39

The June Community Asks Sprint has concluded!

As noted in the announcement post, this Community Asks Sprint focused on addressing issues with community tooling and flagging. With this focus in mind, the team on this Community Asks Sprint was able to deliver incredible value in addressing several long-requested improvements and fixes, especially to make the user experience more comprehensible when curating. Here’s a rundown of everything addressed during the sprint:

Flag window redux: proposed syntax

These updates to the flag modal help users to understand what happens when a given flag is cast, and to know which flag is appropriate to what situation. Here’s what the modal looks like on Stack Overflow now:

An example of the flag modal on Stack Overflow as of 2025-06-26, demonstrating the updated language of the new flag modal

Remove “is of very low quality” for the Rude/Abusive flag description in the flag dialog

As a follow-up to the flag modal updates, we were asked to make one more clarifying update to the wording. This was quick to address! While looking into this, we determined that a further improvement could be made: As “very low quality” and “spam” often overlap to the point of being difficult to distinguish, we created a site setting which can show or hide the “very low quality” flag, giving communities more control over how they use flags.

Improving the copy in the close modal and post notices

Similar to the flag modal improvements, the team made a variety of copy improvements for the close modal and various post notices.

Here’s what the close dialog looks like now:

The close dialog, as seen on Stack Overflow

Decrease the required view count to prevent automatic deletion when score = 0 on smaller sites

As noted in the post, there are many sites in the network where the number of incoming views is not sufficient to avoid automated deletion once the question becomes 365 days old. To address this, we created a new site setting which lets communities change the minimum number of views needed to avoid deletion, and at least one site has already taken advantage of this.

Add a list of recent chat flags to /admin

This one’s very straightforward- there was a handy visibility tool for chat flags which was never added to the chat admin page. Now it’s there!

The new Moderation Tooling Team was also hard at work through this sprint, and delivered several improvements of their own! While they are not part of the Community Asks Sprint, but instead work on moderation tooling full time, their work is worth celebrating here as well.

The Moderation Tooling team worked on a variety of issues while the Community Asks Sprint was in full swing, smoothing out rough edges and making tooling more pleasant to use. On top of that, they moved quickly to address secondary issues that arose out of their changes, knocking out a bug report from Meta almost as soon as it came up. Kudos to them!

Next Steps

As always, thank you to the moderators for marking relevant issues with , and to everyone for voting on the issues that are relevant to you. And thank you to everyone for bringing these issues to us on Meta. While we consider much more than just votes in how we identify and prioritize issues, votes are still an important signal we consider in the process of planning sprints and will continue to play a part in future Community Asks Sprints.

Before we close out, we want to hear from you again: What would you like to see worked on in the next Community Asks Sprint? Do you have a collection of feature requests that make up a theme, or a variety of quality-of-life improvements for tools across the site? Whatever the case, we’d love to hear from you, so feel free to share your ideas as answers below.

Improve this question
5
  • 6
    In honor of the new flag dialogue, award the flaggers appropriately: meta.stackexchange.com/a/407409 :)
    – M--
    Commented Jul 8 at 19:37
  • 5
    Thank you for doing this work! This is exactly the sort of steady improvement that makes the site function.
    – izzyg
    Commented Jul 8 at 19:46
  • 1
    meta.stackexchange.com/q/401686/997587 would be nice :)
    – starball
    Commented Jul 8 at 19:49
  • 8
    Thanks! "What would you like to see worked on in the next Community Asks Sprint?" Since you asked, I would like you to implement the same things I asked for this sprint and the sprint before that. The biggest bug here is the "post is mostly images" bug. That regularly affects users and moderators, and has been a thorn in our side for a couple of years now.
    – TylerH
    Commented Jul 8 at 19:54
  • "As “very low quality” and “spam” often overlap to the point of being difficult to distinguish" how is this possible? A one-word answer "No" is nothing like spam, based on the definition of spam in the microcopy. It's just low quality.
    – Rob Grant
    Commented 2 days ago

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
46

I do realise that its something that legitimately affects a handful of users directly, but I'm close to a year on requesting for a full data dump. I've periodically asked for updates but at this point, at best I get "We'll get back to you" and at worst silence. The current per site dumps for this month seems delayed as well.... which in context isn't particularly reassuring.

So could we get finally get a way for a full data dump for archival reasons, and for ways to get the per site data dumps to be reliably released on time?

The real goal here's about mutual trust as much as the datadumps - that we can trust the company to keep to promises made (hopefully in a reasonable amount of time.), and that you trust community members to keep their word that they're not going to turn around and feed the data dump to a LLM.

Improve this answer
7
  • 8
    Why should it matter if we do, when they're feeding the entire network to LLM's live anyway.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jul 9 at 18:14
  • @KevinB Well you can't just prohibit people like that, if you allow LLM usage with the datadump but state the cc by-sa license, it might encourage LLM savvy people to train free (as in freedom) models. In my opinion, if we provide an easier way to do the thing more ethically, people might be drawn to release their models under cc by-sa because they realize there's an easier way to train the models than scraping. Of course, big companies probably won't care...
    – John
    Commented Jul 10 at 2:40
  • 2
    @KevinB In this case - its that I've gone through the 'proper' process, made requests the right way, and am doing so under the same constraints as downloading them one by one. In theory - I (or some future user) would be an independent backup for data dump, but downloading hundreds of files from hundreds of pages to do things is a bit of a bore. The fact that I've followed processes laid out, and agreed to by the company and gotten nowhere is a bit of a annoyance really.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jul 10 at 3:32
  • 3
    I think the "quiet part out loud" (maybe not so quiet) piece of this is that increased friction was the primary goal. Improving the experience would be a change in course for why it was made that way in the first place... Make no mistake, I'm firmly with you, and I really hope it changes for the better– gating the data dump was a flagrant violation of the reasoning for the dumps in the first place. Even in the most optimistic read, where the company added friction to avoid removing them altogether... the friction is very much the point.
    – zcoop98
    Commented Jul 10 at 21:54
  • 3
    Well yes, but that's also why I kept asking from before the official announcement - and was assured by folks it was possible. Its easier for me to do things the 'wrong' way - and either grab it off a unofficial upload (which is likely the best option for the backlog) or run existing tools that automate the process (which have issues due to cloudflare) to grab the full dump . Its as much about keeping assurances made as the actual dumps.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jul 11 at 0:40
  • Mutual trust, you say.
    – canon
    Commented Jul 11 at 19:15
  • 3
    Well I see this as not trusting me to turn around and upload it somewhere where I can train an LLM. I'm not having the company live up to promises made when I'm trying to follow their processes. So yeah, mutual trust. The company has issues trusting its userbase, and we have issues trusting the company to live up to its promises.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jul 11 at 23:05
10

I would like a copy button for the preformatted (code) blocks. Many other sites including ChatGPT makes it easy to copy code blocks from an answer. But even on sites like Codereview with extensive code in the question we do not have this option. That means having to select all text from a block, while having to deal with the issues of selecting text outside of the block, extensive scrolling (often with two scroll bars) etcetera - a very cumbersome and error prone process in other words. Current users expect the site to be usable without these kind of roadblocks.

Using an extension just to copy some text should not be part of any User Experience. As indicated, many sites provide this kind of functionality, so there should not be any reason to avoid it. I think the functional and security concerns should be mostly resolved (it certainly should not rely on flash anymore as some previous remarks suggested). It should be relatively easy to add this option, and it still gets requested pretty often.

Improve this answer
1
  • Tried to get an extension, found out that the script-monkey wasn't supported anymore on Chrome and actually ended up on SO to try to resolve the issue. Fortunately ChatGPT offered me a script with a copy function and a copy button, but at that point...
    – Maarten Bodewes
    Commented Jul 14 at 16:05

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.