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Moderating Posts

We're all able to do a better job moderating the site when we all collaborate.

Off-topic questions should be deleted, while relevant 'questions' that don't have enough information to be answered should be closed. That's it! If we vote on questions quickly as soon as they come in, then we will increase the likelihood of a positive result for the poster, and prevent backlogs.

If a new question doesn't have enough information to be answerable, your options are to do any of (and possibly all) these:

  • Vote to close as unanswerable
    • Add a comment requesting clarification
    • Vote down the post
  • If a new question is off-topic, just vote to remove it. Let's get these off the site as fast as we can.

Here is a list of all question moderation options. As our community policies evolve, please help fill in the policy for each action.

Moderation Options: Questions + Answers

Remove as spam / offensive

Requires 5 moderator votes.

Deletes the post, and docks the author's reputation 100 points.

Should be a case of last resort. Reputation is too hard to come by to dock someone for a one time or innocent mistake.


Requires 5 moderator votes.

Deletes the question, but does not remove reputation from the asker.

Please do not encourage this behavior by answering the question a simple comment denoting its malapropos placement is all that is necessary.

Archive as not answerable

Requires 3 moderator votes.

Archived questions do not show up on any index page, but do appear on a user's profile. Archived questions may be edited by their owners, but no others. When the question is edited, the question is re-opened. Questions are automatically archived if they do not receive any answers within the first two weeks.

Merge as duplicate

Requires 3 moderator votes.

Migrate to [meta, Answers]

Requires 3 moderator votes.


Accept as solution

Requires 3 moderator votes.

Moderators can accept answers on behalf of the original poster. This should almost never be done. In the past, we have seen votes to accept answers where it was not 100% clear that the answer solved the posters question. We should be cautious with forcing an answer to be accepted, because it has a very specific meaning. We can easily clear questions out of the unresolved queue by just up-ticking answers. We should only force accept answers when it is clear that the poster's issue has been resolved, and that user didn't understand that they needed to click 'accept.'

Remove as not an answer

Requires 5 moderator votes.

Switch to a comment

Requires 3 moderator votes.

Switch to update to question

Requires 3 moderator votes.

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