26

Update - July 8th, 2025

The results of the June 2025 Community Asks Sprint have been posted!

Update - July 2nd, 2025

The June Community Asks Sprint has concluded! We are in the process of cleaning up leftover tasks and collecting the results of the sprint into an announcement. We will be posting those results as soon as they are ready, currently targeting next week.

The fourth Community Asks Sprint is coming up quickly! The Community Asks Sprint is dedicated time for us to focus on requests the community has made regarding what issues to address and what changes to make on the platform. Learn more about the previous Community Asks Sprint and everything we resolved in it.

It is important to note that we’re making some updates to how Community Asks Sprints will operate. To align with shifting priorities and workloads, we’ll have one product team and its developers focused on the curated issues that have been chosen for that sprint.

While this shift represents a new direction, our commitment to supporting what matters most to our community remains strong. We have recently introduced the Moderation Tooling team, which is dedicated to handling community and moderation tooling requests year-round. Recognizing the overlap in responsibilities, we saw the need to clearly define the focus of the Community Asks Sprint.

Going forward, the Community Asks Sprint will prioritize addressing needs outside the purview of the Moderation Tooling team. We believe this shift will be a significant net positive, ensuring that our efforts remain in a state of perpetual investment in the community's needs.

Now to kick off this Community Asks Sprint! For this sprint, we’ll be returning to the single week format of our first two sprints, with this sprint being scheduled from June 23rd to 27th. However, there is a twist for this sprint! When we announced the results of the last sprint, we suggested that the next sprint could have a specific focus or theme and asked you for ideas to fill that role. We’re happy to announce that we will be focusing on ”community tooling”, especially the function and use of flags, this sprint.

This focus came from a review of requests made on the prior two Community Asks Sprint announcements. Many of the requested features and bugfixes centered around specific improvements that could be made to make flagging more informative and predictable, more forgiving toward user error, and otherwise smooth out its rough edges.

Once this sprint is completed, we’ll share everything we were able to tackle.

With that in mind, we’d love to hear from you: What issues are most important to you? What initiatives or improvements would you like to see us working on? While we’ve identified a theme and specific issues for this Community Ask Sprint, we’re also eager to hear your suggestions for future themes or challenges. Your input will help guide our focus, not just for this sprint, but also in the future.

Improve this question
11
  • 13
    I'm a bit confused. you spent the first half of the announcement explaining that there was a team for moderation tooling (which includes tooling for the community not just moderators) and how it was separate and how the sprint was going to focus on something different... but then the sprint is focusing on "community tooling", especially the function and use of flags, which falls squarely under moderation tooling
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jun 12 at 18:29
  • 9
    Just go with it for this sprint. ;) But moving forward, there will be better demarcation.
    – Bella_Blue StaffMod
    Commented Jun 12 at 19:43
  • 4
    I asked for awarding Marshal Badge multiple times during the previous sprint. While this is certainly a lower priority feature, it is very much a low-hanging fruit and something that community has asked for multiple times, and it was well-received every time (see the linked posts in my answer and its dupe-target). It is also in-line with the theme of this sprint.
    – M--
    Commented Jun 12 at 21:35
  • 3
    So, if I understand correctly, if the things I want to point out aren't related to flags / community tooling, then I can just sit on it and wait another three months for a new sprint and hope its theme covers whatever I'd like to report? I have to say, I don't like this. There's tons of issues to be raised about various themes. If you really want to have a theme for sprints from now on, it should at least be chosen by the community so it decides what it thinks is the most important at the moment.
    – RedStoneMatt
    Commented Jun 13 at 7:04
  • 6
    @Bella_Blue "Just go with it for this sprint.": What?? You can't just say one thing and say the opposite in the next sentence, then tell us to "just go with it"? At least, please edit the post to clarify, because as of now it really looks like "We won't talk about sugar anymore. Now, let's talk about candy!". Maybe swap the "Going forward, [...]" and "Now to kick off [...]" paragraphs, and perhaps make the former start with something like "This is the last sprint that will be focused on moderation tools, as going forward, [...]"?
    – RedStoneMatt
    Commented Jun 13 at 7:10
  • 5
    @RedStoneMatt, Issues can be raised on Meta at any time. That is, of course, where the list of community asks we decided to work on for this sprint came from initially. So when prioritizing the most highly-voted issues, it naturally led to a common theme. As stated in the post, the Moderation Tooling team will continue to address tooling-related requests throughout the year as part of their work, ensuring these are not overlooked. But going forward, the Community Asks Sprints will focus on addressing requests that fall outside the Moderation Tooling team’s scope.
    – Bella_Blue StaffMod
    Commented Jun 13 at 11:15
  • 2
    I yell into the ether, yet again: Please roll back the annoying VOTE experiment that replaced the upvote/downvote score.
    – devlin carnate
    Commented Jun 17 at 19:13
  • 1
    happy sprinting! what's selected for development this sprint?
    – starball
    Commented Jun 23 at 16:42
  • 3
    This sprint should be done since a few days. Can this announcement be un-featured and the results be posted and featured?
    – Adriaan
    Commented Jul 2 at 9:26
  • 1
    @Adriaan I've updated the post to note the conclusion of the sprint and when to expect a followup! re: un-featuring, this post will remain featured until the results announcement goes up.
    – Frog StaffMod
    Commented Jul 2 at 16:01
  • @devlincarnate As much as I don't like it, seems like it was a success: "Update April 10th, 2025 -- This feature has been graduated. Voting increased with both lower-rep users and high-rep users". This might be a case where running a userscript locally (to change it back to 0) is actually a more "correct" decision, if that's what you would prefer to see. I don't particularly want to cut off the nose to spite the face.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Jul 10 at 4:25

12 Answers 12

Reset to default
33

Flags, you say? Okay... Prepare yourself.

First, I'll shill Machavity's feature request every chance I get. The flag dialog's not the most approachable thing for a new user. It's so important that it's obvious what flags do what so that a new user can properly indicate that they see something bad to a moderator, and it should be obvious what type of "bad" it is. Especially with recommend closure flags, lumping things under "needs improvement" is just not very clear. We didn't like the change at the time. The best time to switch it back passed a long time ago, but the next best time is now.

If I handle a flag with something that I think the flagger needs to see, it's very likely to be missed because it's buried in their flag history. I'm not going to spin up a private chat room to discuss it, either, because it feels inappropriate IMO. Only dedicated users check back on their flags' responses, but it's not only dedicated users flagging things. Consider Send custom flag responses to messages inbox.

This is a 10 year old one, but let's give users some insight into how a flag was handled, be it by the system, a moderator, or the review queues. The system already knows this info, it's just a matter of exposing it. It's beneficial for folks to know how these things flow behind the scenes without reading our monolithic FAQ entries.

This might go beyond the scope of the sprint, but please help larger site mods out with searchability. I know the situation's miserable for the SO mods, but it'd be helpful for the rest of us too.

For a feels-nice change, consider Allow us to earn the Marshal badge multiple times. For some QOL for moderators, consider Moderators should be able to reflag spam posts when their spam flag has been cleared. These aren't mission-critical, but they'd be nice-to-haves.

Improve this answer
27

There are several long-standing requests to allow flagging more things.

There's a lot of rationale there for why it was not implemented, though quite a lot has changed in the nearly (or more than) 15 years since the majority of those conversations have taken place.

There are many cases where it's difficult to know how to flag (suggested edits by anonymous users, bad reviews, users with no posts, etc.) It's not intuitive to just go and flag a different post for something unrelated. And while flagging some random post technically works for it to be brought to moderator attention it fragments the user moderation history.

If a user flags the post on which the edit was suggested, then that flag will be associated with the author of that post and not the user who suggested the edit. This can make future moderation harder because the user history doesn't hold the complete story.

Some miscellaneous stuff

  • a re-ask from Sprint 2 but some grace period to re-handle a flag or even to dispute previous handled flags would eliminate a minor, but incredibly frustrating experience of clicking the wrong button.

    Allow moderators to change the outcome of a handled flag

  • Not flag-related, but definitely community tooling. The 10K Tools pages could definitely use some love. I have a UserScript that adds links to lots of tools to the topbar of sites that I have the requisite privileges to access them. I find that this both helps me remember that the tools exist and find them without having to dig through a bunch of links. 10K Tool Links
    For the tools pages, it doesn't have to be a huge change. Even something as simple as moving each item into its own tab so I don't have to wait for everything to load would be a huge improvement (Here's a quick mock)
    10K Tools page with tabs

Not flag related, but still would love to see it fixed, I am once again asking for the 3rd year to be able to learn what my two unread messages are.

Improve this answer
16

This feature request of mine is already in review: Would it be possible to delay (red-)flagging privileges?, and the case that triggered my request is fortunately not active anymore, but such abuse has happened before, so it'll certainly happen again in the future. Cases like that are not hard to repair for moderators, but they are very hard to detect, so I'd prefer if they can be prevented at all. My solution is probably a matter of one extra column in the Users table and making sure it's updated and read the right way, but I like @Laurel's solution in the answer as well.

Improve this answer
1
  • 5
    Yes, please! I also like Bryan Krause's idea in the comments there: it would be sufficient if the delay was for flags to count towards auto-deletion. Just having them cast is not the problem in my opinion, the auto-deletion is.
    – Dan Getz
    Commented Jun 12 at 22:33
15

I suggest you look at enabling the community to help process 'no longer needed' flags on comments, so that the burden doesn't fall solely on ♦-moderators. For example, I'm suggesting adding another review queue for such comments, open to users with >= 10K reputation; if enough members in the review queue vote for deletion, then the flag is validated and the comment is deleted and removed from the ♦-moderators flag queue.

See also Allow high-rep community members to help review No Longer Needed comment flags and Make comment flagging work more like chat flagging, available to users with 10k reputation for a closely related proposal; and https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/403541/160917 for an alternative design that could also work and might be much simpler to implement.

Why only 'no longer needed' flags? Because other flags should be seen by ♦-moderators, as they might require additional actions beyond deleting the comment. For instance, comments containing harassment/bigotry/abuse might lead a ♦-moderator to both delete the comment and send a moderator message or suspend the user.

Improve this answer
1
  • 2
    …and most importantly, notify the commenter when their comment was flagged, so that they may immediately delete it.
    – Bergi
    Commented Jun 23 at 22:16
10

Please either make a cross-site flag history page, or send inbox messages for mod-declined flags. If you cast flags on more than a few sites, it's very awkward trying to keep on top of feedback from mods about your flagging.

Yes, I've seen and tried the Global Flag Summary userscript. I love seeing statistics as much as anyone, but it doesn't provide information on where my most recent declined flags were, and technical limitations mean it loads fairly slowly. To not require hundreds of HTTPS requests, a solution would have to be on Stack Exchange's end.

Improve this answer
10

Having chat on the sidebar was half of a previous request I made. Could we add per site metas too?

Improve this answer
3
  • 3
    Absolutely. Meta users tend to be a bit more likely to be aware of Chat already – but the folks invested enough to participate on Meta sites are also the folks more likely to engage in Chat, IMO, so it's worth making it easier for them to discover it and navigate there.
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jun 13 at 18:21
  • 1
    Or more precisely, make per site metas more obvious
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jun 13 at 23:22
  • 1
    Ah, I misunderstood your answer. But I agree with that too!
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jun 16 at 18:06
8

From:

Here are some of the issues we’re planning to work on for this sprint. Keep in mind, these plans aren’t static; the teams may choose to focus on different issues from these.

This issue came upon after Inbox notifications not consistently marked as read after clicking title was "fixed" in sprint 1.

I propose you at least go back to the initial rework of the inbox which made it a point to allow almost all types of clicks to mark the notification as read. That is: left click, middle click, Ctrl+click. Only right click -> Open in new tab was not covered. The breaking change "fix" removed these and only allowed clicking the tiny envelope button as marking the message read (without reloading).

I would also be happy if you expand it to work with right click -> Open in new tab.

However, I hope we do not have to talk about having to fix this again in future sprints. It is getting ridiculous. I would like to see the platform moving forward, not failing to address a relatively minor issue for so long. Particularly, we can probably start addressing other issues from the initial inbox rework.

I almost forgot - once the marking as read is done, then we can maybe also actually address Inbox notifications not consistently marked as read after clicking title because it is still not consistent. It is more rare but the solution that was implemented fails to deliver. Although, it will me a much much rarer issue if I do not have to click and load to each notification multiple times.

Could this finally be addressed? Probably not under "community tooling" but the first sprint broke it. We are almost up to full year of this being broken and consistently ignored.

Improve this answer
8

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 are still 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.

Improve this answer
7

I'll paraphrase my answer to the previous sprint announcement:

Allow filtering of flags by sub-type in addition to their status. Flags easily go down to page 7 of my helpful flag page by the time they are handled. This causes me to miss any custom moderator messages present.

In addition, the request made by B-Tech on the previous sprint announcement, would help increase the visibility of custom mod replies.

Improve this answer
6

2 feature requests for spam flags:

That would make spam flagging much faster.

1 feature request for all flags:

Less important:

Improve this answer
2
6

We’re happy to announce that we will be focusing on ”community tooling”, especially the function and use of flags, for this sprint.

:) I’ve made some requests regarding flags and spam already. So I'll just list them with a TLDR:

Request regarding flags:

When dealing with spam waves and near identical spam posts, one might accidentally open a post already flagged. This is annoying and time-consuming. But also easily fixable by having a small label Flagged symbolon any post one has flagged.

Spam wave means there is a lot of very obvious spam, no need to open the post. No need to open it. So allow user with experience(!) to flag from the overview pages, but only for spam and moderator attention. The other flag types always require looking at the post.

Custom mod flags can get responses, you (the flag raiser) likely never realized, as the only place to find them is absurdly obscure. While at notifying users: Inform users about rejected edits, it irritates me much more than it should that there is simply no notification about it.

Request regarding spam itself:

New users should do something (successfully suggest-editing a post, posting without being marked as spam etc)before beiing allowed to edit the "About me"/"Links" section. This would greatly reduce profile spam.

Reduce the visibility of profile spam by removing badge related sites from indexing would remove spam from search resultes, discourage spammers and even save some resources as less pages must be indexed.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.