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Surely the important goal here is the production of well-asked, well-answered questions, right? Not visible self-flagellation...
When I ask for effort, what I'm really looking for is a starting point, some context for where the problem actually exists. So many XY Questions are easily answered by seeing a code sample. Without that, it's like trying to ...
answered Dec 9 '13 at 21:05
JDB still remembers Monica
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Shog, you're attacking a straw man here. You should know better than that.
Folks aren't looking for "effort" because they think displays of struggle are some sort of magic pixie dust, able to turn a terrible, useless question into gold. They're looking for effort because the lack thereof is the most blatantly obvious hallmark of the thousands of terrible, ...
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Update: Kevin Montrose makes it happen
The hell-ban is no more! Long live the verbose, obnoxiously evident ban!
Kevin has implemented (more or less) the system described below. Flaggers with a recent (past 7 days) flagging history consisting of at least 10 handled flags where >= 10% of flags were declined will see the following when they flag:
Those ...
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I see a very big difference between moving to 4 or to 5 automatic flags. I wouldn't have any issue with 4 flags, but 5 flags means that only a single user is required to nuke the post. This would probably still be safe if that single user organically stumbles upon the spam post, in this case the odds of a user falsely flagging a false positive are very low. ...
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This is now completed and as of August 2016, live network-wide.
Note that if you're a moderator (and thus your flags are authoritative), there's no retracting. Also, close flags get converted into close votes if you have enough rep, and can be retracted through the existing "retract close vote" mechanism.
It works for Questions and Answers. To retract a ...
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I agree that having another option to post a flag without going back would be desirable. I stated as much in this answer as well. I propose an additional radio button, where the user only has to type in the site name. Something like this:
Obviously it would be nice to have some form of completion for that text box, but that's just details. You could use ...
103
There's another reason for making it possible for people with sufficient rights to remove a flag they placed: Saving the moderators' time.
Moderators have a lot of flags to get through. If you flag something, and then something changes making it no longer relevant before it's reviewed, you should be able to remove the flag so no one needs to review it.
...
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I could have sworn that somewhere in my reputation I saw "6 helpful flags"...
That means that six of the flags you have raised so far were deemed helpful to moderators. You don't flag things as helpful yourself, you flag things that need moderator's attention. The helpful/unhelpful designation is how moderators give you feedback on the quality of your ...
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Stack Exchange has its own spam detection and prevention system. If I understand its design goal correctly it prevents spam from even being posted. What SmokeDetector finds are basically the posts that passed their tests.
Two questions:
Is there any other feedback loop from SmokeDetector to that system, except posts being flagged as Spam? If not, any plans?...
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Stack Overflow is going the way of Usenet.
No, I don't mean that the quality is going down. I mean that the moderation of questions on Stack Overflow is focusing more and more on the effort made by the asker to conform to the group norms, and less and less on the goal of “collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world”.
...
answered Dec 10 '13 at 2:18
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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I'm assuming that's not what "abusive" in this reason is referring to
Abusive means what it says. Don't overthink this.
Look... The problem folks have with these is that they see the pile of nonsense and try to extract meaning from it. "Surely if I can determine what the author's intent was," you might imagine them saying to themselves, "...I can then pick ...
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Declined flag: if the flag was reviewed by a moderator who did not agree with you (for other, spam, offensive and comments flags) they decline them. Flagging to close a question will push the flag to the close review queue, and if the review is completed without any user casting a close vote the flag is declined. NAA and VLQ flags can be declined by ...
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You start with 10 flags per day.
Based on your reputation and flagging history, you can end up with as many as 100 per day.
Currently, that means you get an extra flag per day for every 2000 reputation points or 10 net helpful flags (helpful-declined).
Since you have an insane number of helpful flags, you're maxed out at 100 per day.
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The biggest advantage I see in how the Smoke Detector project has operated thus far is its transparency: one of the most frustrating aspects of using these sites is how difficult it can be to determine precisely what happened in a given scenario (much less why it happened) - even for moderators, there's so much data that's either unavailable or more often ...
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Are we taking a stricter approach to evaluating quality flags?
Yes, we're taking a more 'letter of the law' approach to dealing with quality related flags in order to help reviewers better hone their moderation skills. Previously, most of the moderators were inclined to validate a flag even if it didn't exactly apply, but still pointed us to problematic ...
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The thing that concerns me about 5 auto-flags is that sometimes users are wrong and now it only takes one user to spam-delete a post. A statistic that would help me better evaluate this is: on each site, how many organic spam flags are dismissed or disputed? If even site users sometimes get it wrong -- and they do, particularly on questions where product ...
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When I think of this whole debacle, I'm reminded of a King of the Hill episode from decades back. I can't point you to an exact episode number, but I recall this exchange.
A manager at Strickland Propane had made some executive decisions which riled a lot of the drivers, and this was before Christmas Eve - a prime time for users who had propane-powered ...
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What does this dismiss reason mean?
Certain moderator flags are invalidated by age. This prevents flags from accruing over time and allowing actions that the greater community in general doesn't want.
When a flag is aged like this, you see "aged away" for the flag reason (previously, it was "scheduledtaskinvalidated").
What causes flags to be dismissed ...
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We determined we can beat those numbers and eliminate spam from Stack Overflow and the rest of the network even faster.
(Emphasis mine)
What, if any, work have you done to ensure the robustness of SmokeDetector (SD) across different sites in the network, given that they have broadly different scopes and topics? For example, you've finely tuned SD to detect ...
65
I'm definitely in favor of this. Always have been, but particularly after today's chatpocalypse on SF.
Two caveats/enhancements I'd like to suggest:
A high-rep user whose post is flagged should not be able to act on their own flags.
(I'd be surprised if this wasn't already part of the system)
When a post is flagged it should get a visible flag in the chat....
65
As the proposed site is likely to be of more interest to adults, and there are even some adults who may not want to come across this site accidentally, the proposed site will have two unique features:
A "warning" page requiring you to confirm that you are over 18 before you enter the site (this would set a cookie. See Reddit's various "not safe for work" ...
64
The helpful flags count is not private or sensitive information that users should need to hide from other users. Anyone can already tell if a specific user has hit the 80 or 500 mark by simply looking through their list of badges. The helpful flags count is really just like the votes count. The flags that have actually been cast are still private - users can'...
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Phew, this was a really long request. It took a long time to work through all of this, but I'm going to try. As you've mentioned a lot of this has been documented in multiple places - MSE, MSO, help center, etc. While I'm going to go over most of this, I will also be linking to many of the canonical posts where this is already outlined because there no sense ...
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We've replaced Programmers and Webmasters migration paths with TeX and DBA, respectively.
Enjoy. :)
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Hmm... Lots of good discussion here already, but to answer the question you actually asked...
NO.
No, you can't have consensus on what flag you should use for "link only answers", because as Tim notes you shouldn't always be flagging them, as George notes there's no "one size fits all" flag reason for them, and as Anna notes they're quickly becoming a ...
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It's not about Effort. It's about Respect.
The line I draw for moderation is based on the probability someone will say, "Try X" and the OP will respond, "I already tried X". To which the person will inevitably comment, "Try Y" and the OP will then say, "But I already tried Y!" (without having it in their question originally).
It all comes down to ...
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When should I flag a comment?
When it will be shown to future readers but offers them nothing of value, or what value it has is overshadowed by the comment being unfriendly or outright rude.
There are many different sorts of comments that qualify here, roughly categorized by the flagging dialogue itself:
The first two flags address similar behavior ...
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Another reason to bring back the suggested edit indicator is that on smaller sites (i.e. not on SO), the suggested edit indicator is often 0. So a lot of people with the requisite privilege don't keep checking the review queue, they wait for the indicator to appear. Without the indicator, suggested edit reviews will be significantly delayed.
This is not ...
answered Dec 5 '13 at 9:13
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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