newsletter

Blog Post Roundup

There were a few blog posts last month that are particularly applicable to site moderation, so for those who haven’t seen them, here is September’s suggested reading list.

The Future of Community Wiki

The suggested edits feature made community wikis rarely (if ever) needed. This blog post outlines when (and when NOT) to make questions community wiki.

Hint: If you’ve checked that “convert to wiki” button recently, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Improved Tagging

When tagging a question, descriptive tag excerpts now pop up as part of the tag completion. But for this to work, you need good tag wiki excerpts. Tag excerpts shouldn’t just define generic terms, they should educate users about when to use those tags!

Gorilla vs. Shark

“Gorilla vs. Shark” is about a subtle type of poll which appears far too often: the “which is better?” post. When users asks for “this v. that” comparisons, they rarely detail what problem they are actually trying to solve. Answers can only be a rough guess of what information would actually be helpful. “This v. that” questions would be better expressed as examinations of the underlying concepts without all the mock conflict.

Flags Too Often Marked [declined]

Marking a flag [declined] was designed to deter serial abusers of the flagging system, but we find that this “slap on the wrist” is being used more often than is beneficial.

Flags should be closed as [helpful] under most circumstances. If you feel strongly that a question was flagged in bad faith, it is okay to mark it [declined]. But try to err on the side of clearing as [helpful] whenever the user is trying to be genuinely helpful, even if you do not necessarily act on the flag.

Users are asked to flag posts to help keep the city street clean. Even if you feel the flag was not technically correct, you don’t want to continually send the message that their help is no longer wanted. That is not what the feature is about.

We clarified the guidance for when to dismiss a flags as [helpful] or [declined]:

dismiss flag on this post as…
[helpful]   the flags have merit but no further action is required
[declined]  the flags are unhelpful or noise

Super-Ping to Reach Individual Users

The regular @ chat alerts only notify someone if they’ve been in the chat room in the last day or so (see chat notifications help). But did you know moderators can use a special @@ notification to contact anyone on your site, even if they have never been in the chat room? Moderators can use the @@ super-ping that will always put a notification in the user’s inbox. The syntax is

@@<chat id>

or:

@@<user id on site>@site.stackexchange.com

So, for example, typing:

@@98786@meta.stackoverflow.com

would generate an inbox notification to me, even if I’ve never been in that chat room.

Costanza Wallet

With a nod to the famous Seinfeld sketch, users are no longer limited to two login credentials (OpenIDs, OAuth, etc), but can have as many as they need. In addition, logins are now stored at the network level (not per site).

This means a few changes to the moderator interface. To view a user’s credentials, use the “my logins” link next to the edit button on user profiles. Also, merging accounts now includes additional protections because the merge applies to every site network-wide. If a candidate has +2000 rep on any site, the merge requires developer approval. The additional notifications will all happen automatically.

For further discussions about multiple logins, this is a good opportunity to plug the weekly SE podcasts (SE Podcast #16, starting at 5:20).

That’s all I have for now. See you next month!

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Moderator Newsletter. This monthly newsletter highlights the top community-related issues and events of the previous month.

Past Issues now Archived

The monthly newsletters are now archived in blog format. You can see all previous issues of the Community Moderator Newsletter at http://moderator.stackexchange.com/. The newsletter will continue to go directly to your inbox, but the blog format provides a convenient way to find and reference previous articles.

A Recipe for Supporting Community Conferences

We continue to sponsor community leaders to attend interesting, relevant, and useful conference. This latest blog post goes into greater detail about how to sponsor community leaders to attend or speak at an event on behalf of your site (of course, moderators are eligible, too!). Take a look at the article to see examples of the vinyl stickers, t-shirts, flyers, and cool business cards we put together to support your community’s events.

Supporting Community Conferences

A Fresh Look at Area 51 Analytics

Many users have asked what the statistics in Area 51 mean to the future of their beta site. We’ve said on many occasions that a site can remain in beta as long as it takes, but this latest blog post takes a closer look at what those analytics numbers mean and, more importantly, what you can do improve your participation and traffic.

Does this site have a chance of succeeding?

Your Site Has a Newsletter

Have you noticed the newsletter ads appearing on all of the sites? Despite our aversion to spammy email, this feature has been in high-demand. We’re hoping these newsletters will get less-engaged users coming back to the site. Newsletters include the top questions for the week, unanswered questions, and (coming soon!) important moderator announcements. They’re a great way for users to catch up on what they might otherwise have missed each week.

Stack Exchange Site Newsletters

Deleted Comments now Visible

Moderators can now view any deleted comments on a post. From the ‘mod’ menu, click on ‘show deleted comments’ (available only if there are deleted comments on that post). This should prove handy when cleaning up obsolete or resolved comment threads. Once comments no longer serve a purpose, they should be deleted.

Should moderators delete obsolete and resolved comment threads?

Collecting Anonymous Feedback

Typically, about 90% of your site’s traffic is from anonymous unregistered users. We now provide a way for these users to provide feedback on posts other than passively incrementing the post’s view counter. This data is currently being evaluated to see what we can do with it. If you have any suggestions, add your feedback to that meta thread!

Anonymous user feedback now in testing

That’s all I have for now. See you next month!

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Moderator Newsletter. This monthly newsletter highlights the top community-related issues and events of the previous month.

Helping Users When Deleting Answers

It used to be that, when you deleted a post, any comments you left to the author were also removed from their inbox. We changed that behavior so you can now reach the author of a deleted post to explain your actions.

When deleting a post, simply leave a comment immediately before deleting it. Your comment will appear in their inbox, even though the post has been deleted. Note that this only works for moderators and only for comments to the author of the post (@replies to other users will not work)… and the post has to be deleted within one hour after leaving the comment. The details are outlined in this meta post.

Subjective Close Reason Replaced with “Not Constructive”

Asking users to avoid questions that are subjective has long been a source of confusion on Stack Exchange. Outside our computing and mathematics sites, most questions are somewhat subjective. The problem starts when questions become unreasonably subjective, and expecting users to understand the difference was also, in itself… subjective.

For that reason, we changed the criteria for closing those questions to “not constructive — This question is not a good for to our Q&A format …”

I like this change because it removes the pointed accusation that users are being too argumentative. It explains, instead, that we simply choose to forgo these types of questions because the answers will not likely be useful to this site. “We expect answer to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; This questions will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.”

This is a clearer, less user-hostile explanation about “what kind of questions can I ask here.” It diffuses somewhat the rhetoric of closing as a personal attack to one of educating and espousing “What’s special about Stack Exchange.”

Community@ Email Address

The Community Team is up to five members: Rebecca (rebecca@), Dori (dori@), Josh/”Shog9″ (shog@), Susan/”HedgeMage” (susan@), and Robert (rcartaino@). In addition to our direct email addresses, we now have a “team” email address: community@stackexchange.com. If you wish to address the entire team in one shot, feel free to use this Community email address.

Increasing User Retention

We started taking a closer look at how many of your highly engage users keep coming back to your site month after month. Most websites are a “leaky bucket,” but if your site consistently fails to keep users coming back, that will effectively put the brakes on your site’s growth. Consider the effort you put into getting new users — A site with a high churn requires enormous growth just to avoid a decline in involvement.

Review your /review path

The first step to reducing churn is to actively engage your newest users. Have you seen the /review path under the tools menu? At 200 rep, a review entry appears in the top menu; at +10K reputation, it appears under the ‘tools’ menu.

These are the first posts a new user has ever submitted to your site. One of those users just may be your next big user! But if that new user doesn’t understand how your site works, it’s all for naught.

Did you know…

It’s human nature: If a user receives any indication that someone noticed them on your site, the probability that they will return goes through the roof! It’s not just a bit of glowing praise or a hearty “good job” that keeps users interested in the site (although that is nice), but any acknowledgement that someone noticed their presence. Please make a special effort to regularly review a user’s first posts and vote, comment, or flag them appropriately. Encourage your community to do the same. Don’t be a “leaky bucket.”

One User’s First-Time Experience

Maybe you’ve heard this before — a hands-on style to community and user engagement is critical, especially when it comes to educating new users who are new to this style of “knowledge creation.” But it’s nice to hear it from a first-time user; How she went from being the “poster child for bad posting etiquette to becoming their poster child for fast learner! A poignant tale …” and a good read.

Life in the Stack Exchange Lane

That’s all I have for now. See you next month!

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Moderator Newsletter. This monthly newsletter highlights the top community-related issues and events of the previous month.

Question Down-Votes Are Now Free

As part of our effort to increase voting on questions, down-voting questions will not be subject to a -1 rep penalty. Down-voting answers still incur the usual -1 reputation cost. We will be monitoring voting patterns over the next few weeks and evaluate the effect of this change.

Community Promotion Ads for Your Site

If you’ve been following the Stack Exchange blog, you may have read that your Stack Exchange site can now host its own ads for events of interest to your community. Users submit the artwork for these ads and users vote for which ones appear. This is a great way to bring announcements of interest directly to your community. See the blog post for details.

Community Guest Appearances on SE Podcasts

Next week’s podcast (SE Podcast #07, airing June 8th) has scheduled our own Steve Karantza (Shirlock Homes from DIY.SE) as a guest. If your site has an interesting user you would like to “meet” on a future podcast, let us know! Who Do You Want to See on the Stack Exchange Podcast?

Keep Network Meta Questions on Meta.

There was an interesting discussion on last week’s moderator chat-cast (#20, starting at about 4:42 PM in the transcript). I mentioned the importance of keeping and supporting discussions on your per-site metas, even when those discussions could go on meta.stackoverflow.com.

We routinely follow all the support threads on your meta site. It is completely unnecessary to burden your users with the subtle nuances of where to ask for help or submit a feature-request. Network-related questions are okay hosted on your meta site. Please pass that on to your community when you see users shutting down discussions with “This should be asked on meta.SO.” Our goal was never to dismissively direct everyone to meta.stackoverflow just at the hint of the issue being “network wide.” Pass it on!

From the Department of “If you read nothing else…”

The Teacher’s Lounge hosts all the latest discussion of interest to moderators. But pouring through endless chat transcripts may not be your thing. If you read nothing else, why not drop by the chat room once a month to view the “starred posts?” The right column highlights the most “starred” advices and announcements the moderators found most helpful. If a favorite post rouses your interest, click on the link to see the full transcript — Why not use this newsletter as a reminder to check it out once a month?

On a related note:

If you have a general moderator issue that can be discussed in public (without disclosing private per-user stuff) then we encourage you to discuss general moderation issues using the [moderation] tag on your site. That way the entire community can benefit from the conversation and provide input. And don’t hesitate to email the Community Managers at community@stackexchange.com or team@stackoverflow.com if you have any deeper concerns. We always prioritize email from community moderators.

That’s all I have for now. See you next month!

Introducing the Community Moderator Newsletter

Welcome to the first edition of the Stack Exchange Moderator Newsletter. This monthly newsletter will provide an important outlet to highlight the top community-related issues of the previous month, as well as highlighting the newest features added to the Network.

My goal is to keep the noise and the rhetoric to a minimum. This will be an information-dense resource, so let’s get started.

Staying Informed

If you haven’t already subscribed to our Stack Exchange Blog, that is where you will find most of our major announcements. If it’s more detail you seek, the Recent Feature Changes to Stack Exchange post provides an up-to-date list of all the major new features added to your site.

Return of the Stack Exchange Podcast

April brought and end to the long hiatus of the sorely-missed Stack Exchange Podcast. The audio podcast invites us to to listen in on a weekly call between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (CEO and CTO of Stack Exchange) to discuss the development of the Stack Exchange Network. There is a lot of information packed into the hour of pithy banter between Jeff, Joel, and the occasional guest. It really is the best way to gain some insight into the how’s and why’s of how this all works. I receive each episode automatically on my iPod through a free subscription from iTunes, or you can listen to it on your computer by watching for the announcement of each episode weekly in our blog.

Encouraging More Question Voting

We’ve known basically forever that questions don’t get voted on nearly as much as answers. To promote more voting on questions, users now have an additional 10 question-only votes in addition to the current 30 all-purpose votes they get each day. We also provide a gentle pop-up reminder for users who cast a disproportionate number of votes on answers only. Set a good example and vote on particularly clear or intriguing questions on your site.

/Review path for New Users

We have been experimenting with a set of review pages that focus on contributions by new users. It’s incredibly important to vet and review contributions by new users, as that’s your first and best opportunity to educate. It’s also how you’ll find and reward your most talented newcomers. Please make it part of your routine to visit those review pages and make a special effort to up-vote good content from new users. That will give them the initial boost they need and help them realize “Wow! This is the place for me!”

Treat Meta Questions Like Gold

It’s not unusual for your meta site to receive significantly less traffic than the main site. The problems begin when you meta starts to get ignored by the community and ignored by the moderators. It is particularly disturbing when users reach out in meta and starts talking about improving the site or asking for help… only to be ignored; No follow-up, only deafening silence.

The only way to break that cycle of The “Empty Restaurant” Syndrome is to treat each meta question like gold. That small spark of activity may be just what you need to promote even more involvement in the site. But more importantly, it is vitally important that users know meta is there when they need it.

To that end — As a moderator, every new meta post is now inserted as an item in your inbox. The “inbox” is that small Stack Exchange icon in the upper, left-hand corner that notifies you when you have replies anywhere on the Network. When users reach out in meta and starts talking about improving the site or asking for help, please engage them by giving their inquiries top priority! More meta participation will encourage others to participate so you don’t have to carry the entire burden of community support yourself.

Fill Out Your Tag Wikis

If you haven’t visited your ‘tags’ page lately, the tag listing now shows a bit more information about each tag, including an excerpt from each tag wiki.

There was an interesting issue raised by ChrisF of our Home Improvement site. He noted that we should make special effort to assure that the first two pages of tags have tag wikis. He’s right. Tag wikis are a great way to educate users about the most popular subjects on your site. Take a look at your ‘tags’ page and see to it that each of those top tags has clear and concise wiki entries.

That’s all I have for now. See you next month!