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 t…
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 LIK…
Thanks, corrected.
> 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.
I would hope so, and I thank you for calling this line out, because I forgot one imporant action. As a moderator yourself, you know that the appropriate action once a user rolls back a valid edit to the question is to flag the question for a moderator and move on, which obviously didn't happen. I've amended my original comment.
> What you've described is not at all what happened.
Outside of those two minor points, it doesn't seem like you disagree with my account.
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To address the edit you made after I replied:
> 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.
That sounds like blanking out his question and requesting deletion to me.
> 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.
He added that in revision 8, after the power user reverted his question 3 times in less than a minute.
As a moderator yourself, you know that every day users come to Stack Exchange that don't know how the system works, it's a given, and they'll make mistakes. This question did not deserve the treatment it got but this type of thing happens with too much frequency for whatever reason: jaded power users, too large of a review queue, whatever. My point here is that while this looks like "mission accomplished" for a Stack Exchange power user, from an outside perspective, this looks positively kafkaesque.