Meta:Flood flag
 | The following page documents a Meta-Wiki guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that users should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss on the talk page, Babel or at RfC. |
| ←Policies and guidelines | flood flag |
| Meta-Wiki's administrators may temporarily give themselves a "flood flag" when doing repetitive, non-controversial edits or actions to avoid flooding Special:RecentChanges and related pages. |
When to use the flood flag[edit]
Administrators should use the flood flag to avoid flushing other edits and actions from the RecentChanges (RC) feed when making repetitive changes. Such actions must never be controversial, as using the flood flag decreases the amount of oversight they may receive. Abuse of the flood flag is treated as abuse of any other administrator tool would be. Examples of acceptable use would be deleting many spambot pages, deleting a large number of pages after consensus has been achieved at Meta:Requests for deletion, or blocking many open proxies. Unacceptable uses include attempting to circumvent legitimate oversight of any controversial action, whether or not it is an administrator task.
Users may also wish to raise the flood flag when performing log actions on large numbers of usernames that are offensive or libellous (i.e. stewards locking/hiding global accounts, administrators performing local blocks and so on).
In some cases, a bureaucrat may remove the flood flag to force an administrator's edits to appear in RC. This should be done in cases where the administrator has forgotten to remove it, or when the changes should be seen by default in RC.
The flood flag is set and removed using Special:UserRights.
Room for abuse?[edit]
One issue with the proposal as it stands is that there is room for administrator abuse: if an administrator is making contentious edits or actions, he or she would be able to toggle the flood flag to prevent them from being seen or monitored from RC, which is the primary place where new edits are displayed and observed.
However, it must be remembered the administrators are already trusted with the ability to delete pages, block users, view deleted material, place protections on pages, etc. In the end, this added functionality should not require more trust than that sysops are already given.
Granting the flood flag is logged, and shown in recent changes. Administrators who abuse their admin rights (now including the flood flag) should be sanctioned.
Flood flag or bot flag?[edit]
This is intended to replace requesting temporary bot flags from bureaucrats. Administrators who would otherwise request a temp bot flag may simply flag themselves using the flood right.
Cases where a permanent bot flag should be given remain the same - the administrator should create a secondary account and request a bot flag as normal. Only temporary bot flags are replaced with this flood flag.
See also[edit]
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