Comment by chrisaycock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisaycock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What you've described is not at all what happened.

> 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.

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.

That's hardly "requesting deletion".

> 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.

> The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically.

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.

> ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not helping google users

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?

it is, on the face of it, a weird thing to say.

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.

Or 3, he wanted others that searched on Google to suffer as he did.

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