A new review queue layout with all new features

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

We’re excited to announce some valuable improvements to the review queue and Discourse’s moderation tools. These are available behind an experimental feature flag that can be enabled on any Discourse site - read below for more info!

A refreshed layout

The layout of the review queue has been entirely rebuilt to make sure moderators can find vital information at a glance and take action on reviewables from a consistent location.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Additionally, we’ve moved the filters to the top of the page on the list view, providing more space for reviewables to be displayed.

Moderator notes and a timeline

Moderators can now record their thoughts and communicate with each other directly on each reviewable by leaving notes. Notes are displayed in the Timeline tab along with other chronological data about the reviewable, including info about any flags made by users.

If you have the User Notes plugin enabled, you will also have an option to add your moderation notes onto the user’s profile itself, without having to navigate there.

Even more data now available

The Insights tab shows more granular and actionable data about the reviewable to assist moderators in making decisions, such as:

• The number of times this post has been flagged
• The flagged user’s trust level
• The number of times the user has been flagged
• How many posts the user has written

How to enable these new tools

The refreshed review queue layout is available to use on all Discourse sites right now! If you are self-hosting, make sure you update to the latest version to access it.

To enable these new tools:

• Navigate to the ‘Experimental’ page in your admin (/admin/config/experimental)
• Add groups to the “Reviewable UI refresh” setting.
  • Any groups you add to this setting will see the new layout and features when they access the review queue - you can add your built-in moderators or admins groups, or create a new group that moderators can join or leave as they please.

There’s more to come…

We’re hard at work on rebuilding the moderator actions to allow moderators to take separate actions on users and their flagged content, which will make actions more consistent, easier to understand, and far more flexible.

Share your feedback

We’d love to hear what you think of the new moderation tools! This work has been in development for some time, and we’re already using it for our daily moderation needs here on Meta with great success.

If you opt into the new tools and test them out on your site, please leave a comment below to let us know what you think, and how this update is impacting your moderation flow.

[one1]

Thanks! These changes look great!

Can you offer a little guidance on how experimental it is at this point? I’m assuming you think it’s fine to use on production. If there are problems, are they likely to have permanent impacts on the forum?

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

We’re currently using this here on Meta, so we consider it safe to use right now. The moderator actions have not been changed (yet), so you will still have all the core moderation features available to you, and it won’t have any permanent impact on your forum if you use the new interface.

You can always switch back to the old interface at any point, and any notes you left on reviewables will be there when you return to the new one.

[Michelle_L (Michelle Lynn)]

@hugh - I do like the changes thus far, it’s very user friendly. I do have a couple of questions:

• Will the Timeline & Notes be available in Data Explorer?
• If a client is using AI Triage and not the OOB AI Spam Detection, will the trigger be listed as it currently is on the current version, not excluding the first post typing time?
  • This is very key when it comes to moderating the post, we need to know why the post was flagged, even if a user flags a post, we need to know the reason they flagged it.

[gormus (Osman Gormus)]

I like the new layout, I think it is much clearer : )))
The reviewable’s meta, the moderator convo, the action items are now cleanly separated.

@hugh

If you have the User Notes plugin enabled, you will also have an option to add your moderation notes onto the user’s profile itself, without having to navigate there.

This is my new favorite though. I’m hoping this will help our moderators to use the user notes even more.

Would you also consider adding a site setting for requiring the Copy note to {username}'s profile? checkbox?
e.g. copy moderator notes to user profile allowed groups

[j127]

It looks great. “Copy note to user profile” saves a few clicks.

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

@Michelle_L

Will the Timeline & Notes be available in Data Explorer?

The data in the timeline already exists (flagging reason, who flagged, etc.), so that will continue to be available in the same places. For the notes, I’m not sure about their availability in Data Explorer at this stage, but I’ll find out and circle back here.

@Michelle_L

If a client is using AI Triage and not the OOB AI Spam Detection, will the trigger be listed as it currently is on the current version, not excluding the first post typing time?

The current data shown for flagging reasons will still be shown in the timeline view, so the new UI won’t remove any data you previously had access to.

@gormus

I like the new layout, I think it is much clearer : )))
The reviewable’s meta, the moderator convo, the action items are now cleanly separated.

@j127

It looks great. “Copy note to user profile” saves a few clicks.

I’m glad you like it! We’ve already found this interface to hugely improve our own moderation experience on Meta, so we’re confident it will do the same for everyone else.

@gormus

Would you also consider adding a site setting for requiring the Copy note to {username}'s profile? checkbox?
e.g. copy moderator notes to user profile allowed groups

That’s a possibility, although not one we’ve actively considered at this stage. Only admins and moderators should have access to the review queue, so I suppose a setting like this would allow you to be more granular with who is allowed to do something like that. We’ll give it some thought!

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

@hugh

@Michelle_L

Will the Timeline & Notes be available in Data Explorer?

The data in the timeline already exists (flagging reason, who flagged, etc.), so that will continue to be available in the same places. For the notes, I’m not sure about their availability in Data Explorer at this stage, but I’ll find out and circle back here.

There is a new table called reviewable_notes, where the notes are stored - these can be queried in Data Explorer

[Michelle_L (Michelle Lynn)]

@hugh - Thank you for the update. That is exciting to know it can be queried.

[gormus (Osman Gormus)]

@hugh

That’s a possibility, although not one we’ve actively considered at this stage. Only admins and moderators should have access to the review queue, so I suppose a setting like this would allow you to be more granular with who is allowed to do something like that. We’ll give it some thought!

Thanks for the consideration @hugh I guess I was mainly thinking about the category moderators and a feature request I made while back: Add group access setting for user notes

[T_Disco (T)]

It’s a great improvement, thank you!

Please could these be considered to further enhance the review queue:

1. The links in the ‘Need help?’ section in the sidebar on the review items don’t currently work.
   Could they be customizable/replaced with custom links?
   Could they also be displayed on the review queue page for quicker access.
   Add customisable moderator help links to review item pages and review queue page

2. If the Assign plugin is installed add ‘Assign this topic’ below ‘Claim this topic’ and add ‘Assigned to’ in the Timeline & notes tab if the topic is assigned.

3. In the Timeline & Notes tab, display the Revision Reason (if there is one) below the Reviewed by line.
   Display the Reviewable revision reason in the reviewable scores table

4. In the Options section add these filters:
   Add the ability to filter by 'Reviewed between' dates
   Add the ability to filter by ‘Claimed by’

5. In the sentence ‘The first few posts from every user must be approved by staff.’ - replace ‘few’ with the value in the Approve post count setting (users (Moderators) who can’t access the site settings wont know the value entered in the Approve post count setting as the link results in a 404 for them).
   Display the value of approve_post_count below the relevant posts on the review queue

6. Add the number of user’s previously rejected posts on the Insights tab in the User info section
   Display number of user's rejected posts on posts in the review queue

7. Filtering by ‘Reason’ returns the reason for the initial flag. Could the title be changed to ‘Flag Reason’ and an additional filter, ‘Revision Reason’ be added to enable filtering by the reviewable revision reason that the moderator selected when reacting to the flagged item.
   Enable filtering by 'Reviewable revision reasons'

8. Display the number of items returned when filtering Display the number of items returned when a filter is applied

9. Include the current number of items in the Review Queue in the notification email that is sent to Moderators

Please could you mark this feature request as completed/solved:

Suggestion: Add comments/notes for moderator reference to posts queued on the review page

On the Review page, add an ‘Add Note’ button (possibly after the ‘Delete User…’ button) below the individual posts, for moderators to add comments/notes to individual queued posts for future reference for themselves and other moderators. The note(s) could possibly be displayed above the buttons: Approve Post etc. and include the date, time and author of the note. This could be used when there has been activity outside of Discourse related to the post i.e. ‘emailed x to ask for their opinion’, …

[tobiaseigen]

I’ve been enjoying the new layout here on meta, too! Warm congrats and much gratitude to the staff experience team who put so much thought, time and effort into getting it to this point. It has so many moving parts so I know it was no easy task!

I like the moderator notes and the “copy note to .. profile” tickbox too - that’s a nice touch! However, having used this for a little while already I want us to resist the temptation to turn that feature into chat for moderators or load it with features.. in my mind this is mostly for moderators to help each other with the specific reviewable item, while reviewing it and again later for future reference.

I also am not sure how much we want to load into the user notes - that feature is fairly barebones and works quite well as is to share key details about a user amongst moderators. There is no way to search/filter user notes so if there are alot of them it can become hard to manage.

I noticed that a note I added recently didn’t make sense in the user notes out of context, so I deleted it and posted it again.

@T_Disco

Please could you mark this feature request as completed/solved:

Done! Wow, @T_Disco that’s an impressive laundry list of feature requests!

[Michelle_L (Michelle Lynn)]

@hugh - It appears that posts that a user has deleted themselves are appearing in the UI. Is this the expected behavior? We don’t need to decision a post that the user themselves deleted. This could cause to restore the post that the user deleted.

Is there a way to get the Revise Post option to appear on other triggers besides appearing for the first post typing time trigger?

[Teafh]

@hugh

Thank you for the hard work. It could be better if notes can:

1. Mention (@) users;

2. Build polls.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Can you share more about how you’d use those features if they were available?

[Teafh]

Our forum is a big community with lots of flags per day. Different moderators have different specialties in handling different flags.

We want to assign some flags to specific moderators for handling, and for other flags, we want to decide on a voting process for handling.

[jenmck (jen)]

This looks great so far. Some feedback:

• We prefer that moderators can’t see email addresses by default; instead needing to intentionally show email so it appears in the audit log. This is extremely crucial for our use case.
• All of the user’s custom user fields show up. For our use case, this is not something that should be so visible to moderators. Of course they could see them in other ways, I suppose, but not putting them in every flagged post is far far better. We use custom user fields for a variety of webhooks and custom settings based on those fields.

If it were possible for admins to toggle these, that’d be fine. Currently I am hiding the fields with a css change but this is not a long-term or particularly viable solution, given the email address can still be shown using dev tools.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@Teafh

We want to assign some flags to specific moderators for handling

Would it help to change “Claim” to “Assign” so that people could assign themselves or another moderator?

Or would you prefer to lean on mentions to suggest someone assign themselves?

[Teafh]

I think “assign” is better than “claim”, and I prefer to suggest someone handle the flag rather than simply “assign” it.