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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 ...
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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 who'...
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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 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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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 ...
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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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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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This has been fixed, thanks for posting!
Moderators can now flag comments with the "Something else" reason so that they can draw comments to the attention of other moderators on their team. When a comment is flagged by a moderator using the custom comment flag, it won't automatically be handled:
This may be because the moderator can't handle the ...
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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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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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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 ...
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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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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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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 ...
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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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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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As you might have noticed, I've gone around your recent questions to give them a touch up. Overall your questions seem rather okay but there are a few points I'd like to note though
"Thank you in advance" and other fluff like "I'm a beginner" shouldn't be in your question. They take time away from other people interpreting it and it ...
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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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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 ...
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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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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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I would like to distinguish between effort in formulating the question and effort in solving the problem. When I want to kill a post, it is mostly for a lack of the former.
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When should moderators delete comments?
Same advice as for flaggers: when they offer no currently applicable constructive requests for improvement to the post.
Moderators may generally process comment flags without much deliberation: if it doesn't immediately appear to be needed, remove it; if it might be, leave it. There are almost always more useful things ...
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Can you please instantiate some emergency procedure of asking willing members of the community if they'd volunteer and step up to handle flags, until a more permanent solution can be made?
I do not think that is a good idea.
Moderators are elected on SE. They are meant to represent the community. Even if you were to start elections here and now, it'd take ...
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When should moderators move comments to chat?
This option is available at any time from the mod menu on any post with comments:
How you use it depends on the situation. Keep in mind that you can only move comments to chat once for a given post, so consider carefully whether to use it or not. If the comments continue after moving them, you must resort to ...
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Set a benchmark on acceptable behaviour
Okay! Sounds like a good idea to me, let's do it -- oh, wait.
Be Nice is the benchmark.
If what you say doesn't fall within acceptable bounds as defined by Be Nice, it's not acceptable. That includes posts, comments, chat, and anywhere else you can post your own stuff.
That means:
Regarding inappropiate jokes in ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
