@FaheemMitha Good question. Important? Yes. A requirement? No, but I think it would be important to know why they haven't used the queues and have really strong indicators that they are actually interested in what the job entails. If they haven't ever even used the tools available to to do light-weight moderation as a community member why should we assume they know what they are getting into and are interested in the job?

Now I can think of valid reasons, but it's something to consider. Even if all you do as a moderator is handle flags, it's helpful to understand the workflow that generated those flags. The community is going to be using the queues to pass stuff up into the flag queue and if you've never even used the review queues to know how your community is handling things you won't be as useful in guiding them in their usage.

One thing moderators get to do is review the reviewers. We can shut down folks that are abusing the queues or try to educate folks that just aren't using them effectively. If you've never used them you won't be a great guide. Now not all moderators have to be good at all the aspects of the job, but I do think it's important to have a good general handle on the workings of the site/community.

@Caleb That's a good summary. Thanks.

@terdon about that... When I first looked at it felt the same - like itbwas a world of difference and that should have been obvious to anybody. But after dabbling with a couple of CLI calculators I looked at it again the other day because the command format some use reminded me of the data in that particular question. I think that the maybe the user who noted he had been working with tcl on a solution otherwise genuinely didn't think they'd make a difference.

@mikeserv No. He was parsing text, using regular expressions and thought that x and say * are equivalent. He did not only go from a single character to a string but to a string that contains special characters FFS!

In a lot of those kinds of tallying operations they don't - apparently. In bc a string is anything between " and ". It will never do anything with a string but pass it along to its stdout. And dc can do a little more but not much, and its strings are [ and ] - any length of characters.

Well, the question did have some worth to me eventually - it gave me an example problem that could be solved with a calculator.

I think it can anyway.

But either of those utilities can count the strings easily. That's all I'm saying. Maybe he assumed they would just be split then flat counted. I still haven't been able to decipher his goal yet, but it looked like something along those lines.

@terdon - I'm not saying it was a good question, but maybe it was at least honestly bad and could have some merit for that reason alone. Most offensive about it to me personally though was that it wasn't a question - as I noted there. Whatever happened to please and thank you?