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Per the tag wiki of and this official staff post, questions about Area 51 are explicitly on-topic here and should not be closed as "only applicable to one specific site".

Simple Question: Why community bot is a moderator on Area 51, but on the discussion zone and other sites, is the Community just a bot?

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Discussion Zone:

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Does the Community Bot an invisible user? I just searched “Community” and there’s no result for it, unlike other SE sites.

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    Community as a user doesn't really exist. A lot of processes just need a user-id and default to -1 in case no actual user was used. Area51 is an arcane old piece of software that's many versions behind on the rest of the network, so there's no point in comparing the two.
    – Mast
    Commented Sep 14 at 18:25
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    The community user used to be a mod-status... "Entity" awhile ago. It's likely it was changed to just have implicit mod status to avoid confusion with actual moderator users. Area 51, being as ancient as it is, likely didn't receive the same treatment.
    – Spevacus Mod
    Commented Sep 14 at 18:26
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    Area51 has old codebase, it causes that any new feature or change is not there. Pointless to open bug for each and every one. Yes, it miss tons of things.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Sep 14 at 18:27
  • You can even see comments on deleted posts via a URL edit and area 51 is unfortunately not an option in the data explorer. This should stay in this comment
    – Тyma Gaidash
    Commented Sep 14 at 19:02
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    Don’t understand why this question was closed, from the area-51 tag, we can ask Area 51 questions here.
    – user1176409
    Commented Sep 15 at 11:36
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    @user1176409 same, I totally disagree with the closure, voted to reopen. My guess is that Area51 isn't known enough to some rather new users, who think it's just another ordinary SE site. (I checked the first close voter, who usually set the tone for others who just follow from the close votes review)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Sep 16 at 5:54

1 Answer 1

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Community used to be displayed as a moderator on all sites; see this 2009 screenshot from Stack Overflow.

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The main Area 51 site runs on a very old branch of the Stack Exchange software (even though the footer says 2024.8.5.633, that means it was a build from August this year, but definitely not from the up-to-date main/stable branch).

On the other hand, Area 51 Discussions runs on the very same build as Meta Stack Exchange and the other Q&A sites in the network (2024.9.13.15206 at the moment of writing). So it makes sense it's just a [Bot] there. It doesn't appear in the user search, which may be a bit confusing, but the same is true for other per-site metas like Meta Stack Overflow:

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As @Sonic notes in the comments, even if does not have a diamond anymore, it's still a moderator as far as the system is concerned. You can think of the [Bot] badge as a specialization of the [♦ Mod] badge.

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    It's also worth noting that it is still internally considered a moderator behind the scenes on all sites - it is still able to take actions that would otherwise require a moderator to perform.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Sep 14 at 23:21
  • @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Though a moderator deletion can only be overturned by a moderator, a Community deletion, besides spam/offensive, can be overturned by regular users.
    – CPlus
    Commented Sep 15 at 0:36
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    @CPlus That was a feature change implemented explicitly for the Community user. Prior to that, Roomba-deleted posts were non-undeletable except by mods.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Sep 15 at 0:43
  • Thanks for your clear answer! But there’s one thing I’m not sure, why does my question closed, I know my question is very low quality. According to area-51, question related to Area 51 can be asked at here, so I’m not sure with the closure of the question.
    – user1176409
    Commented Sep 15 at 12:10
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    I think you're right about that, but since I answered, I'm hesitant to open it single-handedly (conflict of interest). Let's see what the review queue does ...
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Sep 15 at 13:10

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