It is possible to be an admin of a Discourse site and not be a moderator. As admin, you may be very active on the site for reasons other than moderating. In this case you will not want to be notified about flags.
My suggestion would be to make whether a user is notified determined by a site setting, e.g. flag_notifications_allowed_group.
To keep current behavior, by default this setting would include admins and moderators. But it could be configured with any group that admins can join that want to be notified and help out with handling flags.
i have added this feature as a setting to this theme component. note that the settings affect all admin users. there is no granularity for specifying only specific admins in the admin group. (that would need it to be developed as a plugin that adds the settings to the preferences/notification tab for admin users, which i don’t really feel like building at the moment).
I can understand this being something many would appreciate.
I can see a few possible ways to go about this:
a) add a _groups setting as suggested in the first post
b) simply change the hardcoded groups to only notify @moderators, and require admins who care to also be moderators
c) add personal notification preferences, so individuals could control whether they receive this particular notification or not (along the lines of @Lilly’s theme component)
I’d lean towards (b) or (c) in this case, I think.
@awesomerobot any thoughts on what design would make the most sense here?
a) doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense because we’re only dealing with 2 groups (admins and moderators) and one of them (moderators) should always receive flag notifications, thus:
b) is by far the easiest and individual admins can just add themselves to moderator group or not
c) would entail more work in core code to check if user is admin and add setting to their preferences/notifications tab, but essentially results in the same as (b) (i have a working idea how to do this and explored it as a plugin already TBH)
so, just for kicks - i opened a PR here for making all flag notifications only notify members of the Moderators group (option B, above). thus, Admins who are not members of the Moderators group will not receive any notifications or indicators of flags. They can of course still enter the review queue via the sidebar whenever they wish.
i expect some PR tests to fail as usual, probably linting. lol
my old pal triage-bot can probably fix
edit: sorry @Moin, i do not care about category moderators
(the PR probably broke some category moderator notifications somewhere but that’s an adventure for another day…)
This could easily result in category moderators not being notified because the one making a new group moderator of a category forgot to add the group to the setting.
Only notifying @moderators would also result in categoy moderators not being notified about flags in their category. I think you’d somehow need to notify all moderators that can handle the flag instead of relying on the default group.
Out of curiosity, how any of those options, but specifically the option b would work for the category moderators? (my apologies, I haven’t had any chance to test how it works for the category moderators yet, juggling many other tasks right now)
I’m a little skeptical about excluding admins from flag notifications unless we make admins moderators by default. In that case the flow would be “if you don’t want these notifications remove yourself” rather than having to know that you need to add yourself to the group to get them to begin with.
We know from our experience hosting that it’s not unusual for a site to have 0 moderators, and sometimes admins will let flags pile up for a very long time unhandled even when they receive notifications. Removing notifications from admins by default in those situations can make that situation worse, or even accidental.
We’ve been requested to have preferences to control specific notification types before[1][2], it’s a bigger project but I think it makes the most sense.
This is just a sketch, but the idea would be something like this:
Hmm. There are notifications which are only sent to moderators (I think the ones about users being silenced automatically or users pending approval). So forums without a moderator already miss notifications.
I know FEATURE: add bootstrap first admin job - Pull Request #39851 - discourse/discourse - GitHub re-added support for making the first admin also a moderator. It has also been there for some time before bootstrap mode was removed. So maybe similar to how Uncategorized is currently removed, it could be enforced that each forum has at least one moderator on existing forums.
Then there could be a default configuration for notifications regarding moderation for moderators, and they could still customize it with the more complex change of custom notification management.[1]
push notification could be a third option in that ↩︎
Fair. I feel like we should make admins moderators by default, for a number of other reasons. So I’m OK considering that required scope here for making the otherwise “simple” move.
I like this as a more general long term direction for notifications as a whole (for all users, not just admins).
I think this is aligned with the stuff @Lilly has been exploring as well.
