Guidelines for appropriate moderation?

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This question is a bit twofold. I keep seeing "answers" like this:
They tend to take one of two forms:
  • Terse, often single-word blurbs that convey no useful information. Things like "matlab" or "what happened" or maybe as much as "i get error". I get that language barriers exist, but conceptually, these can't be expected to be meaningful communication in any language.
  • In other cases, the user copies and pastes a prior answer from the exact same thread; often the one immediately above their own. Zero attempts are made to format the copied material or to even copy the post in whole.
The screenshot actually appears to be an example of both. These answers seem to all come from single-use accounts, and though other mods (e.g. Walter in the case of the pictured thread) try to help those who at least implicitly look like they're asking for help, I can't recall any of the accounts actually responding.
So I have to ask
  • What am I even looking at? Is this some sort of bot grooming thing? Is this a counterexample to praxaeology?
  • Is it worthwhile to ask for clarification from the user, or is a cold deletion justified? Should I bother flagging? I've been assuming that much of this is up to my own discretion and reading/weighting of the community guidelines, and I've been favoring deletion. As it's difficult to witness the rate at which others with editing privileges delete content, I have to ask what the expectations are.

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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson il 24 Feb 2022
Ah, those license / activation threads are always "fun"
First off, I would say not to worry about the backlog in those threads -- not unless you are exceptionally bored or bothered by it. In my opinion, those threads are Mathworks resources, and they ought to be putting in the time to do the major cleanup, including making the policy decisions about which of the posts to keep. I believe I've already Flag'd one of them for Mathworks attention. IIRC I also told them in internal channels that they ought to be cleaning it up.
Beyond that, my thinking is:
  • any post that just says "matlab" or a name or something unintelligible, is a post that is effectively completely unactionable (other than asking "What do you mean?"). I do not see any point in keeping those around
  • a post that talks about having trouble is at least potentially actionable, in the sense that it hints that the user might be watching, and might be willing to look where we point or call Mathworks or respond to us if we ask for detail
  • In most cases, copying and pasting a stock answer is about the only effort warranted by the low information content.
  • I recommend that the stock answer not be accusatory or have visible impatience. Muster the politeness once and copy + paste. Saves your time and emotions, and doesn't upset the person reading (except to the extent that some people get upset at receiving a form answer instead of a customized answer.)
  1 Commento
DGM
DGM il 28 Feb 2022
Modificato: DGM il 28 Feb 2022
Heh. I do tend to get exceptionally bored. My forum activity is often a distraction -- a way to feel marginally productive while waiting on (or avoiding) other things. Consequently, it should be no surprise that I go after low-hanging fruit.
I was kind of viewing those threads as no less of a resource than the rest of the forum. I assumed it was the mods that would have to clean it up either way. If anything, I kind of felt it was more important given that those threads are ones where a lot of first impressions get made. If TMW staff do/will maintain it, then I guess I can reduce my concern there.
Do you have any ideas that explain the copypasted answers? If it were bot activity, I have no idea what the purpose would be. The other hypothesis was that perhaps that's what happens when an instructor requires students to perform some requisite forum interaction as part of their introductory MATLAB project. That seems like an absurd thing to require, but it totally sounds like a guaranteed outcome if it were required.

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Rik
Rik il 24 Feb 2022
Sorry, this post is not very structured, maybe I'll edit it if this thread gets more attention.
What I personally tend to do is to comment with something to the effect of 'did you read the answer' or 'do you have a question'. I then flag with 'to be deleted in 24h (if no response)'. I do that sort of cleaning every once in a while, but I'm afraid I don't have the patience that Walter seems to possess.
I think cold deletion is fine at times. The worst that can happen is that the same user will post the answer again, in which case a comment should get them to think.
Maybe something to keep in mind: with the default settings (presumably a fair assumption), everyone who has posted on such a thread will get an email notification of your comment. So only 1 comment would suffice for the entire thread, should you want to go on a mass flag-today-and-delete-tomorrow spree.
For some of the homework threads I have taken some action (edited the question to state that duplicate answers may be deleted without warning). I do enforce that from time to time, but there are more things to do in life, and moderation is not the most fun part of this forum.
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Rik
Rik il 28 Feb 2022
Since Mathworks chose to lock down the threads (not even allowing comments on the question), I also don't feel as much motivation to keep those threads clean. I do delete a bunch of answers from time to time, but as Walter indicated: some thread have become monsters that should be tamed by a Mathworks employee. Some thread might take an hour to clean up if you don't just delete everything, but also want to do something with the feedback.
Sometimes its very apparent that this simply isn't their main product. I'm fine with that. I much rather they spend time on somthing like implementing an automatic way to create the function signature JSON from an m-file. I would like them to also implement a soft-lock (i.e. requiring approval/reputation to post on a thread, useful for homework threads and wishlist threads #1 #2 #3 #4), but you can only spend engineering time once.
(It also helps that their gratitude for what I/we do seems sincere whenever I have contact with Mathworks staff.)
I also get your point about seeing it as someone looking for things. Whenever I'm searching for something, I try to clean things up and/or comment that it no longer works, even if that means reviving a decade-old thread.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson il 28 Feb 2022
There is a parallel database view that users do not have access to, in which Mathworks employees can un-publish a question (shows up as a Delete to us mortals), work with it, and publish it again, where it shows up again with the original question number and timings. It is intended for Mathworks publishing "resources".
But in order to be able to do that, Mathworks has to be registered as the owner of that Question.
If I understand correctly, there is something tied in with that technology that disallows comments on the Question itself (as opposed to the Answers). It was probably a design decision at the time; I am not sure what factors might have led to such a decision.
So, I don't think it is so much Mathworks chosing to "lock" a particular Question, as a side effect of Mathworks "owning" the Question for that kind of publishing purposes. I have not seen any evidence yet that the Mathworks technology exists to lock a question against further input, or to require a certain minimum reputation.... it might already be in place, but I haven't seen any evidence of it (or any evidence that there are reasons why It Can't Be Done.)

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