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So it seems the 10k flag queue is being removed with essentially no replacement. The general consensus over at SO (or at least my own reading of it) seems to be that

  1. Moderators ignored 10k feedback in dealing with flags, and in fact this feedback was an encumbrance to them; and
  2. 10k users have better things to do.

This raises a few Physics-specific questions. Regarding (1), do the moderators here not use (or minimally use) the feedback 10k users provide via flags? If that information was never useful, then there is no loss here, though in the future it would be nice to be told "ignore that feature; we don't want you to add flags." If it was useful, are we losing functionality with the imminent change, and is there any way to recover it?

Regarding (2), what else can I be doing as a 10k user? I understand there are several information overviews tabulating migrations, voting trends, comment activity, etc. But these seem to be more for my own personal consumption; it's not clear how to use this information to do anything. A perfectly valid answer might be "nothing - 10k users are just like any other user who can vote to close (3k) but can't vote to delete (20k),"1 but if that's the case this should really be spelled out clearly somewhere.

1 Well okay, tag wiki approval (5k) and protecting questions (15k) are in that range too, but these are pretty lightly used features here.

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  • $\begingroup$ Get to 20k first? $\endgroup$
    – unsym
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 4:33
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    $\begingroup$ @hwlau the extended moderation tools don't actually get you much. Also, we don't have and probably won't have enough 20k users to make things like "vote to delete" very useful for our site. $\endgroup$
    – Brandon Enright
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 5:04
  • $\begingroup$ I can't speak for anyone else, but I take note of the flag queue result when considering marginal flags. I'm lazy and don't like the hard ones, so you guy are a big help. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Mod
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 5:08
  • $\begingroup$ I concur with @dmckee here, 10k flags on Physics were useful. As for doing stuff, I find the 10k close stats useful since you can find stuff to close with some sorting. You can also delete recently closed questions from there if the question is unsalvageable. But yeah, there's not much. The 10k queue functionality is now in the LQ review queue, though. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth Mod
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 5:58

2 Answers 2

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I want to clarify a few things:

  1. You can still help handle flags, via /review. Yes, lots of other people can do this too - but that doesn't mean they'll do as good a job as you would.

  2. Flag handling has never been the "big" 10K privilege, IMHO. It got a lot of focus, because for a long time it was the only way ordinary users could directly help shoulder the support burden... But it often wasn't really the best use of your abilities.

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. Here are a few ideas, based on how I've used the 10K tools:

  • 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, which can be helpful in identifying problems there too.

Finally, as a 10K+ 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 arguments. And that's the most valuable "10K privilege" in my book.

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  1. I'll be honest, I never really paid much attention to anything that happened in the various review queues. But I do know that when a post is flagged by multiple people, or when a flag is disputed - really, any time multiple people weigh in, the more the better - it's tremendously useful to me when deciding how to handle the flag. If that came from the 10k flag queue, then I will be sad to see it go.
  2. Again, I'm not really sure what 10k users are able to do, but the biggest task, for anyone who has the privilege, has been and continues to be voting to put questions on hold as appropriate. So yeah, there's not much that should change at 10k. But that situation may be somewhat specific to our site and others in this range of activity. Perhaps a meta post would be useful; I don't think it's necessarily something we can expect to appear in the help center.
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