What is moderation?
As one of our most experienced users, we're counting on you to guide the community and lead by example.
You can...
- View deleted posts
- Cast delete and undelete votes on questions
- Access moderator tools
- Edit tags inline
...which collectively allow you to help the site moderators in monitoring the site and helping to clean up messes.
Viewing deleted posts
You now have privileged access to posts that have been removed, either by their authors, by users with access to moderator tools, by moderators, or by the system.
Use this privilege wisely:
Make sure what is being deleted should have been deleted, and bring unnecessary or harmful deletions to the attention of the community and/or moderator team.
Watch for signs of abuse being obscured by deletion.
Don't abuse this privilege to stir up trouble when someone has wisely decided to remove a problematic post.
You also have a new search operator available to find your own deleted posts: deleted:1.
Deleting questions
Users with this reputation level can delete closed questions.
When should I delete questions?
Closed questions that are of no lasting value whatsoever should be deleted.
Before voting to delete, please check whether there are any good answers; if so, then the question should be flagged for moderator attention as a potential merge candidate. We don't like to lose great answers!
Also, be cautious when deleting questions closed as duplicates; they can serve as a signpost, directing users to useful answers on another question.
It takes 3 votes, minimum, to delete a closed question. However, the number of delete votes required scales to the number of votes on the question and all its answers.
You must wait for a question to be closed for 2 days before you can vote for deletion. This restriction is removed for trusted users when a post scores -3 or lower. If you feel a post should be deleted despite having lots of votes or for being new, please flag it for community moderator attention.
You can view a list of posts with outstanding delete votes via the moderator tools delete tab.
What happens when a post is deleted?
Once a post has been deleted, it will disappear for all users except the post's author, developers, moderators, and users with this "access to moderator tools" privilege. However, deleted posts can be undeleted by casting undelete votes. Once a post has 3 undelete votes (or more for highly-active questions), it will no longer be deleted.
How many times can I vote to delete per day?
At 2,000 reputation, you can cast 5 delete votes per day. An additional vote is granted per 1000 reputation, to a maximum of 30 delete votes per day.
Access moderator tools
You now have access to various lists and statistical reports, giving you a broad overview of activity on the site:
- Posts with extreme votes
- Posts with the most comments/views/edits
- Recently protected questions
- Recently closed/reopened questions
- Recently migrated questions
- Recently deleted/undeleted posts
- Questions with pending close/reopen votes
- Posts with pending delete/undelete votes
- New answers to old questions
- Suggested edit stats
- The full history of reviews by all users in any review queue
Access these tools by clicking the Review icon in the top bar, and then the Tools link in the menu that pops up:
If you poke around in /tools, you'll quickly notice that most of what's found there isn't directly actionable - it's informational! What you do with that information is up to you: hopefully, you've been around long enough now that you have some idea of how you want the site to be run, and are able to make good use of the information presented. For instance:
Find problems that've been overlooked and fix them if you can, or bring them to the attention of the moderators if you can't. The stats page is a gold mine for outliers that might benefit from a bit of attention from a wise, aged site veteran such as yourself.
Find awesome stuff that reminds you of why you like coming here. The stats page is a good one for this too.
Sanity-check the stuff that other people are doing, and offer guidance and correction where necessary: new tags, new answers, suggested edits, questions being migrated or closed, posts being deleted... Outside of /tools, you also get a full history of actions taken by others in /review by clicking the history tab in any queue, which can be helpful in identifying problems there as well.
Finally, as a high-reputation member of the site your opinions likely carry quite a bit of weight with your peers: if you see a trend that you think is worth calling attention to, don't hesitate to do it - having access to more data makes it easier to back up your assertions.
Inline tag editing
Finally, you now have the ability to do inline tag edits on questions: a new "Edit tags" link will appear next to the tags on every question; clicking it brings up an inline editor for the tags on that question:
This allows you to quickly retag questions that need it, which you'll find especially useful combined with the list of new tags on the stats page.