93
You caught me.
We throw a few known cases into the queue* as "gotchas" to keep people from just nailing "Looks Good" or "Close" or whatever without reading the questions.
If you see one of these just handle it normally, we're probably going to make them a little more... subtle over time. For now we're pulling from really obvious sources: spam, and ...
49
The reference question and answer for post bans is written with a harsh tone and a bad faith assumption. This bad faith assumption becomes obvious when you consider that a shortened URL is used in the post ban message. It's this kind of bad faith assumption that drives people away from Stack Exchange, and we should be assuming good faith whenever it is ...
47
This is good.
In order to not add to the moderator woes of drowning, not waving, if you're at a level only to flag, don't.
There are plenty of users with close vote rep that can help wash out this debris.
Getting rid of these questions will allow for better search results and an increase in quality overall.
A typo is not the same as a logic problem ...
46
I fully support this proposal. The main reasons why it makes sense to me are:
Spam does not belong in the LQ review queue in the first place. As far as I understand, spam flags are handled by diamond mods, and do not send posts to a review queue. Therefore, spam vs. not spam decisions are not a normal part of working the LQ review queue.
Related to the ...
45
This happened because you had an account that was blocked from asking questions, and returned after requesting deletion of your account, which we obliged.
We're happy to give you an almost clean slate, but we must also protect the quality of the resource that we're building. To this, we just ask that as you start off again, you treat questions as a ...
44
Some guidelines:
You should Edit a post
If the post is acceptable, but the grammar or the formatting has issues.
If the post needs copy-editing, and you understand the spirit.
If the post contains personal information (telephone, email, password) [possibly flag]
[ANS] If the answer is flawed and correctable (or leave a comment, and downvote)
[ANS] If an ...
37
Personally, I think the edit action should dismiss the flag as disputed, which is actually what it did for a long time and I thought it still did. I was never able to figure out when the change actually took place though.
There are other questions on Meta (one from August 2012 and another from August 2013) that suggest very low quality flags did get ...
36
I've bumped up the threshold below which questions will be blocked. The majority of recently-asked questions that fall below the new threshold do not fare well on Stack Overflow (i.e. they are closed, deleted, and/or down-voted).
The down-side is that short questions will be harder to post (this is more than just a length check, but short + poor spelling / ...
32
First off, I'm not wild about doing anything to the registration system right now. Not on any one site, and definitely not network-wide. We're working on a design for a complete revamp of the global login system (the one that in theory lets you log in on one site and be logged in automatically on the rest) - hopefully, it'll work to make login and ...
31
Those comments come from people who are using the new /review-beta page. When they review answers from the Low Quality Posts section, one of the buttons they see is Recommend Deletion.
Reviewers who recommend deletion get the opportunity to provide a reason. Each reason comes with a boilerplate comment that the system automatically adds to the post in ...
31
I fully agree that these help texts are confusing and should be changed, however, not necessarily as you suggest (though you are pointing out the right problems).
What needs to be covered
Let me first recapture what the options mean according to my understanding:
Looks OK: This is a serious attempt to answer the question in parsable English. It is not a ...
30
SE Chat room to help coordinate voting
Now with live backlog courtesy of Gordon, David X. Random and PeeHaa!
Syntax to point out questions that you think should be closed: [tag:cv-pls] (url)
It seems difficult to coordinate the voting on this; we seem to be needing a tool. (the Google doc is more of a crutch really)
The PHP chat room has an ...
27
If you actively went through the user's past posts and downvoted the bad ones, that does sound like a form of serial downvoting, even if well-intentioned (in that you felt the posts deserved a downvote, not that the user deserved a bunch of downvotes). That is going to raise eyebrows.
I note for example that at the time of this writing, you have only given ...
26
You are right: That is rude and offensive. I flagged it so too. But I don't think you can do anything about it besides flagging such comments.
And on SO we discourage link-only-answers. That is why the post was correctly flagged as low-quality. It just does not meet the quality standards of SO.
And for the downvotes: They may be from the answerer, but you ...
25
I'm afraid the explanation here is kinda boring.
There's a job that runs weekly which deletes any question more than 365 days old which...
has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 or less in case of deleted owner
has no answers
is not locked
has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
has 1 or 0 comments
On Super User, ...
24
The weight is already very low. Lower it further and we might as well not consider it at all.
Remember, the purpose of the filter is to block questions which are likely to fare poorly on the site (and annoy people in the process); like it or not, extremely poor grammar, spelling and punctuation are distractions and annoyances to many readers.
24
I don't know if you're joking or not, so I'll answer as if this were a serious proposal.
ELL is a serious StackExchange site like any other, centered at trying to help people learn English. If people are posting "garbled questions or answers in barely intelligible English", then their contributions are not going to uphold the standards of posts on the SE ...
23
There is a pretty big difference between LVQ and NAA.
Very low quality is for actual answers that have severe content or formatting problems.
Example:
lol u just have 2 use console.log(err) jquery ftw
Not an answer means that the post doesn't attempt to answer the question.
This flag is appropriate for "answers" that ask for clarification, ask another ...
23
I guess most of us current high-rep users are guilty of having answered these kinds of questions at some point in the past, and gaining rep points for it (I know I have) so discouraging the practice now feels slightly hypocritical. Still: the classy thing to do is absolutely to post only a comment, or a CW answer, and vote for the question to be closed. I'd ...
23
Since it's pretty much my fault that VLQ comes with an automatic downvote to begin with, I feel like I should weigh in on this.
I feel very strongly that we should not be removing posts we aren't even comfortable slapping a downvote on.
For all the hand-wringing about downvotes over the years, at least they're transparent: if your question or answer gets ...
22
Flag it as...
Not only is this slightly more accurate than "spam", it will feed into the same automated systems that track spam to slow the rate at which malicious noise-makers can make noise maliciously.
22
As a possible solution, I propose to do the following two things:
Add a description to No comment needed like:
This is a good choice if an existing comment already addresses the post’s issues.
Add a field Other, allowing the reviewer to enter a custom comment, which is a regular comment, possibly with the from review note.
21
At the risk of receiving downvotes from both flaggers and mod-supporters, I would say that both you and "declining" moderator made mistakes here.
Your mistake is of using wrong flag. VLQ description says "answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing" which makes it a very (very) bad fit for link-only answers.
Thing is, as long as ...
21
Flag one of the questionable posts for moderator attention, select 'other' and let us know what's going on. Don't down vote the posts in rapid (or slow) succession, because:
That's focusing a little too much on the user
Your votes will likely be automatically reversed, as an algorithm can't tell if you have the best intentions at heart
It's darn hard for ...
21
The Low Quality review queue is to "blame": https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/2322114.
As of April 5th, 2014, all future deletions by low-rep users from review will create a special post history entry that includes a link to the review task that resulted in the deletion:
Unlike deletions performed by moderators or trusted users, post ...
21
The system will now revoke the automatic downvote if, after the flag is marked Helpful, the post later gets an upvote.
Remember, the automatic downvote essentially exists because folks use this flag in cases where they should be downvoting. As such, it serves an important role... But should still be considered weak compared to actually downvoting the post ...
20
To repeat what @Robert & @MichaelMrozek mentioned, edit the crap out, downvote it, leave a comment mentioning rather than filling further reading and related question info, the user might want to add details which will make someone read the current question.
And oh, don't forget to Vote To Close / Flag it for closing as Not a Real Question.
FTR It's ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
