5

Almost a year ago, Writing.SE clamored for graduation, which was finally granted in August 2019, albeit without the standard increase in reputation requirements for privileges as was standard for graduating sites.

Over the past summer, there was a discussion on whether the reputation thresholds should finally be increased, but to my knowledge no actual decision or plan was made either way.

What is the present status of the interest in/plan for increasing the reputation thresholds for privileges on Writing.SE, either to the level of a traditional graduated site or to some sort of middle ground?

  • Has the desire to increase reputation thresholds been abandoned?
  • Has a specific date been set for an increase?
  • Is the community still debating the exact nature and/or schedule of the reputation increase (and where is this happening)?
  • Does the site need to meet some sort of specific quality, content, or participation goal (e.g. increase the number of questions per day to 25, reduce the time the average spam post is visible on the site to five minutes or less, sign up 1,000 new users, etc.) in order for Stack Exchange to grant the community's desire for higher thresholds?

To be clear, I'm not asking for the change to be made, simply asking what happened to it.

3
  • 5
    While I wasn't around back then and can't answer the actual question, I would suggest that now is probably a bad time to be increasing privilege requirements. With the departure of almost all the high-rep users and all the mods to the new site, reducing the number of people who can, e.g., cast close votes would likely make it very difficult to get any moderation done. And, ah, almost all the high-rep users leaving probably has something to do with the effort stalling in the first place.
    – AmaiKotori
    Dec 20, 2019 at 17:12
  • 3
    The desire is still there, but we still can't do anything about it. It's up to the company and they don't seem interested in this site, judging by how they ignore the moderation problems. There is no schedule and no thresholds that we need to meet. Only official feedback was that "It's all sort of up for grabs." - it's just that nobody is willing to grab the task in the company and actually work on it.
    – Secespitus
    Dec 21, 2019 at 10:10
  • 2
    I admit I haven't been keeping up with SE news, but my understanding is that our "graduation" (and that of dozens of other sites) was minimal and only involved removing beta status and a couple other important + minor things. I asked about the rep changes at the time and was told that there was nothing in the works. That was before the blowup. I would also like to see this change but not now. If we get things back to normal, ever, then maybe. I'm not optimistic, despite the latest "apology."
    – Cyn
    Dec 23, 2019 at 19:40

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Increasing reputation levels is no longer tied to beta status. The primary indicator of readiness is having x users with n reputation. Many sites that aren't beta don't have the users to support higher reputation levels and still get things done. So, each site should decide for themselves whether they think raising the privilege levels is appropriate for their site.

In my mind, this is a valuable separation. The number of users needed to perform certain tasks and the reputation needed is somewhat arbitrary but it's particularly important that you have those people on site who can participate, else the site will fail to function properly.

The two most obvious examples are with close votes (500 vs 3k) and delete votes (4k vs 10k). If you don't have 5+ active reviewers on the site with 3k reputation, you will never close a question without moderator assistance. If you don't have 3+ active users with 10k+ rep who can vote to delete, you're unlikely to succeed in deleting non-answers and low quality answers without moderator assistance.

Y'all have taken a huge blow, through no fault of your own. Looking at numbers, I'd say you're somewhat on the cusp. You have enough people but I'm not sure that you'll be able to keep up with reviewing at the higher rep levels. You have a total of 36 users with 3k+ reputation but 42% of them (15) haven't been on the site in the last 30 days and 70% of them (25) haven't been around in the last 7 days.

Over the last 30 days, only two 3k+ users have reviewed more than 10 items in the close queue - the top five reviewers are all under 3k. If I raised your privilege levels, what closing was getting done would essentially stop. NB: Reviewers, specifically. This doesn't look at people voting to close on the post directly.

In general, you're doing OK with your reviews. Over the last 120 days, 241 posts were flagged or voted closed and y'all have handled 71% of them. Many sites do far worse. But this would doubtless drop dramatically with higher levels.

Until a point in time where the majority of the review activities are being handled by 3k+ users, y'all will stay at the reduced reputation levels. Please don't see this as a badge of shame or indication that you weren't ready to leave Beta. Our goal in removing the Beta label was to indicate to everyone that we believe small sites are great and stable. This means that sites may keep the lower rep levels indefinitely.

And, if you ever feel like you're ready and we don't notice, let us know. Have your mods ping a CM or use the Contact form to get us to look into it.

8
  • 4
    "Have your mods ping a CM" What mods, exactly? I do believe all current moderators have in fact resigned.
    – Weckar E.
    Jan 27, 2020 at 6:54
  • Assuming y'all still have people interested in moderating the site, you'll have mods again in the near future. Even still, that's why I included the other half of that statement.
    – Catija
    Jan 27, 2020 at 7:05
  • This is the first time that I have heard we could have simply asked for it and got increased rep levels. Are there also specific things or procedures for the other stuff that had been sort of up for gabs so far or updates about the automated election?
    – Secespitus
    Jan 27, 2020 at 9:27
  • @SecSE-clearMonica'sname Shog was the one building the new election system so I don’t know what we’re doing right now though I’ve been told it’s a priority. For most things that require changing site settings, it’s a matter of a few factors - whether we customize it, if there’s a demonstrated need, if we have time to review requests. A great many things are possible.
    – Catija
    Jan 27, 2020 at 13:09
  • 2
    Sounds like there won't be an election anytime soon if it depends on a feature for which the developer working on it has been fired recently without a replacement for this task.
    – Secespitus
    Jan 27, 2020 at 15:22
  • @SecSE-clearMonica'sname The feature allows us to hold more elections simultaneously but elections don't require it.
    – Catija
    Jan 27, 2020 at 15:23
  • The manual process is quite time-consuming according to your older comments that I linked above, which means sites that lost moderators will likely be ranked to get a priority for which site gets to hold one - I assume quite a few will want to hold elections at some point in the near future. Especially now that the Community Team is smaller this will be a long process. In theory an election on this site might not depend on the tool, but I currently don't see how this would practically work out anytime soon. Not that I foresee many people nominating themselves, but a roadmap would be nice.
    – Secespitus
    Jan 27, 2020 at 15:48
  • @SecSE-clearMonica'sname True, we are all much too humble to self-nominate.
    – Weckar E.
    Jan 28, 2020 at 17:16

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .