What kind of checks and balances are in place for over-zealous, puritan moderators who seem to have nothing better to do with their time than make it very difficult for people with genuine questions to get answers? Case in point- I was working on an answer to  on GIS Stack Exchange, which I considered to be on-topic. The OP was asking a programming question related to prominent GIS software and features. Next thing I know, the question is put on hold as off-topic. Per the  page:      Keep the site reasonably on topic by closing, migrating, or removing   blatantly off-topic questions.   With as little reputation as I have, is there nothing I can do to help users like this escape the oppressiveness and get answers to their questions?
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One or more of the following things happened to me on a Stack Exchange site:   My post(s) were wrongly deleted or locked by a moderator A moderator posted a wrong comment on one of my posts I was suspended, but did not do anything wrong I asked a meta question, but the question was closed and/or deleted A moderator discredited me in public ...   I think a moderator has abused their power, but I feel powerless against them.  What recourse do I have now? What can I do when I feel that a moderator has abused their power, and has been repeatedly unfair in their dealings with me?
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There was a suggestion on uservoice - now down, that really illustrate the need to stop users from gaming the system by simply asking meaningless, ridiculous question after question to gain rep. We have users who have gamed the system enough to actually have moderation capabilities.   These users do not deserve the system's trust and instead cause nothing but problems.   My solution is to enforce a threshold for how many questions you may ask and receive reputation on based on your answers or other activities.  Please stop these people from becoming trusted members of the community. It will not be good for anyone.
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Downvoting legitimate questions on Meta because one disagrees with the question's premise has become a bit of a problem.     Question bans on users asking legitimate questions are a real possibility. Discussion can be suppressed.  Heavily downvoted questions fall off the front page, and no longer have any visibility.   If you disagree with the question or its premise, why not:   Vote on the question based on its clarity and usefulness.  That's how we do it on every other SE site. Express your disagreement in an answer explaining why you disagree, and allow your opinion to be voted/vetted by the community on its own merit.   You can still vote down questions that:   Do not demonstrate minimal research effort (close as duplicate of FAQ questions), or Are merely rants, or otherwise not constructive.   Feature requests are an exception.  Note recent change in :     Unlike normal Stack Exchange sites, Meta invites the community to   discuss, debate and propose changes to the way the community itself   behaves, as well as how the software itself works. On posts tagged   feature-request, voting indicates agreement or disagreement with the   proposed change rather than just the quality or usefulness of the post   itself.
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This question was just posted to SO:    The OP admits right off the bat that the question is "more of a career question", which is very clearly off-topic. But I could not match one of our off-topic reasons to this question because they are all too specific:   Questions about general computing hardware and software are off-topic for Stack Overflow unless they directly involve tools used primarily for programming. You may be able to get help on Super User. Questions concerning problems with code you've written must describe the specific problem and include valid code to reproduce it. See SSCCE.org for guidance. Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and the expected results. See also: Stack Overflow question checklist Questions on professional server, networking, or related infrastructure administration are off-topic for Stack Overflow unless they directly involve programming or programming tools. You may be able to get help on Server Fault. Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it. This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)    Other can obviously be made to work for any situation, but the question was so far from on-topic that I wasn't really sure how to begin ("wha... you... can't you read?" just didn't seem to fit with the spirit of the new close reasons). Perhaps we need a more general off-topic reason, or at least some language I could copy/paste into the other reason?  As-is, I weant with "primarily opinion-based" which, in this case, seemed to fit just fine.
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I posted a question which was closed as off-topic and it seems like it could fit on another site in the network. How can I go about moving it there?   What is migration? When can a question be migrated, and who can migrate it? When should I consider migration, and when is it inappropriate? What causes a migration to be blocked and what happens after? What causes a migration to be rejected and what happens after? Anything else I should know about migration?
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Is there a Stack Exchange site where users post their questions not to get answers or to get up voted or down voted for quality, but to decide on which site to post their questions? If not, does anybody else think that a site like this should be created? Up votes and down votes could be allotted for how obvious the correct site to post to is. For example, a question that obviously asks about why their code is broken would be sent to SO possibly with down votes. However, a question that spans both programming and academia where it is unclear which subject is dominant, could get up votes for its complexity and deserving to be asked.   Is helping to decide where questions go a function of Meta Stack Exchange or should another site be created?  Are there any negatives to creating a site like this?
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Is it allowed for user to post question proposing some protest actions against SE site/network? For example propose to avoid using it on concrete date or misuse/overuse some of the rules to explicitly show its inadequacy. Actually not sure if we can join these cases, so if they differ, I'd like to find some kind of border between them.  If yes, are there special requirements for such kind of posts? If no, how should such questions be handled: just close as offtopic or close and delete? If some of them are allowed and some are not, where is a border?
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Every once in a while I take a look at the tools page and see a high number of flags - like right now.  And there is indeed some pretty spammy stuff in there.  It's fairly self-evident what to do with flagged questions, I think - just vote to close/delete if the flags are in fact accurate.  But what about flagged answers?  It doesn't really seem like there's much we can do about those.  Should we:   Flag them again, hoping to bump the answer down and/or get it auto-deleted? Flag for (real) moderator attention, i.e. to confirm "yes this is really spam"? Just leave them alone (assuming that a proper mod will find it soon)?   Also - is there any particular action we should be taking if a post is erroneously flagged - i.e. somebody got annoyed that a question wasn't marked CW?  Some guidelines on how best to use this feature would be appreciated.
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(probably soon to be deleted) made me wonder what would be the right way to handle surveys like that:     I'm doing a worker interview for High School and I want to be a computer programmer.      What is your job title?   What is your work history?   ...   What are the duties of a beginner?   Where is work available?     To me it feels like spam but checking the  makes me doubt that it really qualifies. I find it somewhat difficult to state that questions like in above example advertise something:     A post should be marked as spam ONLY when it contains an ...   If there was a link to a survey off-site (like in most similar questions I've seen so far) I would easily flag it as spam. But this one didn't have link, it expected answers right there, on our site, making it hard to say what exactly is advertised. Or it would be correct to say something like asker advertises their survey?  Another option I considered was flagging for moderator attention. But I can't come up with compelling flag message that would justify mod involvement assuming that question can be closed with 3K users votes.  That leaves the only option to handle such questions - vote to close, correct? (At sites where I'm active such questions are blatant off-topic; maybe this is so network wide but I am not sure).
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I  sometimes wonder where to ask a particular question (on Ubuntu? Unix and Linux? Superuser?) because all of the sites will have great people to help. This is not a common case for me but I already had it happening.   It may be, though, that a question goes unanswered for a while and would be ,  all in all, a better fit for another site.   Is it acceptable, then, to migrate it ? Or move (delete and repost)? Or copy?
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Guys, I just wonder if people are allowed to have civilized discussion (on any IT topic) on this forum without actually being accused of starting a row. I'm asking this question for a reason that few days I've asked few questions referring to VM, JIT etc. and compared them to C++ way and despite the fact that I've explained myself that I'm not starting any agro with anyone, that I'm really just genuinely curious, my post was first closed and then removed. I'm asking: What's wrong with asking nonstandard questions which sometimes my be quite difficult to answer? Thanks
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After reading , I feel I don't quite understand this function. What are the guidelines for flagging a question as &quot;Requires Moderator attention&quot;?
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appears to have been question banned because of two unpopular Meta suggestions. (He says so in )  Look at the two contributions that appear to have gotten him banned. Like those of many others, they may not be of perfect quality, but they are not actively harmful to the site, either. As it stands, you can get question blocked on Meta simply for asking questions that aren't popular with the Meta crowd.  Why does the team insist on keeping the question ban active on Meta?  Why can't real problem users be dealt with through manual moderator action? Don't tell me it's a problem of scale; as far as I can see, actually toxic users are very rare on Meta.  People will frequently complain that Meta actively discourages the expression of unpopular viewpoints and suggestions. With the threat of question bans in place, I find those complaints difficult to refute. I hate that.
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I came across  today. In reading the answer and the comments it turns out that the issue was just a simple typo that the OP made. So that being the case I decided that this question probably needs to be closed since this will not be helpful to any future vistors. However, in looking at the flag reasons (I don't have the close ability yet), I don't see a flag that would be appropriate.   I know some of these options might still be influx because of the . However, until a different off-topic flag description is created, how should this be flagged? Or should this not be flagged at all and just allowed to live on or wait for a user with close votes to use a custom off-topic close option?
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On Stack Overflow at the moment, there is a popular question which is currently high in the Hot Questions feed:   So far it has been closed twice (once by the community and a moderator and once by a moderator alone) but re-opened twice by the community. It is clearly not a [so] Stack Overflow question. Reading between the lines, there could be a valid Software Engineering question there, but it would be a very basic one (at the fizz-buzz competency level) and looks more like a populist attempt to farm reputation than a serious question.  Worst of all, even though there are some interesting answers on this question, they are all going to be completely useless to future visitors to the site, since they will be completely undiscoverable. If the question were at least "What is the best fair distribution algorithm?" it would still be off-topic (primarily opinion based), but at least it might help someone once the topic falls off the Hot Questions feed.  Although this has turned into just a bit of fun, and I don't want to kill that, enough is enough. While this question is open, unlocked, and still seen as a valid question, it is setting a bad example for the whole Stack Exchange network.   questions like this, especially on the grandfather Stack Exchange site, devalue the work we are putting in on every other site by making it appear acceptable to re-open populist questions like this after two moderators have classified it as off-topic.  What should we do about this question?   Should it be left open? Power to the people? Closed and locked by a moderator? Migrated to another site? &hellip;or something else?
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Since high rep users gain some pretty powerful privileges I wonder what checks and balances are in place to prevent them from abusing their privileges.  I am not near these privileges on any SE site, but a particular user that I think might abuse them is. , demonstrates one way that misuse can be highlighted.  Is that the only thing that prevents bad behavior for high rep users? You have to 'report' them on meta? What if you try to stop them but they 'punish' you, and you can't do anything about it because you are low rep? It would be nice if all their actions were public record; maybe some where on their profile page.  Things that might be done that abuses privileges in my opinion:   Someone may edit questions so they favor his own answer, or disfavor yours because your he does not like your answer. Delete votes on questions (I don't even know what this means) for subjective reasons. Dismiss flags that are valid.   Also, I am a bit confused between a moderator and a trusted user. I know that mods have more power but I would like to see a side-by-side comparison.
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I think we should have some mechanism that automatically flags certain meta posts (both child metas and here) for Stack Exchange staff attention when they get beyond a certain point. The thresholds would be something like (subject to tweaking):   Post is  or  Post has a score of 50 or more (possibly adjusts based on site).       OR   Post receives a bounty from 3 or more users (this will take weeks, I know, that's the point)   The idea is to prevent very highly voted posts from falling through the cracks. Here are some examples where this has happened (or, at the very least, a very long time passed between a staff response and an answer). These are just the some of the ones that eventually DID happen:             The bar for this should be very high. Possibly higher than the one I propose above. But it should exist, to handle the outlier cases that fall through the cracks, plus it will encourage more meta participation and voting (since it will add to the perception that voting really does matter), which can only be a good thing.         Could you expand on how you think this feature would help solve problems on the sites? It's not hard for us to slap  when we don't like a feature request or don't have time to work on it or when it's blocked by some other feature or when the request is unclear, etc. But I don't know if that will fix the underlying problem. (As an aside, it's strange to call out meta posts that have been addressed. Is the problem that they weren't fixed fast enough? If so, I don't see how your proposal addresses that.)   In at least two of those links, someone tweeted at @balpha before they got noticed. In a third, I custom flagged one for dev attention and @AnnaLear fixed it within three days later. Some of these are huge fixes, some of them are small; the bottom line is that I don't know what you have noticed and what you haven't, which is why I didn't link to questions that haven't been addressed. Searching for unaddressed things might turn up lots of stuff you've thought about but never got a , or it might turn up stuff that fell through the cracks.  However, these questions took six months or more before any dev response, at all, but they were things that Stack Exchange clearly did support, because they happened. A system that nearly guarantees a dev response for the most popular posts will serve to:   Prevent very easy things from falling through the cracks, like #1, #2, #5, and #7 above Facilitate communication "We love this idea, but it's very hard!" Like #6 above Increase morale and user participation on meta "hey my votes and bounties actually accomplish something!"   This is about fixing easy bugs faster / without missing any, and about increasing communication on the more difficult things.    Related, but not dupe (because this is a specific proposed solution, not a question):