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September 16, 2010 Release Notes

As you've all noticed, last night we rolled out lots of fun little changes around the site. Here's the rundown:

Moderator voting!

We scrapped our existing flag-based moderation system to put more power in the hands of you. We found the old flagging relied too much on us, and made it hard for everyone to track what was happening. It wasn't always obvious when posts got deleted and when to flag posts for different actions. So Sterling scrapped it and rewrote the system from scratch.

Here's the deal now: if you see a problem with a post, hit the 'Actions' link and cast a vote for what you think should happen.

  • These are your voting options for questions:
    • Remove as spam / offensive
    • Close as not repair-related
    • Merge as duplicate
    • Migrate to Meta
  • And for answers:
    • Accept as solution
    • Remove as spam / offensive
    • Remove as not an answer
    • Switch to a comment
    • Switch to question update
  • Finally, comments:
    • Remove as spam / offensive
    • Switch to an answer
    • Switch to an update to a post

If you find something wrong with a post (such as it is a duplicate, needs to be on meta, it is offensive, or something else), you can click the actions link and place your vote for what is wrong with the post. You can also see what votes have happened so far against that post in the same window.

Of course, mistakes will happen. Churchill said it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." So votes can go the other way, too. Just as it takes three votes to close a question as off-topic, another group of three people can come along and vote to re-open the question.

To make your life just a little bit more efficient, we created a way for you to keep track of current votes. If you are looking for just bad posts you want to either improve or vote on, you can check out /Moderation which shows all current in progress votes.

Oh, one other thing: You can't vote on your own posts. And we have systems in place to track gaming the voting, so don't bother.

Comment editing

In response to a popular uprising, you can now edit comments! Editing is limited to the original author, and you can only modify the comment within 5 minutes of your original post.

Merge duplicate questions

This is a really big deal, and should dramatically help increase the number of questions we can answer. This new option is quite powerful, and allows you to merge a new question in with an existing, already solved post. The details are a little non-intuitive, so I'll put up another post with more details on this soon.

New patrol thresholds

There is now a slider for users with over 1000 reputation to set the patrol threshold for editing guides. Whatever number you set this to will be the number at which edits will be patrolled. You can not set it above your own reputation or below 1000. All iFixit written guides now also have a patrol threshold of 30,000. As usual, you can always edit your own guide without being patrolled. Want to learn more about patrolling? There's a helpful post explaining our content review system works.

Other changes

  • We made some back-end changes to image handling to enable future growth. We didn't change any functionality, but keep an eye out for bugs.
  • Lots of small tweaks to the site UI and back-end to make things shinier, faster and more stable.

As always, if something is not working or looks broken, please leave a post here in meta so we can track it down and make iFixit better for you. I'm happy to clarify the new voting system, just post questions here.

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Wow, that's like the majority of features we've been asking for, not perfect, but very good, should prevent a heck of a lot of problems now.

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It's almost like we listen or something ;)

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Kyle Wiens will be eternally grateful.