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In We expect some Q3 projects to be delayed "Ticket Smash" was announced:

No tomorrows. No excuses. Ticket Smash on September 8th - September 18th

In total we have almost 600 unhandled CM escalations today. We do apologize for that. To remedy the situation, we have decided that the entire Community Team (Sara Chipps, Tim Post, Stephanie, Juan M, Catija, Cesar M, JNat and Nicolas Chabanovsky) will be exclusively working on CM escalation requests for two weeks, from September 8th to September 18th.

How successful was "Ticket Smash"? Is the number of CM escalations back to about 0?

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    In a related chat about a flag of mine that required CM escalation it was mentioned that all tickets were handled.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Oct 5, 2020 at 9:17
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    I imagine it's never at exactly 0: the SO mods at least are probably raising new CM tickets every day.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Oct 5, 2020 at 13:56
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    @Randal'Thor yeah that would be wishful thinking indeed. A more appropriate, but harder to define, measure would be the amount of time an item is in the CM queue.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 5, 2020 at 15:01
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    The backlog has been handled; they reached 0 at some point. This was confirmed to moderators on Friday. They also stated they don’t expect to get into similar problems in the future.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Oct 5, 2020 at 23:07

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Ticket Smash went very well =)

Over the course of two weeks we have handled around 500 tickets (all tickets in Freshdesk and Jira). We still have some tricky ones in Trello but overall we dropped the “day-to-day” ticket queue to zero.

I think the thing the team enjoyed the most was the hackathon-like experience. Each day:

  • We held a daily stand up where we agreed on the course of actions for the day.
  • A manager paired with a CM to work together on some tickets.
  • Within the group we discussed a lot of interesting community issues.

Ticket Smash was a play where everyone on the team found their unique role.

How does the ticket queue look like today?

Every month we receive around 100 CM escalations from Stack Overflow moderators, 5 from Mathematics moderators and another 5 - 10 from other network site moderators. Usually one of the CMs tries to take some time to resolve a few escalations every day.

As for today we have 46 tickets to work on.

Thank you for CM escalations!

Revealing cross up voting that is not (yet) determined by the system, revenge down voting, puppet accounts and many other activities are necessary if we want to keep our house warm, dry, and safe. A lot of thanks to the moderators for sending us the requests! We appreciate that. We hope that in the future we will be able to create a better system that will help moderators to resolve such situations more efficiently or automatically. Until then, we are ready to help!

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    Good to hear it was such a succes! Sounds awfully efficient, 3 systems to track tickets....
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 10:35
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    Thanks for the update! I'm curious: it's unsurprising that Stack Overflow is responsible for the vast majority of escalations, but why is Mathematics consistently in the second-place slot?
    – Ryan M
    Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 11:42
  • My guess would be (over)active moderators @RyanM
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 12:08
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    @RyanM It's the second largest site based on a few metrics - it's the only site other than SO to cross the 1 million questions and answers line, for example, and they get the second highest number of questions per day network-wide... this means there's a lot more opportunity for vote fraud and sockpuppetry.
    – Catija StaffMod
    Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 12:56
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    @Luuklag It's only two now. In the two years I've been here, we've slowly transitioned from ZenDesk to FreshDesk and now to Jira. One of the actions we took during this Ticket Smash was to handle every single outstanding FreshDesk ticket, so we're now only in Jira and a subset of special tickets will end up on our Trello board - which will be moved to Jira in the next month or two. So, one system soon. :D
    – Catija StaffMod
    Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 12:59
  • I'm glad for you @Catija
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 13:00

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