30

I recently had a run-in with some minor edits, and lost my edit suggestion privileges for a week. I want to discuss part of the experience that was weird. I only found out about my loss of privileges because of the following observations:

  1. Huh, that "edit" button is greyed out. Let's see what's up with that… [searches around Stack Overflow]
  2. Oh, you can lose editing privileges. Weird, what happened… [searches for my activity feed]
  3. Whoa, I can how my old edits were scored! I wonder how I did… [reads edit scores]
  4. Ohhh, I made some edits that didn't clear the community's bar for editing. [reads up on Stack Overflow's editing policy]

I would love a notification about losing editing privileges that rolled up all this information, rather than me playing detective:

"Your editing privileges have been suspended for [number of suspension days] because of [reason for suspension (in my case, rejected edits)]. You can view your [rejected edits] on your activity page. Please review the Stack Overflow [policy for good edits]."

(Not sure if this falls under discussion or feature-request so let's discuss it, I guess?)

Improve this question
20
  • 1
    I may have, or may not have, but it was probably four years ago that I earned it? Yes, I think most folks only read the docs after they hit a wall, and that mostly jives with the site behaviour I saw as a new user's patroller on Wikipedia a couple years back.
    – cbowns
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 18:57
  • 5
    @Yannis That doesn't even apply here... OP doesn't have 2k rep. He's referring to edit suggestions, which is not a privilege and is open to all, including anonymous users. And yes, it is an issue that the system doesn't notify them that their suggestions are being rejected and doesn't notify them when they get silently banned.
    – Lorem Ipsum
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 18:58
  • 2
    The officially stated reason there is no notification for this is that they don't want global notifications for "bad things" they want them to be for "good things".
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:00
  • @yoda Ah, didn't check the OP's SO profile, my bad. And I agree this is an issue, I've already upvoted this.
    – yannis
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:00
  • @yoda Yeah, I found more than a few posts here on meta along the lines of this answer: basically, "you had no idea this score existed, but you didn't do as well as you thought you did.
    – cbowns
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:01
  • @Servy Interesting. I looked at it from the tack of, "uhhh, is Stack Overflow broken for everyone or just me?", because the edit button didn't have any additional info on it like it does when the edit queue is full, it was just disabled with zero info about why.
    – cbowns
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:02
  • @cbowns I'm not saying I agree with the policy, mind you, I'm merely repeating it.
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:09
  • possible duplicate of Is there a penalty for one's edit suggestion being rejected?
    – gnat
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:10
  • @psubsee2003 ??? 2k users have always been able to approve edits. That was the case when the system was first put in place.
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:10
  • 1
    @gnat This is about how users are notified of the ban, which isn't addressed in that proposed duplicate. The OP knows about the ban now, because he did his research before asking the question (giving me warm fuzzies) but he had to go through a lot of work to find out about it, work that 90% of other users won't do, and shouldn't have to do.
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:12
  • There is also no notification about a question ban. You find out when you go to ask a new question. I'd say SO doesn't invest a lot of attention or resources to letting you know you did something wrong.
    – Johnny Bones
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:15
  • @Servy To preserve notifications only for good things, this info could be presented in a 'just in time' popup when you try to edit something.
    – blahdiblah
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:16
  • 1
    @blahdiblah That is what the current behavior is. The problem is that the OP happened to never feel the need to suggest an edit while he was edit banned.
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:19
  • @Servy fair enough (retracted CV). I've been edit banned by the way and per my recollection it was quite easy to find out about it
    – gnat
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:19
  • 2
    Also note that you should have been the message described here when editing.
    – Servy
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 19:31

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .