Moderation queue is kind of useless

jamesinc

I turned on the Approve permission for a certain user role, to help me better handle users who frequently stir the pot on my forums.

The problem is, their posts now appear in the approval queue with no context. I get their username, date, and a snippet of their comment, but I have no link to where the comment is going to appear or any other context, nor can I even see the entire comment.

How am I supposed to do anything useful with this information?

jamesinc

Let me re-state my question more constructively. What is the best way to address this? As I understand it, the moderation system works by plucking a comment from the Comment table and writing it to the Log table in a marked up format. That table also captures the ParentRecordID (i.e. the disccusionID that the comment relates to).

It seems to me therefore that it should be relatively straightforward to put comments in-context, or at the very least provide a link that takes you to the last visible comment in the thread before the pending comment.

I'm happy to contribute a PR to address this, but I am wondering what the community's thoughts on this are?

R_J

I don't manage a community, so this is a more theoretical answer:

• The comment can be expanded so that you are able to read it completely if you like to.
• My understanding of the purpose has been to prevent spamming and it doesn't need any context to identify a spam comment.

That said, I would guess the moderation queue is useful for the majority of admins.

But being able to filter by category when you have no hint in which category those comments should be in, is a feature that I would suspect to be a reaction to some other edge cases.
And already to make this category filter more useful would be a good reason to show at least more discussion information, like discussion name and category.
My estimation is that adding those two pieces of information would be a good enhancement. The name being a link to the discussion itself would enable you to get more context if you whish to.

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Although this is a little off topic I would like to share some thoughts on the current implementation. I think that the moderation queue lacks forum member friendliness.
As far as I know, a user isn't notified when a post has been approved.
A user has no chance to see his posts until they are released.

I think there should be an additional tab in the profile only visible for the session user, which lists the unmoderated posts. Although I would like to apply also the forum wide/category specific rules to edit and delete own posts, that would require some extra rounds in moderation:

• check if comment still exists, give Admin feedback if not
• check if shown comment is equal to current version to prevent approving an unredacted version of the post

Based on that additional complications, I think it would be ideal to only allow deletions.

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Even more offtopic: having a module which shows unmoderated posts to moderators directly in a discussion might be helpful. That same module could show up for people who have unmoderated posts in a discussion, only showing them their own comments

jamesinc

Maybe I could make a plugin that just shows moderation actions. It would be good if instead of deleted comments disappearing, they showed as little line items in the discussion [deleted comment] etc, so that users know moderators have been active

R_J

I once was active in a community where a [deleted] would have been the topic of the day for the complete community. If a post has been deleted for a reason, I don't think that anything has to remain. But that certainly depends on the community.

phreak

Sidenote from my expertise as a community manager: Usually edited or deleted posts span a huge tail of complications. Not only - depends on the community - users are getting curious and come up with all sorts of theories and accusations but also from a SEO perspective where you are basically loosing content which could lead to decreased search engine rankings and lesser sign ups.