For the mods and potential future mods (i.e. regular users right now), I would like to have a way of "voting up/down" how they behave for a given comment, question, answer or moderation action. BUT keep it visible only to myself. So come election time or if I want to report on behaviour I would have a compiled list for myself to present as evidence to other mods or for my own vote.

In addition perhaps we can have it to be less binary rather than like or not like. Since it's a personal thing have a little more choice in how we would want to tag it but provide a set of sensible defaults.

  • This mostly already exists: stackoverflow.com/election If you go to an individual election page, you'll see the list of candidates and some include links to their answers to user questions. – BSMP Jan 16 '17 at 22:22
  • As for the last one, participating in Meta is the best way to know how mods handle issues. There's no way to tell which mod handled a comment (unless they discuss it here) for one thing and adding a whole new layer of voting behavior for this probably isn't worth the effort. – BSMP Jan 16 '17 at 22:24
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    Elections are not a regular thing, they are scheduled only when new moderators are needed. Personally, I didn't really know I was going to stand for election until the election nominations opened, so there was no point in 'registering early'. And strong candidates usually have already shown a strong community participation by being active on Meta. Last but not least, current moderators are never part of an election, they are not 'incumbents' that need re-electing. Once elected, you stay moderator until you step down. – Martijn Pieters Jan 16 '17 at 22:28
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    I don't see much reason to have a known list of users who want to be a mod, nor the upvote/downvote thing upfront. FYI: The list of current mods is here, – rene Jan 16 '17 at 22:30
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    @ArchimedesTrajano oh, some user names are pretty obscure and hard to remember, but to me, if it's really bad enough to warrant "well you shouldn't be a mod", it's something I would remember.... but that may be just me (and.... normal RL elections have a LOT of choices.... we're not all in a system with limited choices.... ) – Patrice Jan 16 '17 at 22:46
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    @ArchimedesTrajano 100%... however the question here seems to be in relation to election... which is why I answer it with the election mindset... If you want a way for you to rate users just so you can rate users... that's different than the question in your post which relates it to elections – Patrice Jan 16 '17 at 22:48
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    It's not like I would want to go through all their respective posts during the election period. - But you're not going through all of their respective posts ever. You would, at best, only be marking everything you just happened to come across. So Candidate A might have made 3 decisions you didn't like that you saw but Candidate B might have made 20 decisions that you would have disagreed with, but you never saw those actions. – BSMP Jan 16 '17 at 22:51
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    So now, the question becomes: why should it be on Stack? Can't you use a spreadsheet? (userid, postid, rating on 5, notes)? and then just filter to who runs for mods? I personally wouldn't use this, but I can see how some people would want to... just not sure it needs to live on the site :/ – Patrice Jan 16 '17 at 22:58
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    This idea so way off and so focused on damaging users. Users here should be able to rely on the fact that they are not scored in secret and that they should be moderated based on facts that recently happened. Not when they decide to run for mod and then find out that 100 users have kept notes. And then pile on the shit from three years. That is way beyond reasonable. You're free to keep track of me in an excel sheet, but let's never make that a feature of this site. – rene Jan 16 '17 at 23:02
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    @ArchimedesTrajano well.... if you make a feature request, it's because you want it implemented... FRs aren't "suggestion boxes"... it's for needed features on the site. Either it's needed and you can make a strong case for it... or it's not and it doesn't really need an FR for it... at which point I would suggest a Google Spreadsheet, again :). – Patrice Jan 16 '17 at 23:06
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    @ArchimedesTrajano Majority rule isn't entirely how things work here. – Daedalus Jan 16 '17 at 23:24
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    @ArchimedesTrajano True... but if you wanted road tolls to be a thing of the past and never come back, you would need a MUCH MORE compelling argument than "well I don't like them". – Patrice Jan 16 '17 at 23:26
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    This site isn't really governed as a democracy either, it's more like a meritocracy, as decided by SE employees. Not everything the majority (or a majority at the time) of active users want is implemented, for good reason. The population here on meta isn't a representative sample of the entire userbase, not by a long shot. – user308386 Jan 17 '17 at 7:18
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    @rene Can you please post that comment as an answer so that I may upvote it? :-) I think that about sums up everything that needs to be said here, and if I wrote it, it would be about 10x longer but no better. – Cody Gray Jan 17 '17 at 7:21
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    @CodyGray sure, done that. The last time I promoted an well received comment to an answer, the answer was down voted into oblivion. I'm always in for an experiment. Let's see how this one goes. – rene Jan 17 '17 at 11:38

This idea so way off and so focused on damaging users.


That is beyond what I consider to be a reasonable way to coach and help this community grow.

You're free to keep track of me in an Excel sheet, but let's never make that a feature of this site


I disagree with @CodeCaster's take on this. While it's tempting to internally tag someone who hasn't responded or otherwise behaved negatively as "ignores improvement requests" and then just skip any future questions by them, it's also brutally unfair. At that point you're making judgements about the person and not the content, and that's not what stack exchange is about. Displayed accept rates were removed for a similar reason, and this would be even worse in its adverse effects.

Think about it, such a system is basicly a self-maintained blacklist, and is probably going to be used mostly to exclude people, based on their past behavior (And not giving them a chance to improve. The guy could have learned to respond to improvement requests by now, you wouldn't know, since you resolved to ignoring all their questions from now on)

And then you couldn't stop people from sharing their preferences. What's to stop a couple of high rep users from easily and conveniently maintaining a "bad users list" then. What happens if someone makes a mistake and gets on that.

No, this veers strongly into the territory of moderating users not content, and that's diamond moderator only territory.

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    Amen, my thoughts exactly on why this is a Bad Idea™. We really really really don't want this to turn into an identity based forum any more than it already has. Objectivity is hard, but we have to keep trying. – deceze Jan 17 '17 at 9:51
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    I don't know what's worse: tagging a couple of users who show again and again that they don't care in the slightest how this site is supposed to work but just want their damn code fixed, or ignoring the fact that such users exist and pretending to live in an utopia where every question is treated as just text, not posted by an individual. It's fine to disagree of course, and not my downvote on your answer anyway. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 9:54
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    @Code The system already "tags" bad user behaviour if you keep downvoting and flagging their bad content, and eventually gets rid of such users based on that. At least that's how it's supposed to work. If it doesn't, let's discuss that. We don't need yet another parallel system to that. – deceze Jan 17 '17 at 9:56
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    @CodeCaster Well yeah, these users exist and so do their questions. Thats why we have close votes and downvotes and delete votes. If the content of a question or answer is bad, we can and should moderate that. Just that a question comes from someone with a history of bad questions doesn't make it worth ignoring irrespective of its content, though. – user308386 Jan 17 '17 at 9:58
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    @deceze I'm not talking about generally bannable or otherwise actionable offenses, at least, not according to current site policy. From the users I mentioned in my answer and flagged, each of their questions lacks any understanding of the subject, each comment train is going to devolve into a chameleon question, and I'm sure they're using plugins to ignore my comments. I just don't want to spend any effort on helping them anymore, and I don't want to keep their usernames in my own memory, my machine is way better at that. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 10:01
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    @Code You are free to not engage those users to begin with, walk away as soon as you smell something fishy and downvote them to your heart's content. But I am absolutely against systematising this into some sort of user annotation blame system. – deceze Jan 17 '17 at 10:04
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    @deceze if a certain user performs actions which are generally permitted on the site but annoy the hell out of you, and they don't show any improvement over a long time, I can understand you'd want to ignore that user and their posts. A tool that can help with this, such as a browser plugin, could be useful for people who need that. Ignoring a couple of users is not going to bring down the site. I am explicitly saying that this should not be implemented by Stack Overflow, but that I do see the benefits of tool-assisted ignore functionality. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 10:09
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    @CodeCaster I don't agree with that, but if you absolutely must, there has been an user script to auto-ignore questions from users below X rep. You could modify that to instead take a flat list of users – user308386 Jan 17 '17 at 10:11
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    @Code Yes, as a personal choice like a browser plugin, you may do anything you want. I'm just saying it's a terrible idea to build this into the platform. – deceze Jan 17 '17 at 10:12

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say "Yes, this could be useful". Of course your wrapping of this suggestion in a statement like "so we can use it against a person when they nominate themselves for moderator" rustled everyone's jimmies, but having a feature where we can "tag" or "note" or "flair" a user could definitely be helpful - if only for your own peace of mind.

I would tag people as "author of $library" to never second-guess their answers to questions about $library, I would tag people as "designer|implementor of $language" so I'd accept their authority in questions about the design of said $language and I could mark people as "help vampire" or "ignores improvement requests" so I won't waste any time trying to help to improve or even answer their questions.

So, the main reason I could see a feature like this being useful is in this situation:

  • There is a user who annoys you. For example you don't like the way they phrase their questions or answers.
  • They do not respond positively to your comments. They don't reply, they don't follow them up by editing the requested information into their question or answer.
  • Their questions are not closeable. Their answers are answers indeed.
  • They're not performing offenses that are actionable by moderators, so you can't make the entire account go away by flagging.
  • You want to keep using the site as you were, you just do not want to encounter this particular user again. Other users, perhaps those with more patience, are fine to interact with them - you just don't want to anymore.

Then, in that case, I can understand you want to add such users to some kind of "ignore list", or tag them with an appropriate tag that's only visible to you.

I have mentioned this before, but keeping this list merely mentally is very error-prone.

Of course you're not going to get this implemented by the Stack Overflow developers. Perhaps you could create a browser extension for it, or build a plugin for one of the existing ones.

And no, this is not meant as a replacement for flagging. It is meant as a way to prevent yourself from spending effort for people who don't want to be helped in the way you like to help people.

As far as I know being a help vampire is not flaggable (the couple of times I've tried this on users with 500+ low-effort questions nothing changed), so there's nothing you can do besides making a note that you don't like this user (other than doing nothing and forgetting it until the next time you encounter them). Whether you make this note mentally or digitally should not matter.

And if you're doing it digitally, why not do it in a way that's shared between machines and browsers? But to implement it, you're on your own, as far as I know. You can take a look at the "Reddit Enhancement Suite" for ideas.

  • Maybe that's a clue that you're not supposed to keep this kind of list? You've been around Meta for long enough to know that the focus should be on content, not on the users who contribute it. Eric Lippert might have been involved in the design of the C# language, but if he starts posting incorrect, unhelpful, or unclear answers, I'm going to downvote them. I'm sure he'd want me to do so, not turn my brain off because I had him annotated as "C# guru". – Cody Gray Jan 17 '17 at 11:45
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    @Cody I know I shouldn't have mentioned that example, but it's too late to remove it now. Of course it's not meant as a trigger to shut off your brain, don't ridiculize my motivation. While that principle is shot down again and again here on Meta, ignoring certain users is something that certain other users can benefit from. That's all I'm saying here. Nobody has to agree with that. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 11:48
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    Well, I don't think I agree with the argument of ignoring help vampires, either. Legitimate questions should be answered, regardless of who asks them, because the answers will still help others in the future. It's easy to tell that someone is a help vampire when they start pestering you in the comments or otherwise abusing you. In that case, you just stop responding. You don't need an annotation. For people who ask persistently bad or low-quality questions, I don't want you simply ignoring them, either. As someone with moderation privileges, I want you fixing the problems or flagging them! – Cody Gray Jan 17 '17 at 11:57
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    @Cody (1/2): of course I understand where you're coming from. I'm just defending this feature request from the one and only viewpoint I know that it applies to: I, as a question answerer, over the years encountered a handful of users which I'd never want to interact with again. They ask bad questions for others: way too localized, full of XY problems and based on one misunderstanding after the other. They're not helped by an answer; they need proper education, or a switch of employment altogether. Their questions don't have a clear-cut close reason. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 12:14
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    @Cody(2/2): so as far as my privileges for interacting with their question goes, all I can do is downvote (for being unclear or extremely poorly phrased) and sometimes vote to close as "unclear what you're asking" or "too broad". The users behind those questions are not going to change, that's what they've proven in the past couple of years. So yeah, sue me for wanting to ignore them, or at least signal to myself: "watch out, you've had less than perfect interactions with this individual in the past!", or showing some understanding towards that in this answer, right? – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 12:15
  • Main question: Am I on your list and if so, in what capacity? – rene Jan 17 '17 at 18:27
  • @rene you can buy access to List Insights for a nominal fee. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 20:45
  • Kratje Amstel? – rene Jan 17 '17 at 20:54
  • @rene nah, that's 2006 currency. It's all about the Hertog now. – CodeCaster Jan 17 '17 at 20:55

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