Ex-Moderator Madara Uchiha's  was recently untagged as  by a staff member, which removes it from the featured box on the related community's sidebar. This is rather early for a moderator resignation. Per a  on a question regarding the above event, it is now becoming standard practice for moderator resignations to be untagged from  after only 24 hours. This is a rather large step away from the usual practice of letting elected moderators decide how long moderator resignations, or questions in general, should be featured. Juan went on to explain, with my emphasis on one point:  Lately, we have had an increase of resignation posts that have served to host combative and hurtful words to attack Stack employees, other mods, and teammates. We need to be mindful of this and limit the time the posts are featured. We still value people posting these when they're stepping away from the team. We also value folks being able to say their goodbyes and we want to continue to feature these resignation posts. But we need to keep an eye on the length of time that these featured posts can be in the sidebar.  Why can't the hurtful material be moderated, as is usual practice? Is it too much to moderate? I feel what Journeyman Geek♦  is particularly impactful:  We watch out for, and remember our own. If we're restricting this due to fear, we're lost. We have lost.  Featured posts, as noted historically, should be a reflection of what the community at large feels requires attention. I feel that a moderator resignation, given their extensive contributions to the community, should be a part of that - for a time that their fellow elected moderators feel is appropriate. They're very important moments in a community's history. For what other reasons are we limiting these announcements now? Are there no other options?
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How long are moderator resignation posts allowed to be featured in the sidebars of our sites?
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I'm out of close votes again today. But I still have 100 flags. How do the mods feel about me flagging questions for closure, even though I would be able to VtC myself, if I weren't already out of votes?  Related: How do the mods feel about me flagging a question for closure (a super obvious code-dump, for example), even if I have CVs remaining, in an attempt to preserve my close votes for less clear cut close decisions?
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Is there a limit on how long a flag (on a question/answer, not on a comment) can wait for a moderator's attention?  Does it vary from site to site (I believe it may take longer on SO)?
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There is a steady stream of duplicates of  coming in lately. It's got me wondering. Roughly speaking, out of say 100 folks who get this ban, how many    wander away and never interact with SO again?   do the sorts of things that might lift a ban, but don't get it lifted? do the sorts of things they should, and lift the ban? post a question of their own on Meta which we close as a dupe?   Among the continue-to-interact folks, is there a difference in success rate between those who post on Meta about it (motivated, but not good rules-readers, who nonetheless get customized advice) and those who do not (better rules readers, but working to some extent blind) - which do better?  Is there a reasonable chance of recovering from a ban, assuming you care enough to try?
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On Stack&nbsp;Overflow, I'm a pretty frequent contributor with over 3K in reputation. Almost all of which earned by answering real user questions about Windows programming and other topics.  Last night, somone posted a .  I knew the easiest thing to do would be to direct him to an appropriate documentation page on MSDN that I thought would help. And I literally did this:   Copied the URL directly into the post. Below the URL, copied two lines of content from that page that was relevant. Small code snippit below that.   Literally, this is what the answer looked like:           This warning is automatically promoted to an error. If you wish to   modify this behavior, use #pragma warning. For example, to make C4235   into a level 2 warning, use the following line of code  #pragma warning(2:4235)    I felt that by cutting and pasting a quote from the website, and attributing it with the URL was proper form. Such that it's not ambiguous where the answer originated from - both from a copyright perspective as well as a courteous to the content owner.  About an hour later, I observed two things:   One moderator downvoting the answer and flagging it because "Copy/pasting. Nice. Did you see "© 2011 Microsoft. All rights reserved" at the bottom of that page" Another moderator deleted it with just a link to the FAQ - which says nothing about cut and paste or copyright rules.   Well that was disappoining. It wasn't like I was pasting a writeup without giving credit to the original author. Just a small quote from a well known reference site.  So here's my questions:   What is the policy around answers coming from other online reference sources? Is pasting a URL to a page with an answer OK? Is pasting content from the URL OK?  Even if it's attributed? Is there a proper way to attribute content when it originates from another site? Is there a proper way to attribute an answer if it originates elsewhere? Was I wrong to paste a snippet of content from MSDN, or was I wronged by aggressive moderators?   Now here's the real kicker - my day job is a software engineer at Microsoft. I am certain that my employer would not take issue at all with me helping the Windows development community by referencing pages they publish. So in some sense, the Stack&nbsp;Overflow communinity is just making it harder for the Windows experts to help the Windows community. It seems odd.
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Given , I must say I think the idea (making that user's content visible to only them) is a good one.  However, the people in whose hands that power will be placed terrify me.  Jeff is saying that he doesn't like that bans can degenerate into meta-discussions about the fairness of banning, and in that respect I agree with him. But the meta-discussions do accomplish one thing -- they get more than one person to look at the ban and weigh in on what they think.  This isn't that I don't trust moderators (or, indeed, diamond moderators), but I don't trust any one single human being with an irrevocable and complete banhammer, where there's no potential to dispute things. (And if the user doesn't know they're banned, there's no potential for dispute)  Basically, I'd sleep a lot more soundly at night knowing that if one of these "enhanced bans" are put into place, that at least two people have looked at the "problem child", and only after more than one person has signed off on such a ban, does that go into effect. I don't care exactly what that process is, but I don't want to have to worry about pissing off a moderator and getting banned as a result.  We all get pissed off here -- it's part of any community. But "the nuclear option(s)" need(s) to be decided upon by someone with a cool head, not someone who's pissed off.
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Post-split, Meta's moderators are (we've been told) the CMs and maybe a few other employees.  And, sure enough, those folks have diamonds.  However, something's missing:    Where are all the moderators??  Also, while I'm here, see the underlined text -- I know it's boilerplate, but since Meta doesn't have elections, you might want to change that.  (Lest you say that per-site metas have that text too, at least their associated sites have elections.  Lest you say that betas don't have elections, at least they can aspire to do so in the future.)
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Question description  There are many questions (~250 in the last five weeks) relating to      sometimes they are about licensing, legal issues, , , , etc.  These questions relate to the same growing polarization between community and Stack&nbsp;Exchange staff. But, it is not easy to search or filter them because the tags are not uniform for those questions, they do not have the same tags.  Could we group all these posts together by some common tag (new or not)? (in addition, maybe we should create less of these questions, they tend to become noise now, water down the core message, and it is ).    Relevance  Overview of current tags (aside from the discussion tag) for the first ten  (           ) questions relating to  (ordered by relevance)                              1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10     moderators              x           x   x   x     community               x           x   x     etiquette                   x     users                       x     company                     x     moderation                      x     code-of-conduct                     x       x       x     deleted-questions                               x     legal                                                   x   These tags are obviously not the same while it is arguably the same topic (it is even for the same, specific, search term) .  Instead of using multiple searches one might wish to control tracking these question by adding some single relevant tag to watched tags or ignore tags. But, this is difficult when they do not use the same tag. And in the case of ignoring one might ignore too much when the tag is not specific.  Another indicator that these posts need consistent tagging is the fact that there exist highly upvoted answers that function as an archive for these questions (see  and ). But it is only a hack/workaround for the absence of a common tag; they are not an optimal solution.    Why now?  In an older question () it was suggested to create a specific tag. That was rejected at that point. But, now we are several weeks, and many many questions, further. The situation is more escalated than what might have foreseen at that point. The overview becomes a mess and something needs to be done.  See the bump in the image below which indicates that something is 'going on' and it entails a large fraction of the current post. (obtained from )
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Right now there are two options a moderator can contact the team:   Pinging a team member in TL, or e-mail.   Both options are a bit crude, there's no easy way of knowing that a fellow mod has already contacted the team or an easy way to backtrack an issue. Certainly we do get things done, however our current tools and processes get in the way more often than not. What I would like would be a feature that:   Would allow me to send a message to the team, Instantly notify my fellow moderators about my message, Give us a rough idea of any progress (unread, pending, declined / completed / wtf?), All complete with a list of past messages.   I think the current feature that mostly resemble what I have in mind is mod messages, every time a moderator sends a mod message to a user, all moderators and the team are notified, and of course there's a handy list of past messages. The mod team bat signal would be more of an issue tracker than a private communication mechanism though, I don't expect the team to respond in any other way than a status. If there's need for discussion on an issue, well, we always have TL (sigh).  Thoughts?  TL;DR  I want an easy way of knowing that one of my fellow mods have communicated an issue to the SE team, and an equally easy way of knowing when and how the issue has been handled.    To address some of : This isn't a replacement for TL, or even worse a replacement for MSO/E or searching around before you ask. Some of the issues that the tool could be used for are:   So long, and thanks for all the fish1, I'll be taking a couple of weeks off, Could you please invalidate votes between these users, Could you please blacklist this IP, Eeek, that user posted their credit card number in their question, please purge2.   And should not be used for:   Anything that should be discussed in public,  Anything that's a search away,  Anything that would require a discussion.   One way we could limit the use of the tool would be to only allow specific categories of messages, and nothing else. You know, like a real issue tracker.  1 My ragequit message, don't anyone dare steal that ;)  2 True story. Sort of.    I must admit I like , it's unrealistic to expect SE to scale as well as the community does, and I'm all for shiny new toys. However:    - March 15, declined,  - March 17,    - Oct 30 '11, declined, Countless discussions for similar mod tools in TL, summarily dismissed.    So, at least three of my examples (more or less) have already been proposed as separate features, and declined (and I've only searched for 30 seconds). It appears that lobbying for those abilities to be made available to moderators doesn't seem to be an option, after all. Don't get me wrong, we get cool toys all the time, however there are always going to be actions that require SE's intervention.   My examples might not be the best examples, but that's irrelevant, the whole point of this feature request is that since we'll always need to communicate certain issues to the team, can we please do it in a way that's not absolutely braindead?
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The "Reputation &amp; Moderation" page on any site (/help/site-moderators) still refers to the company behind Stack Exchange as Stack Exchange and not Stack Overflow.     Moderators act as a liaison between the community and Stack Exchange the company.   Seeing as how the name change was recent, I'm not surprised this hasn't been caught yet, and I'm sure there are other instances of this around somewhere.
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I've seen .  Voting to undelete will not work because it was deleted by a moderator, but I managed to vote for reopening for some reason.  I doubt this is intentional, perhaps not as important, but still.
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While this is an old problem, it's one that will only increase with time.  As Stack Exchange sites gain in popularity, more and more users are coming to the sites in search of answers to their specific problems.  Unfortunately, not all of them understand the basic operating principals behind Stack Exchange, and ask questions, or start discussions as separate answers.  Deleting these answers is fine, but more often (I would argue almost always) than not, a new user doesn't understand why.  Granted, comments are a way of doing this, but there are drawbacks to comments:   They require extra, replicated effort on the part of the moderator for something that they do repetitively The message will be inconsistent; messages like this would be consistent, cite the relevant resources that guide the user in the right direction The larger size would have a higher chance of grabbing the user's attention, as well as put more weight behind the action (as it's officially attached to the answer in a consistent manner). The banner will serve as an example of what not to do to other users who can see the deleted post.   Additionally, there are tools that can help with auto-commenting on posts, but these have their drawbacks as well:   Not all moderators use these tools The messages that are delivered by the tools are ultimately generated initially by the moderators, so the message will not be consistent These tools are not always available on other devices (e.g., mobile platforms)   It would be helpful to the user if they had a reason indicating why the answer was deleted.  Something along the lines of:    In order to accomplish this, I propose an additional (not a replacement) button in the moderation tools labeled "delete with reason".  Mods would still be able to delete answers outright, they just have the option now of stating why in an easy manner which will allows for more time to moderate harder.  Placement is not important (screen real estate is valuable, yes), but I envision it looking something like this in the moderator tools:    When clicking "delete with reason", a dialog, much like the "close" dialog will appear with options:    Initial options for the reasons could be:   Asking a new question Starting discussion   A mechanism like this has the potential for other benefits as well:   Users with an answer deleted with a reason might actually be directed to perform the right action now, and in the future (creating better site denizens) Users who wish to contest the deletion of an answer on meta can cite that specific reason, which mods can specifically address (which actually might reduce noise on meta about "why was my answer deleted?") Can reduce flags on answers asking "why was this deleted?" (admitted, I've not personally experienced this to be a pervading problem on Stack Overflow, but this might be the case for other mods on other Stack Exchange sites) Other Stack Exchange sites which don't have that many users will give a better experience to their users when their first action isn't ideal for a Stack Exchange site; this will enhance the chance that the site will retain the user and get good contributions from them (as per Farseeker's comments: , ).   Additionally, if this works well for the moderator tools, I imagine that it would not be such a leap to eventually have this graduated to users with the rep to cast delete votes, thus allowing non-mods to deliver a more clear message to new users about how to best participate on a Stack Exchange site.
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I flagged a post today, typed out a fairly thorough explanation, clicked the button... and got told that I'd already flagged this post (for something else, which I'd forgotten about) so this flag wasn't allowed.  (This happens if the first flag is still active.)  The dialogue with my explanation was gone at this point, so if I wanted to communicate with the moderators about that, I was going to have to start over.  (In case you're wondering how this could happen, one flag was related to the post itself and one was related to the user -- there being no way to flag a user directly, you have to hang it off of a post.  But I've also seen this with cases where the first flag hangs around unhandled for a week or two and I've forgotten about it.)  Since the system is going to detect that I've already flagged a post and reject a second flag, can it do that after I click the "flag" link instead of waiting until the end of the process?  (Or gray out the link so I can't click it in the first place?)  2015-12-18: someone suggested to me in chat today that this had been implemented, so I tested again.  The behavior has not changed: I flagged a post using "other", then flagged it again (also "other") before the first flag was handled, and the flag was rejected only after I'd typed the message.  (I did this on a site where I'm a moderator so I could then clean up after myself.)
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I believe that showing the post score for nomination posts during primaries is a bad idea.  When I loaded the primaries page during the election, the first thing I saw was a post voted -1. This immediately colored my impression of the post. Reading his post didn't indeed make me wish he was a moderator, but at the same point I couldn't bring myself to click on the down arrow. He wasn't an awesome candidate, but he wasn't a -2 score candidate either. Actually, I kinda wanted to sympathy upvote instead.  I want to judge by myself whether a candidate is worth or not my +1. For some of those people I don't have an opinion already, and I want to form one on my own. I don't want game theory to kick in, I don't want to be tricked into sympathy upvotes.  Having those numbers in large print as the first thing I see about them honestly prevents me from doing so. I'd rather have their avatar there.     Some people on chat do not agree with me;  I imagine they'll post explaining why I want to be aware of their opinion while forming my own.      Regardless of the discussion here, if you do prefer to hide the scores as you vote, here's the jQuery oneliner that does just that:  $(".vote-count-post").hide()
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As an alternative to the other FAQ format being fleshed out here on Meta Stack Exchange, I'd like to propose something far more terse that covers the bare essential mechanics of being a moderator.   Feel free to add more questions, but keep them short: this isn't the place to get into complex moderation issues, but for an executive summary of what it is to be a moderator.  To add a new section, create a new answer and link to it in the index below.  Index:               See also:
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I asked , but within minutes, it was off the question list even though the question list went back an hour in time.  Is this some form of moderation?  If so, it seems weird that no comment was made within the thread that the question was deleted, moved, or otherwise removed from the question list.
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I flagged  five days ago because it seems off-topic to me. The question has been closed by a moderator few minutes after.  However my flag has not been marked as helpful (or declined, or disputed) in my flags summary page. It's just like the flag has not been taken into account (screenshot below).    Is a moderator can explain me?