A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...
stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow.com
The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues.
Edit: Ahh, mine wasn't quite this dramatic - I didn't notice how many revisions there were. This is hilarious and sad.
Your post may have been edited by just another user. Look for a diamond ♦ in the username. The diamond indicates that the user is a moderator. However, any user with 2,000 rep or more can edit posts. There are a lot of 2k rep users on Stack Overflow! Some of them are teenagers (look at the profiles).
It was probably another user instead of a mod — Stack Overflow is a weird combination of a forum and a wiki, so people are allowed to fix each other's posts.
Besides that, though, I think you should consider the possibility that you were also in the wrong. Just because their edit lost meaning doesn't mean it didn't also add something useful. Instead of reverting, I think a better approach would have been to add those meaningful aspects back in and call attention to them, since they obviously weren't clear to everyone. If a hard revert was really necessary, you could have just explained why.
jk
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/166623/what-is-a-day...
I really wish they could just have a "subjective" flag and let users filter out those posts as they see fit. Some of the closed-subjective material is quite useful, as it contains the hows and whys behind developers choosing a framework or widget or technical solution over another.
With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world:
* A new user asks what they think is a dumb question.
* They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.
* A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question.
* The asker rolls back the rollback.
At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: and move on). That doesn't happen. Instead:
* The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before another power user steps in and reverts it.
* The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later).
* The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1]
* The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person.
It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user).
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036
[2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes
[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...
> Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.
No, the user rewrote his entire post to
ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not
helping google users.
IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO
" ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIKE JIHAD CLUB
MEMBERS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.
> a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway, only to unlock it 45 minutes later.
The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically.
> At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator. That doesn't happen.
You don't know that. In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it. The "review queue" on Stack Overflow is enormous; it takes a long time for moderators to get to some flags.
Disclaimer: I'm a moderator on a smaller Stack Exchange site.
Thanks, corrected.
> In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it.
I would hope so, and I thank you for calling this line out, because I forgot one imporant action. As a moderator yourself, you know that the appropriate action once a user rolls back a valid edit to the question is to flag the question for a moderator and move on, which obviously didn't happen. I've amended my original comment.
> What you've described is not at all what happened.
Outside of those two minor points, it doesn't seem like you disagree with my account.
-----
To address the edit you made after I replied:
> No, the user rewrote his entire post to
> > ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users.
That sounds like blanking out his question and requesting deletion to me.
> He then added
> > IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO " ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIKE JIHAD CLUB MEMBERS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.
He added that in revision 8, after the power user reverted his question 3 times in less than a minute.
As a moderator yourself, you know that every day users come to Stack Exchange that don't know how the system works, it's a given, and they'll make mistakes. This question did not deserve the treatment it got but this type of thing happens with too much frequency for whatever reason: jaded power users, too large of a review queue, whatever. My point here is that while this looks like "mission accomplished" for a Stack Exchange power user, from an outside perspective, this looks positively kafkaesque.
This is a really weird thing to say. Is this person saying that he/she is so ideologically opposed to Google that they refuse to leave any helpful information in an indexable location anywhere in the entirety of the World Wide Web?
given english is his second language, I think it is possible he meant one of two things:
(1) he does not think the question will be helpful to other users
(2) he is embarrassed about having his name attached to it.
my money is on (1), although it still seems mildly weird to me.
You may not agree, but in the eyes of most StackOverflow members, a user who posts "I will change my name to Allah Akbar if you revert my question" is generally considered a negative for the community. It is a feature, not a bug, that people like this are driven away.
Also, you seem to really be twisting the facts when you claim the user wants to delete it because they thought it was a dumb question. I'm not sure if you didn't read the logs, but they cited their primary concern as "ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users.".
1. two high-rep users should've engaged in a rapid-fire edit war with a new user
2. the question deserves a -35 score
I'd also argue that there was no reason the user should've been given a 15-year ban (really, 15 years? Even if one concedes a warning or a short-term ban wasn't enough, a month or even a year wasn't enough either?), but I'll agree to disagree on that.
This should be held as an example of what not to do, because this level of overreaction by the community in moderating a single bad post is what drives people nuts with Stack Exchange. It's not necessary, but because of the way moderation is structured on Stack Exchange, it's so damn easy to do.
This is a similar problem to what you have on other diff programs, by the way. Any sane diff tool will give you an equivalent diff to any other one, and it'll give you an equivalent minimal diff as well, but the human friendliness of the diff varies widely on the algorithms selected. The best tools I've seen use some source awareness to give you a diff that can pick up that e.g. you removed an "if" guard and then unintendented its child block. The worst do a greedy linear scan to make their patches. Most tools I use (especially ones based on a recursive algorithm) are in the middle.
This is amazing post. I believe CS courses should require students to help moderate Stackoverflow.com posts.