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I use many of the Sysinternals utilities and follow the tag. Lately, I have noticed that many posts are made in which Questioners are reporting operational problems with their systems that are completely unrelated to usage of any Sysinternals utility. Questions posted recently cover a variety of issues including but not limited to unexpected shutdowns and/or BSODs, battery problems, sporadic bluetooth connectivity, Windows Update issues, etc. and request assistance to solve their particular issues.
It seems to me that such Questions belong elsewhere. I thought that reporting such questions as "Off Topic" would facilitate their relocation to a more relevant tag. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Would a moderator please review such postings with a view towards relocation?
Also, please add some language to the description of the Sysinternals tag to better describe what should be posted.
Hi there,
Thanks for reporting this issue. I've been following up on this tag and redirecting questions to the appropriate categories, but if you see users continue to misuse this tag, could you please report their threads as Other Terms of Use or Code of Conduct violation? This option lets you include a reason for the report, where you can specify that the thread doesn't belong under that tag. That way, our moderators can retag the thread to the correct category. Thank you!
"...but if you see users continue to misuse this tag, could you please report their threads as Other Terms of Use or Code of Conduct violation"
That is what I had initially done. But whoever reviewed those reported items left them where they were and removed the "Reported" flag.
So I stopped wasting my time.
If you previously reported those as Off Topic (which doesn't include a reason box) it's possible the reports got dismissed because the reviewers might not be too familiar with unrelated Sysinternals concerns. I'll give the mods a heads up for further reports on this.
Thanks for the follow-up. By the way, Windows development | Windows API - Win32 is another frequent target for end-user non-development problems.
You bet! Thanks for the additional info, we'll look into that as well.
By the way, Windows development | Windows API - Win32 is another frequent target for end-user non-development problems.
Yes, I follow mainly programming forums, now in the Tags :
Windows development
Developer technologies
and many questions with those Tags (particularly Windows development actually) have nothing to see with programming/development
Those new Tags are a complete mess...
It just happened again! I reported an Off Topic post at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5518716/getting-blue-screens-us-to-be-every-now-and-then-b and whoever reviewed the report ignored it and cleared the flag! I reported it again with more commentary.
I think Microsoft need to provide better training for the moderators!
I did not see this thread until now, but since I review reported posts every once in while, I like to chime in.
Yes, the tagging system in Q&A is very difficult for users. I see plenty of posts that are incorrectly tagged. I don't go and change all of them, since far from all are in my area of expertise.
When reviewing reported posts, I have not seen any that have been mislabelled Sysinternals, but this could be because during the week, I only review reported posts once a day, late in the evening my time. What I do see reported as off-topic every once in a while are posts tagged for the Office product Access, which people think is the right tag for access problems with lowercase a. These I move to a better tag.
But maybe some moderators only think of "off-topic" as "do not belong to Microsoft Q&A".
It seems in the particular case above, you reported twice and it was handled by the same moderator, and the second time he got the clue and moved the post.
It seems in the particular case above, you reported twice and it was handled by the same moderator, and the second time he got the clue and moved the post.
The first time I reported the post I only selected the "Off topic and irrelevant" check box.
When that report was not satisfactorily resolved I reported the post a second time as a "Code of Conduct Violation" with supplemental explanatory language.
So the second report got the point across and the post was moved. Of course that didn't prevent Q&A from sending me an email the post was determined not to be a Code of Conduct violation.
In my opinion merging end-user, consumer-oriented support with developer support was a mistake.
So the second report got the point across and the post was moved. Of course that didn't prevent Q&A from sending me an email the post was determined not to be a Code of Conduct violation.
Well, it wasn't, so that part of the mail was correct.
What I used to do before I was a moderator was to post a comment that they were using the wrong tag. But that was long before the consumer crowd came here. And, yes, that crowd has a hard time in a forum which is not designed for them.
@RLWA32 if a thread is unrelated to the tag and the moderator is unfamiliar with that particular topic, it can be challenging to determine whether the content is off-topic. That's why reporting as Other Terms of Use or Code of Conduct violation allows you to specify that a thread has been mistagged, providing mods with more info to work with.
Windows development Developer technologies and many questions with those Tags (particularly Windows development actually) have nothing to see with programming/development
Hi @Castorix31 would you be able to report those threads as well so we can find them a better tag? Thank you!
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