With premoderation of new users/topics this is highly valuable as it’s often the first interaction with the community. And if someone tries to post and just gets a rejection it’s likely that they’ll never come back. The most common case for us is that we need to redirect them from our discourse based discussion forum to our Q&A website.
To that end we have a policy of the following:
- Create a message to the user with subject "Re:
- Tell them the reason for the rejection (copy and paste reasons stored in our moderation guidelines for convenience)
- Copy their content into the bottom of the message so that they have a copy of their question that they might have spent non-trivial time to create.
- Send the message
- Then reject their post
The benefits of this workflow are that the user gets a reason and can be nudged in the appropriate direction. If we’re already reviewing it knowing the reason makes sense.
In addition we added the copy and pasting of the content because when the post is rejected it’s no longer viewable. And if it’s a good question but misdirected or something else that needs editing and with some iteration would be valuable content, it’s frustrating for the users to lose access to it when we reject the post.