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Avraham Yitzchak has a good point in a comment here that we are talking about advertising our site in Jewish venues, yet we are from time to time plagued by offensive questions (e.g. the Baal and sugardaddy questions). Jews aren't afraid of difficult topics discussed respectfully, of course, but they aren't always discussed respectfully. Most of the time these get taken down pretty quickly, but when it's Shabbat in the US they don't. When it's Shabbat in the US our target readers won't be reading here either, mostly, but jumping in to police the site isn't always everybody's first priority on motzei shabbat either, so they tend to linger to Sunday.

Is this a problem? And if so, what should we do about it?

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  • 6
    Hey, maybe we should find a moderator in Samoa :-)
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 29 '11 at 23:06
  • 2
    Since asking this question I've made it my practice to visit Mi Yodeya as soon after Shabbat/Yom Tov as possible to scan for new posts. If several of us do that (especially across time zones) that now seems sufficient. (The activity that prompted this question hasn't recurred.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Jul 20 '12 at 14:58
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If this is a problem (I'm not sure it is), one idea would be to have a reputation threshold for posting questions on Shabbat (however we define that in UTC). This wouldn't affect posting the rest of the week, nor would it affect comments and answers, which are less visible to first-time visitors. I'd rather send those questions to a moderation queue than forbid them outright, in the interests of placing as few barriers as possible. (Yes, we'd rather that people not post on Shabbat, of course, but if they're going to, let's try to take their questions anyway.)

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    +1, this sounds like a good idea to me; but I suspect SE won't approve it. A variant: instead of sending them to a moderation queue, queue them until after Shabas (however that's defined) and then post them en masse. Maybe. In any event, if you want to see this happen, maybe you should ask it as a separate question with the feature-request tag.
    – msh210 Mod
    Dec 25 '11 at 17:15
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    How do we define when is Shabbos? It could be early Shabbos morning in New York, yet be after Shabbos is Australia.
    – ertert3terte
    Dec 25 '11 at 18:50
  • @msh210, good idea about just holding them. If we think this is the direction we want to go I'll ask for the feature, but first let's figure out if we would even want this.
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 25 '11 at 20:25
  • @ShmuelBrill, the goal isn't to exactly cover Shabbat (we can't), but to hit some reasonable range to reduce the exposure window. Knowing the geographic distribution of users who tend to check the site Saturday night would inform that discussion, I think.
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 25 '11 at 20:27
  • Followup to this: judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4555
    – msh210 Mod
    Feb 20 '18 at 17:04
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Perhaps we can further encourage non-moderators to

That way, among those who do log on soon after Shabas will more likely be some who will act on bad posts.

Also, our current three moderators pro tempore all live within twenty degrees longitude of one another. Whenever we get more moderators, they will, I hope, be from a wider swath of the world, which should also help some.

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  • See also Shog9's answer.
    – msh210 Mod
    Dec 30 '11 at 0:02
  • One of the downsides of launching is that many users will lose the ability to vote to delete questions/answers.
    – ertert3terte
    Apr 23 '12 at 1:17
  • @ShmuelBrin, as well as other privileges, true.
    – msh210 Mod
    Apr 23 '12 at 2:14
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To add to what msh210 wrote... If you see something truly offensive posted, flag it as such!

What it looks like when you flag as offensive

This serves a dual purpose:

  1. It notifies moderators of a serious problem when they're around.
  2. Enough of these flags will cause the system to automatically remove the offending content.
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    Thanks; it's good to remind people that they can do this, and I didn't know about the auto-delete function. Part of the issue here (and this is probably unique to this site) is that for about a day each week, none of the regular custodians of the community are online, so offensive posts that show up during that time stick around for a while. Perhaps we need to encourage the regulars to make a habit of checking in after Shabbat ends to minimize the damage. (Most of our prospective readers won't be online then either, but some will, so in the interests of site promotion we want to fix this.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 30 '11 at 3:11

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