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At Quantitative Finance, some privileges are bestowed at levels that are atypical for public beta sites:

  • "access to moderator tools" at 1000 (usually 2000)
  • "edit questions and answers" at 500 (usually 1000)
  • "cast close and reopen votes" at 1 (usually 500)
  • "view close votes" at 1 (usually 250)
  • "create tags" at 1 (usually 150)
  • "edit community wiki" at 1 (usually 100)
  • "comment everywhere" at 1 (usually 50)
  • "remove new user restrictions" at 1 (usually 10)

These aren't quite the privilege levels for a private beta site (which would additionally have e.g. "vote down" at 1 and "trusted user" at 2000) either, so I'm kind of confused. (Not that quant.SE is in private beta - just making a note of this.)

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    $\begingroup$ Those privilege levels are modifiable on a per-site basis. The "private beta" and "public beta" privilege sets are just default templates. The reasons for why they're different on that particular site would be specific to them. Just because you don't participate there doesn't mean the question doesn't belong there. I mean, if you found a design issue with, say, Arqade - you wouldn't come post it here. It belongs on Arqade's meta. $\endgroup$
    – animuson
    May 18, 2014 at 4:45
  • $\begingroup$ Probably something to do with the paucity of high-rep users. $\endgroup$
    – Aarobot
    May 18, 2014 at 4:46
  • $\begingroup$ After looking at the settings, this appears to be pretty specific to the Quant SE site, so I'm going to move this to the Quant community for comment while we take a look at the settings and decide what if any actions need to be taken. $\endgroup$
    – Robert Cartaino
    May 20, 2014 at 16:50
  • $\begingroup$ @AnaHevesi Is this actually [status-completed]? The privileges page hasn't been changed and I still have access to the close/reopen queues despite only having 105 rep here. $\endgroup$
    – senshin
    Jun 19, 2014 at 19:04
  • $\begingroup$ @senshin Oops. We had a glitch in there. It is indeed [status-completed] now. :P $\endgroup$
    – Ana
    Jun 19, 2014 at 21:00
  • $\begingroup$ @AnaHevesi Is it intentional that I have access to the close/reopen queues here on meta, or is that a glitch too? $\endgroup$
    – senshin
    Jun 20, 2014 at 6:47
  • $\begingroup$ @senshin The changes didn't take affect on meta initially. This should be fixed now. $\endgroup$
    – Ana
    Jun 20, 2014 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ @AnaHevesi Looks like it. Cool beans. $\endgroup$
    – senshin
    Jun 20, 2014 at 22:11

2 Answers 2

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It's not often that we'd do this (and I'm not the person directly involved in adjusting the scale there), but I can tell you why we'd do it.

It's important to say that new communities should be mostly self-moderating from the start - this is a corner stone in our philosophy of how community-driven sites should work. We lower the privilege bar quite a bit during the private beta phase, and then raise it somewhat considerably when a site goes to public beta.

Once in a great while, voting doesn't catch up with the sliding privilege scale, and we're left with a bunch of engaged users that would edit and cast close votes but can't because the voting / view velocity on their posts just isn't sufficient for them to gain more privileges in a timely manner. Hence, lowering the bar a bit as a band-aid for a short amount of time while folks gain enough rep to be effective on the standard privilege scale is a handy way of addressing this. It's not meant to be a long-term solution, just a quick fix for a (few) months until a solid group of folks climb up in the 1k - 3k rep brackets.

Current examples of where we'd do this are exceedingly rare, there aren't any more SE 1.0 sites that need to join the network, and new betas as of late haven't seen problems caused by a lack of voting, but that's where we'd theoretically do this. Edge cases and very niche topics sometimes need a little extra help.

The community critter in charge of watching over Quant SE is taking a look now to see where things stand, and if they're ready to return to a standard privilege scale.

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    $\begingroup$ "community critter"? Someone got promoted? ;) $\endgroup$
    – Shadow Wizard
    May 20, 2014 at 7:02
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We've done a little research, and Quant is indeed ready to have access to site privileges switched from the current, modified levels up to normal public beta levels. This change will be put into effect in the next day or so. A sample of the new privilege thresholds on Quant SE will look like this:

  • "access to moderator tools" at 2000
  • "edit questions and answers" at 1000
  • "cast close and reopen votes" at 500
  • "view close votes" at 250
  • "create tags" at 150
  • "edit community wiki" at 100
  • "comment everywhere" 50
  • "remove new user restrictions" at 10

If you're interested in an exhaustive list of how privileges shake out for public beta sites, it can be found here.

Remember, once this change is made, certain activities which are critical for site maintenance (like creating tags, and editing) will temporarily be bestowed on a smaller subsection of the community.

What does this mean in practice? The community will initially be relying on those individuals a bit more heavily, and in turn, it will be especially important to vote in order to ensure that these capabilities are expanded to new leaders who can share the burden of site governance.

Thanks to @senshin for bringing this up for discussion.

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  • $\begingroup$ Looks like this was a bad idea. Would you care to reconsider? See, e.g., meta.quant.stackexchange.com/questions/1423/… $\endgroup$
    – feetwet
    Jul 15, 2014 at 0:47
  • $\begingroup$ It was already clarified in the thread you linked to that your edit not being accepted doesn't have anything to do with rep thresholds. If the reason is still unclear at this point, please resubmit the edit and try again -- doing so will help us narrow down the issue. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Ana
    Jul 17, 2014 at 22:27
  • $\begingroup$ It was accepted. It just took a week for that to happen. My assumption was insufficient moderator/reviewer activity. $\endgroup$
    – feetwet
    Jul 18, 2014 at 3:43

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