A day in the life of a stackoverflow moderator...

I think this was supposed to show the crap Stack Overflow power users have to deal with, but I think it more clearly shows some of the worst qualities of the Stack Overflow moderation system.

With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world:

* A new user asks what they think is a dumb question.

* They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.

* A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question.

* The asker rolls back the rollback.

At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: and move on). That doesn't happen. Instead:

* The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before another power user steps in and reverts it.

* The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later).

* The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1]

* The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person.

It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user).

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036

[2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...

It was unlocked a week later.

What you've described is not at all what happened.

> Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.

No, the user rewrote his entire post to

  ok i got my answers, we can delete this post now, i am not
  helping google users.

He then added

  IF YOU GUYS ROLL BACK AGAIN, I AM CHANGING MY NICK TO
  " ALLAH AKBAR " AND YOU WILL ALL LOOK LIKE JIHAD CLUB
  MEMBERS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.

That's hardly "requesting deletion".

> a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway, only to unlock it 45 minutes later.

The post was unlocked a week later by Stack Overflow's robot ("Community"), automatically.

> At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator. That doesn't happen.

You don't know that. In fact, I'm willing to wager that the user flagged the question immediately but it took an hour for one of the moderators to get around to it. The "review queue" on Stack Overflow is enormous; it takes a long time for moderators to get to some flags.

Disclaimer: I'm a moderator on a smaller Stack Exchange site.

I had a moderator change the wording of my writing because they didn't like the way I was doing it, it looked a lot like what was going on here. They revised it such that it partially lost the meaning of what I was saying, but also just didn't come across the way I had intended to write it - so I changed it back. Then they changed it back. Then I changed it back again. Then they changed it back. Finally I changed the post back to my own wording, and I guess the moderator said "fuck it" because the changes stopped.

The mods seem a little power hungry. If you're a SO mod, I'm sure you've got better things to do than correct tiny grammatical quirks that make people who they are - try focusing on the bigger issues.

Edit: Ahh, mine wasn't quite this dramatic - I didn't notice how many revisions there were. This is hilarious and sad.

The user clearly believes it is his duty to prevent Google from unfairly benefitting from the existence of the question.