly cleaned up (improve title, grammar, formatting, poor spelling, etc.)--or even flag as needing closure or whatever.

As a possible solution I'd like to give him some friendly "counseling" to provide more value in his edits or they do have to be rejected. Is there a way for me as a 10k user to send a message to him or start a private chat?

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  • 10K user can't sent private message, only moderators can. However as far as I know, it's not really private message but rather kind of a "warning" that stick and better be avoided. Inviting the user to chat is one option, by comment on one of his/her old posts if such exists then removing that comment after short while if he's not responding.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 7:49
  • 2
    Closely related: Addressing users who make many trivial edits Also related: Flag a user as serial minor editor, An alert to serial minor edits Further reading: Some users gaming the edit system by searching for misspelled words, Too minor rejection reason either needs to be reworded or removed
    – jscs
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 8:34
  • Thank you @JoshCaswell. I hadn't even considered the "gaming the system" part. Is it worth mentioning the user? He suggested something like 50 edits...
    – ErikE
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 8:39
  • No, probably best to flag a mod if you really feel there's something bad going on beyond what you can address as a fellow user via comment/chat.
    – jscs
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 8:40
  • @JoshCaswell 50 edits solely removing question closings seems problematic. So I guess I'll flag a moderator now.
    – ErikE
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 8:44
  • I noticed this as well - and I approved a couple. Then noticed, edit after edit of exactly the same kind of thing. (Like some query had been run, and they were blitzing the results). I then rejected a couple, and then just started to skip or else I'll run out of the ones that I can improve or approve...
    – Jon Clements
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 9:45
  • I hope as a relatively new 10k user I can be forgiven for not being 100% with the program yet. :)
    – ErikE
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 10:52
  • @Josh after reading your links it is clearer to me what to do: reject with an explanation, or improve with unchecking the "was helpful" box.
    – ErikE
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 19:10
  • Guess what? He's here.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn Mod
    Commented Jan 8, 2013 at 5:46
  • @bolt yep that's the one...
    – ErikE
    Commented Jan 8, 2013 at 6:15

1 Answer 1

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If the user has edited a post, you can ping them in the comments using @username. Leave a brief description of the problem you see with their edits, linking to any relevant Meta posts. If they have sufficient reputation, you can also leave a link to a chat room. Try to prevent a full fledged conversation in the comments thread though, since in most cases it will only be tangentially related to the post.

Once you have explained the situation to them, be sure to clean up any comments you left.

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  • I didn't know editors would be pingable. Thanks!
    – ErikE
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 18:55

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