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Comment by cruise02 | Hacker News Reader

Most of what you say here is just nonsense.

1. In the vast majority of cases, if you see something not right on Stack Overflow you can fix it yourself. Anyone at all, regardless of reputation, can suggest an edit to any post.

2. You can challenge moderator decisions on Meta Stack Overflow, which is linked at the top of every single page on the site. (Or, if you have enough reputation, you can just vote counter to most moderator decisions directly on the site. It is democratic.)

3. There are over 1,600 questions about security with sessions in PHP on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[php]+security+sessions+is...

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3. There are over 1,600 questions about security with sessions in PHP on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[php]+security+sessions+is....

Yep, and the top search result (with the most upvotes) is locked. QED.

That just means you can't post new answers to that particular question. You can still post new questions about security with sessions in PHP. There are over 1600 others there as evidence. QED.

WTF? Why is it locked? And it has 127 upvotes and 141 favorites. You can't upvote anymore, but you can click the favorites icon, so I'm sure the upvotes would be way higher.

Right below the word "locked" it gives the reason why. The help center explains more.

http://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask

> Right below the word "locked" it gives the reason why.

You mean this very illuminating blurb: > "it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site"

Here is the question: "What are some guidelines for maintaining responsible session security with PHP?"

I have top disagree on point 2. One a question is deleted by a moderator you can only bring it up in meta. You can't vote to undelete anymore (maybe other moderators can?). For anyone who has powers gained through the points, mod's deletion is final.

And that's sometimes very annoying since those deletions require only one person. No voting, no double checking. Delete-happy mods can definitely abuse it.

That's why I said you can vote counter to most moderator decisions. That's the one thing that only another moderator (or employees of Stack Exchange, who oversee moderators) can reverse. And no, "delete happy" mods cannot abuse it. There is oversight by other moderators and the Community Team at SE.

I've seen enough questions killed that way that yes - I consider it easy to abuse. It happens all the time but if it happens to someone else's question it's not worth my time/energy to raise the issue on meta. The lack of balance here is what makes it really annoying to fight.

It's not abuse if moderators are deleting questions that don't belong on the site to begin with. If you don't care strongly enough to raise the issue, perhaps the question was rightfully deleted after all.

I'd prefer they just closed them. There's a difference. Also if I disagree with community moderation I can say so or vote for the reverse action. Not so with diamond mods.

It's also a community site, not my job. Even if I care a lot, dealing with meta is not worth it in most cases. I look through the close votes whenever I have spare time, and would appreciate if other decisions were also taken in the open rather than by one person who may be especially grumpy that day.

I'm not arguing about contents of the questions - some are stupid and deserve closing/deletion. Just want to make sure those decisions are always reasonable, accepted and possible to revert.

Most closed questions are just closed, not deleted.

Yes, you absolutely can disagree with and even reverse actions taken by diamond moderators.

If there were no mods with decisive power and it was completely up to be controlled by the common population (including people who sign up with multiple accounts), how does that help? How does multiplying the amount of people with power make it less annoying to fight an issue?

> people who sign up with multiple accounts

Reputation thresholds minimize this problem to begin with. Any remaining problem could be largely eradicated by focusing enforcement efforts on those people instead of exercising hypocritical control over what content the community is permitted to deem worthy.

It would be interesting to see exactly what number of the community actually wants discussion posts and how many don't. Currently it is the community that votes to put a post "On Hold" before a mod comes around and verifies that it is a legit post that should be "closed." It is brought to their attention by the community who do not want it there. (And not just high rep members of the community.)

Whereas a "delete-happy" mod can abuse their power, another reasonable mod can just as easily reverse it.

As far as mods that tend to be trigger happy, they can be filtered out since mods are elected by the user base. Technically, you can choose who you want spending their waking hours going over questions and filtering out what shouldn't be there.

> "2. You can challenge moderator decisions on Meta Stack Overflow, which is linked at the top of every single page on the site. (Or, if you have enough reputation, you can just vote counter to most moderator decisions directly on the site. It is democratic.)"

I had done that before, but it is not helpful nor democratic. For example I posted about a question I answered and that was closed as not a real question. Even when the issue was addressed, and it was accepted that the reason of closure didn't really apply to this case, it was reopened for a few minutes and then closed again for the same (invalid) reason.

At the end you can challenge whatever you want but the moderators that closed it on the beginning can close it again as many times as they want. They actually said that SO is not interested on generating new content since they already have a lot, so they will be really picky about what they consider a "good" question

Have a link to that last statement? I can't imagine someone saying that, considering how quickly technical content gets outdated.

I wanted to edit my entry but it seems like HN won't let you edit it after a little while. I read my entry again and I think my selection of words was poorly, yet the sentiment was the same. It was in a context were he was talking about lazyness on some questions in SO (which I agree)

Here is an extract of the comment in the question on meta:

" Small sites are starved for content. SO is not. I say we should be far more restrictive at this point. We would still help users, but by guiding them to where the answer is rather than once again spending the time to write it up, vote on it, etc. It's redundant. And that's for the good questions. The bad ones just have to go"

The thing is "good" and "bad" question are relative to the person who read. The question that I am talking about here might not be a high quality question, but still it didn't deserve to be closed as "not a real question" , if any it should just get downvoted.

This is the link to the meta:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/183985/regarding-clo...

NOTE: Something happening after I check that, it seems that the question was reopened once again after the last time I check it out. I might just delete all my comments on here then :/

> The thing is "good" and "bad" question are relative to the person who read.

In the strictest sense, I suppose this is correct. However, the funny thing about language is that it's designed to be perceived in the same way by as many people as possible. That's the entire point of language. We elect moderators to exercise their judgement with regards to how a question will be perceived by most people, and I'd say they aren't usually wrong.

Wow. This answer is chilling:

> I say anything short of perfection should be nuked. But that's my own personal extreme view. (Actually, that's not my extreme view. My extreme view is questions should be closed by default. Only opened upon review. And bad openings carry harsh consequences [loss of rights, re-earnable] for the voters.)

If your question was closed twice maybe it wasn't as relevant as you thought.

It wasn't my question, I was just the answerer. Truth be told, it appears open again right now, something happened after the last time I checked it.

In any case, low quality questions should be downvoted and not closed as "Not a real question", at least in this case it was a legitimate question and it didn't fix with the "Not a real question" criteria.

If you are curious, this was the question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17024377/sorting-large-fi...

> They actually said that SO is not interested on generating new content since they already have a lot, so they will be really picky about what they consider a "good" question

No Stack Overflow moderator told you that.

Sorry, after read it again I realize I chose poorly my words to describe what this user said. I posted an extract of the comment in another entry, the context was that there are lazy people in SO (Something I am agreed with) and they should be more restrictive with what gets there. I don't have a problem with, my only concern is that some good answers are being lost in that restriction process.

Good luck with 2).

There is a thing called tyranny by majority and most of the people who post on meta are mods and have a very specific frame of mind.

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