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:
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:
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.
- Area51 uses insecure avatar generation - everyone has a new, random avatar now.
- Number of annotations and community messages is hard to read when visited or hovered - Annotations and flagged posts are now labeled and match the site better in their appearance.
- Add pluralization support for moderator information on profile page - Quick fix for pluralization on the above item
- Cannot search with no "Filter by" checkbox checked when selecting tags -
- Change password page has a typo in the html autocomplete attributes
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 status-review, 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.
