So as some of the registered members may have noticed, we have just pushed live a new set of moderator tools... modeled after the genius way Stack Overflow moderates their community.
So basically, before we had a "report violation" link on every piece of content that would send the content to a table to be reviewed by an admin.
Now, we have a link called "FLAG" along with a red alert icon so more members actually use it, but on top of that, it asks the user that is flagging to give us more information to make it easier on our mods.
Eventually, the vision is to have a group of mods that will help us not just with spam, abusive comments, etc, but also with helping us merge duplicate or close to duplicate content.
As you can imagine, one of the biggest challenges WSO faces is that over a decade of content is in our archives and oftentimes people don't realize that there is a relevant or duplicate thread that was posted a week, month or year ago (sometimes even longer, but most content has a useful life)...
Anyways, the next step in this moderation workflow is to allow users not just to select something as duplicate, but also to suggest a thread to redirect or merge into.
We're still probably a month or so away from this, but probably the next step will be to let members suggest a merge, redirect or whatever and still have a manually backend review... we make eventually select some "Super Mods" for the community that have the power to do this without admin oversight, but we're still a ways from that.
So for now, thanks for Flagging and keeping WSO safe from SPAM and crap content :-)
Happy Posting! Patrick
