TL;DR: Users shouldn't flood edits without a consensus. Read my post but skip the optional stuff... :)

Every now and then, we get an edit flood at our front page. This sometimes happens without any consensus and sometimes even at unacceptable moments / rates. Which is why I think we should get a better coordination on this when such edit floods want to take place.

I've frequently done took part of this myself, my main intent is that I want it to happen but that shouldn't cause one to act by himself. If we get this better organized we act more together as a community...

I don't to see users banned for a full week just because of a misunderstanding, that scares them away!

Main Idea: We should require users to get permission from a moderator.

Q: I want to perform these changes to the site, may I perform an edit flood?

Three options:

♦ agrees: As there has been a consensus on this, you are free to go.

♦ delays: Not at this point, it's [peak moment in day] right now. You can do it later.

♦ denies: We have not reached a consensus on this, you are not allowed.

Additionally, a moderator can give this permission when a meta question wraps around:

♦ makes a meta question OR adds a comment to a post explaining a consensus has been reached.

Optional: We could gather these edit floods to do edit flood X times a year instead.

Yes, it doesn't seem a bad idea for a moderator to collect the things that seem necessary to be done and then we try to get this through as fast as possible. Instead of doing these multiple days, we just do these X times a year such that the rest of the time there are no edit floods on the front page.

It's fairly easy to do this:

1. Create a chat room where we organize this, assign each person a different topic to edit such that edits do not collide with one another. This makes an edit on one topic actually go faster.

2. Get everyone to open as much tabs as possible on the topic he needs to edit and prepare the edits along, you could like for example set up X minutes to do this. Then afterwards people literally flood the site which requests while still trying to avoid the captcha / IIS request limit, we don't want to take Super User litterally down in the progress.

3. The infrequent visitor sees a flood at that moment which resolves soon after, instead of our visitors seeing unfortunate edit floods at more frequent intervals.

Optional: The SE system could be foreseen from an edit rate limit, which shows a warning.

That warning could explain that one should raise the required editing on meta such that it can be added to the above organized edit floods, of course the rate should be disable by moderators such that we can have the above edit floods when we really need them. The rate limit idea is by nhinkle

The only thing left to do is, discussing these idea and filling in the X...

Main questions:

• What are your thoughts about this?

• What do you think is an acceptable limit on rate of edits, as in X edits per Y minutes?

• Do you have any other ideas / contributions to the edit floods topic?

Optional questions:

• Supposing that it is a good idea, how many times a year should we organize an edit flood?

• What should the warning towards an edit flooding user say, if it gets implemneted?

Related:
Do we care about edit flooding? Should we be doing anything?
Why are there large number of high-view questions on the front page?
What time of the day is Super User getting the least traffic?
Recent edit floods, some of them which confuse / upset people or happened without consensus.