Community Asks Sprint Announcement and Results - September 2024

Please allow moderators to change the outcome of a handled flag, such as when they accidentally/prematurely decline a flag they ultimately want to mark as helpful, instead.

This is a minor issue but is one that continues to crop up on a regular basis. As I'm not a moderator anywhere, I can't provide any kind of stats on this, but it's something that moderators ought to be able to do, especially given they are supposed to be "exception handlers".

_{Per staff request, I posted this as a standalone feature request: Allow moderators to change the outcome of a handled flag}

Bringing Meta and Chat to the sidebar

_{copied nearly in its entirety from here - much like Bernie Sanders, I am once again asking :D}

In the old days, the links to meta and chat were front and center in the top bar. They're hidden under the SE/hamburger menu and its hugely unintuitive. This practically results in underutilisation of tools helpful for a healthy community - our second space (meta) and third space (chat) could use more love.

It also means it's a lot clearer to users how to find the per site meta or main chatroom for the site

Especially considering the whole intent of the sidebar initially was to inline teams into regular sites, and teams essentially is its own thing now, it seems a better use of that space

Please fix the fix you had for Inbox notifications not consistently marked as read after clicking title I'm clicking the same message multiple times to get it to clear, is it broken, or is something else happening? from the last Community Asks sprint. So that we could once again open things in tabs. The only sane way I can manage my inbox is:

1. Open one tab.
2. Open the notification bar.
3. Open one notification in the same tab.
4. Repeat 2-3 until no unread notifications are left.

It gets annoying if you have to deal with 10+ notifications. Which I often have to more than once a day.

It's already tagged with status-review, but I have to point a big sign at Flag window redux: proposed syntax. This is a mini-overhaul on the wording used in the flagging dialog box.

The language improvements here are fantastic, because a bunch of ambiguity is removed in several places. Some highlights:

• Each flag describes what the flagger wants to have happen. E.g. "I think this post should be... Deleted as spam". When first getting involved with SE, users don't really know that red flags are basically votes to delete. Further, the descriptions are more encompassing of the kinds of things that red flags are meant for.
• The removal of "needs improvement" is something we've wanted for a long time, even though folks have been far less vocal about it lately. Like Machavity says: The post notice says "closed", the privilege used to close stuff is called "close votes"... Why do we hide this behind "Needs improvement" still? You've made several changes to post notices, featuring guidance depending upon who looks at them (i.e. post authors get special guidance that's tailored to them). We don't need the ambiguity of "needs improvement" anymore. Closure isn't a death sentence for a question, and that's always prominently displayed to the question asker.
• The mod intervention flag description got some expansion that loosely adds "If there's something you want to add extra context for, use this!" which is really important for mods to understand where a flagger is coming from.

I could go on all day about how great the changes are, but I'll get off my soap box now.

Please fix this bug preventing us from submitting edits that contain an image. This has been reported on Meta Stack Overflow here: False-positive "Your post is mostly images."

Another inbox-related request, but it'd be great if filtering unread inbox notifications actually showed my unread notifications.

I still have two unread messages and gosh do I wish I knew what they were.

As a recap, selecting "unread" applies a local filter on the inbox items and does not go out to find unread items in the full inbox. The link to the full inbox is unhelpful because there aren't any filters there to find unread items so my only option would be to look through literally hundreds of pages of notifications to find the two which are unread.

The flag/close dialog has several serious issues. The easiest way to see these is to review the responses to Question Close Updates, most of which have been unacknowledged (publicly) by staff.

Issues include:

• The flagging dialog should not put all the custom close reasons under the heading of "needs improvement"
• The "needs more focus" reason is not only about posts that ask multiple questions. It is also about questions that are too broad and which it is unreasonable to expect to be answered in the SE Q&A format.
• When you've voted to close with a site-specific close reason, you can't see which one you chose at a later time

Please consider implementing Machavity's very clear proposal.

Can we finally get the badges for finding duplicates? See It's time to reward the duplicate finders;

That is the most upvoted question with status-review on Meta Stack Overflow, and I think other communities would also appreciate this. I could try and make the case for it here, but I think the linked question already does a great job. If you are not planning to implement this, at least give us an update after 4+ years.

Since you're already looking at closing/reviewing, might I recommend y'all wrap up this project I'd started last year?

Improving the copy in the close modal and post notices – 2023 edition

While there's still some slight adjustments that could be done, even as proposed, the new text will be miles better than the existing text. If I get some time, I may try to post a new answer with an updated version of the text based on feedback. The subjective question close reason is still the most finicky.

Can I request rethinking how associated with 𝕏 (Twitter) we want to be?

In particular: Is it time to reconsider Social Media links in "Share" and User Profiles, etc?

I'm not sure if this is the place to ask this, but it seems like you're asking for suggestions on things to look at so I'll bring this up here. Over a decade ago 15 years ago, this request was status-declined: Please add the ability to fold blocks of code in questions and answers However, as you can see, it is pretty well received. And as this answer notes, there is standard HTML which does pretty much exactly what is asked for. It would be nice if you could look into adding the <details>/<summary> tags to your list of allowed tags.

A couple of years ago (back when that was the process), I had tried to flag it so that a mod could tag it for review, but that flag was sadly declined with a stock reason.

My two cents bugs that I'd like to see fixed:

1. Follow popup won't clear (without refresh)
2. Can't delete the filter called My Filter

Both are old time bugs, and likely easy (?) to fix.

Thanks!

P.S.

In case it's done, I hereby promise 1k points for each in bounties. :) (And no, it's not a bribe. ;))

Another moderator tool change that I'd love to see finally addressed is refreshing network profiles. Currently, any time the network profile needs to be touched, staff needs to be involved. Allowing mods to handle this would mean things are handled faster and don't take up limited CM team time.

In the previous community ask sprint, we have introduced the suggested edits canceled and Tell users when their edits are rejected features in Meta Stack Overflow.

But I find a bug that related to the suggested edits canceled, the question has no “status” tag recently, I’m not sure will it be fixed on upcoming community asks sprint notice, but I hope it will be fixed. The question is:

• If my suggested edit is canceled, there should not be a notice saying my edit is rejected

Also, I hope this two years old issue fixed, the question has a status-review tag:

• The site icons in all the dropdowns in the top bar on the chat page seem to have... disappeared??

Improve suggest edits

1. The implementation of the request Tell users when edits have been rejected simply does not work.

   Please just add a regular notification, as you already do with approved edits! As to why it does not work, I have pointed that out in the comments to the official answer and here. I aleady made a feature request in MSO.

2. There are tons of ideas floating around to free up the suggest-edit queue. Please just implement any of them like For edit-suggestors with a streak of N approvals, only require one approval for their next suggested edit, Opining a successful-edit-count-based two tier suggested edit system

Are there any issues that you’d like to see us explore either in this Community Asks Sprint or a future one?

Since you asked, here's a subset of my personal wishlist (I didn't include some stuff that I consider lower value, or some stuff that I imagine to be harder or more controversial to implement. For the record, yes, I have the self-awareness to feel awkward about the fact that I've listed much more here than everyone else. Also, just for context to the reader, I'm more on the power user end of the spectrum, so many of these requests are pretty high-value for me, but not to the average user):

• Add an option to sort answers by the viewer's previously cast votes
• Inbox is no longer immediately marking item as read when middle-clicking to open in new tab
• Autofocus body input field when opening inline editor for answer posts
• Disable annoying autofocus when clicking preview
• Notification when a trivial edit is made on my post
• When in a specific SE site, could there be an easy way to see that site's manifesto?
• Enable autoselect for post owner / post revisions keyboard shortcut
• Add a keyboard shortcut for adding a post to saves
• There should be some way to check which list a saved post is in, and what private notes you have given it — from the post's page.
• Make saves listing visually indicate deleted answers
• Help new users by making tagging smarter

Moderation stuff:

• Option to delete an answer only visible after a reload
• Code blocks wrap on new-answers-old-questions
  • Long lines in blockquote breaks layout in 10k mod tools
• Allow another close vote after retraction
• status-completed (?) Make the "delete" button different when you already voted to delete
• Don't show the contents of a post that was deleted as "rude/abusive" in New Answers to Old Questions

• Make comment flagging work more like chat flagging, available to users with 10k reputation
  • Make community comment moderation a more public process
• How to search my flag history by specific keywords?
• Send custom flag responses to messages inbox
• Allow sorting flags by handling time instead of flagging time on the flag history/summary page

Review queues:

• Bring a "human factor" into review audit composition/selection
• Practice queues for review training
  • Give new edit reviewers some audits to begin with
• Allow us to additionally filter off-topic close reasons in the Close Vote Review Queue

Note that one of your planned changes may(?) also address Show MSE posts authored by staff members on the homepage regardless of the vote count

There's a discrepancy in how URL links are validated on posts, that cropped up around the time of the Imgur migration earlier this year.

The post validation no longer allows protocol-relative links only for images (despite allowing them in the past). For non-image URLs, protocol relative links are still supported:

Url protocol should not be required for image links

I raise it here because it's probably a minor fix and something that could fit within a sprint.

Please add the list of recent flags to /admin on chat. As far as I understand, it's a five-minute change that'll help make people aware of a useful tool that you currently need to already know about to access. I've poked... multiple people across the past few years about this but it's never actually been addressed.

I believe this could be a quick fix/addition, that would really improve the editing flow at times:

Add an option to leave a "This is a duplicate answer" comment when voting to delete an answer from review

This, and/or adding an option for a "duplicate answer" flag, as mentioned in an answer to that request.

This might not be a priority for some sites in the network that have less factual or binary answers/solutions, but for many (among which SO), it would be a great aid.

You asked what we'd like to see you work on. I think it would be great to implement the change proposed by Shog9 and Robert Cartaino:

• Under each question, rename "Add a comment" to "Ask for clarification"
• Under each answer, rename "Add a comment" to "Suggest improvements"

See https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2839/1710, Experiment concluded: a comment by any other name, and Fixing comments in 5 minutes. Intrigued? Let's discuss.