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There should always be some sort of human to appeal to. Even Wikipedia has it this way at least formally [1], although "office actions" overruling community mod

There should always be some sort of human to appeal to. Even Wikipedia has it this way at least formally [1], although "office actions" overruling community moderation decisions are extremely rare. [1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Foundation_Office_Actions_Policy https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Found...

zahlman 2y ago
There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement between community members in the first place. If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed, you are generally expected to edit it to fix the identified problem and submit it for re-evaluation. It gets put in a queue that other users can review; and everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the question anew. If you believe the community has misunderstood something about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what our goals are (hint: not helping you, personally, make your code work), and to accept that you may have misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the fact that voting works differently on meta (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta). People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are explicitly not required to explain this (again for well considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436). But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll highlight the separate problems you're asking about or explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example standard. If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and understanding (i.e. don't come in with the mindset that we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by having a site that works differently from other sites), we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best we can.

zahlman 2y ago

There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement between community members in the first place. If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed, you are generally expected to edit it to fix the identified problem and submit it for re-evaluation. It gets put in a queue that other users can review; and everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the question anew. If you believe the community has misunderstood something about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what our goals are (hint: not helping you, personally, make your code work), and to accept that you may have misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the fact that voting works differently on meta (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta). People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are explicitly not required to explain this (again for well considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436). But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll highlight the separate problems you're asking about or explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example standard. If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and understanding (i.e. don't come in with the mindset that we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by having a site that works differently from other sites), we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best we can.