Can someone explain to me why there are moderators that answer questions through the comments in the moderation queue but don’t publish the Questions to be seen by everyone? It seems to me like all it does is allow them to get a head start on questions and not let any one else get the karma for it.
Moderators: If you provide an answer in the form of a comment on a question in the moderation queue, can you please publish it and not let it sit there for some other moderator to approve?
The logic behind this is not to publish simple answers that can easily be solved through a quick link to the documentation, or a quick typo fix. The idea when doing this is that the question will not get published at all, the future moderator should reject the question not publish it.
The reason why you don’t reject straight away is there is difficulty seeing the comments on a question that has been rejected. If the send message process on the mod queue actually sent an email out or something then the correct way to deal with these posts would be to send message and reject straight away.
I have no particular preference for the practice either way, but it is a good idea for mods to be consistient.
I started doing this after reading:
In terms of moderation, I’m inclined to reject those questions outright. They add nothing to the site in terms of quality content. It does us no good to have thousands of repeat questions, many of which are unanswered or poorly answered. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve no doubt noticed that many of the site’s regulars feel that way.
Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have dealt with similar problems: a whole lot of people want to post a whole lot of low-quality content, and unless someone specifically tells them no, the site’s usefulness is going to plummet.
So, instead of rejecting a question, I sometimes leave a comment suggesting a solution. Sometimes the person comments back, sometimes they don’t. To me, that seems slightly better than just rejecting the question with no explanation. As far as I know, it’s worth zero karma.