47

So I just locked this answer after two people flagged it due to unusual edit activity. Turns out, there were over 700 rollbacks on that answer over the last two days.

Usually, the system automatically raises a "possible rollback war" flag for this so that we can step in before things go too far. That never happened here, and near as I can tell it didn't trigger because the post was community wiki.

I think we should still be notified when something like this is happening on a community wiki post, because we'll probably want to do something about that. It's an edge case, I know, given the relatively small number of community wiki answers out there, but I think the system should still raise flags on this.

Improve this question
8
  • 18
    I am amazed by how they can do this without hitting some sort of editing rate limit. Some of these rollbacks are only 2 seconds apart. If I were one of them, I would hit my mental rate limit and simply give up. Maybe they are not humans?
    – Antony
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 16:02
  • 3
    Pure insanity or boredom took over those users!
    – Taryn
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 16:19
  • 2
    Looks like a good reason for another rate limit, like 10 rollbacks by the same person on the same post.
    – user102937
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 17:27
  • 27
    "Duck Season!" "Wabbit Season!" "Duck Season!" "Wabbit Season!"
    – Bill the Lizard
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 17:28
  • 9
    @BilltheLizard I can't be bothered reading through the whole list: did they at some point make a mistake and roll back to the other guy's version?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 18:30
  • I agree with Robert and suggest that after 2 rollbacks on the same post that is not CW and they did not author users get a friendly red notification about editing solutions by other people (not in CW) and the possibility to discuss changes with the author in chat (invite with a comment) or in meta if it's more severe. In this case it seems that @ckozl had no business editing it after the initial rollback.
    – Benjamin Gruenbaum
    Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 0:39
  • I take it that since the lock was removed that the dispute has been resolved?
    – Krease
    Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 16:17
  • @Chris Too early to tell. One of the participants in the rollback war hasn't come online since it was unlocked. Though it would take some balls to go against a moderator request to stop.
    – Mysticial
    Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 18:27

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
16

Community wiki is a red herring here.

We aren't explicitly excluding CW posts from this flag, but it didn't meet the auto-flag criteria because the very first rollbacks on this post were months before the "war" started and happened to be done by the same users involved later on.

So, this post failed the "did X rollbacks happen within a short amount of time" part of our check since technically all rollbacks happened over the course of months.

Starting with the next build (rev 2014.4.29.2207 here on meta and 2014.4.29.1581 elsewhere), we're going to check for the number of rollbacks performed recently instead of from the dawn of time.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .