Thanks for pointing this out! As I was testing the approval workflow for my last PR, I did feel awkward about the end-user experience. Chose to ignore that at the moment because that wasn’t the area of focus. Now is probably a good time to come back to this!
A few potential improvements off the top of my head:
- User Activity Page:
- include pending posts into all/topics/replies, with indication that they’re awaiting approval
- a separate section dedicated to pending posts; only visible if the user has pending posts
- “Post Needs Approval” Dialog
- link to the “pending posts” section on User Activity Page
- “3 staff who are online have been notified”? - This can also be a bad idea
- Topic list / post stream
- could display the pending topic/reply with clear indication that it’s invisible and awaiting approval
- the pending posts’ ordering with respect to other posts is important
- Approval queue edit:
- mandatory edit reason if the body of the post had been edited (or some other threshold)
- store full revision history
- Improved notification upon approval
- “your post have been approved, here’s the link to it”
- maybe a generated message from the staff who approved the post; implement with care as we do not want to spam the user
- or something close to what we have right now:
The above list is actually missing how to treat rejected post:
- Do they continue to show up in pending posts?
- Should we notify the user? If so, how?
Will try to compile a better and more detailed list after giving it some more thoughts.
I actually don’t know anything about the behavior of the posts affected by Akismet and its queue; will get myself familiar with it.