Add reason for rejection of a post

feature
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for the first posts of a user, which may need to be approved (based on a forum policy), a reason for rejection may be good.

when an admin reject a “waiting for approval” post, it’d be good (educational for users) to add the reason so that this reason goes to the user directly.

currently we message users about the reason their post is not accepted. it’s a bit of work, as in a message you need to say hi and bye :wink: .

I’m not sure if this can work, but when admins click on reject button, a window like the flag window can open and admins can write the reason or choose among the list:

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Are there any developments?

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I have been against unconditionally notifying users here of rejections. (we now unconditionally notify on approval)

But… strategically if the moderator opts to give a rejection reason, I am all for reducing moderator friction.

I would like the full picture here, what are some examples of reasons why you would reject first post?

cc @eviltrout

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I guess anything that causes one to flag a post, can cause rejection of the first post as well! e.g.:

  • duplicate of another thread

  • non-relevant, advertisement, spam, … ; or let’s say out of the community scope (according to the “community guidelines”)

  • very poor writing or non-clear message (bad spelling, bad grammar, …) such that moderators can’t edit it easily

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I am also running into this same issue, and would love this feature!

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In my case, new members must submit one high-quality submission before they are given full access to the community. Thus, it would be really great to give them some feedback on their submission if it wasn’t accepted, as to encourage them to try again. Alternatively, if their submission is good but we have some edits, we would like to share some comments on how to improve the post before officially accepting it.

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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.

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This would be a feature we would love to have as well.

Are there any plans to implement it any time soon?

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I keep hitting this issue on my forum. It would be nice to have the same kind of options that are available with flagging when rejecting new posts, as each time I reject I have to manually go message the user to inform them why I’m rejecting.

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We are also looking for this feature, if the team can pull this off will be great help, our community is very large, need this rejection thing to manage everything, rightnow we have to manually PM every user regarding post rejection. :neutral_face:

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This is something we need. We use approval for bug reports (with 150k+ users they tend to post first, read later) We have a general “support” forum, where we encourage people to ask “how to” questions. If something breaks, we ask that they post in Bug Reports. The problem is if their post is rejected (either as a duplicate or for lacking appropriate information, etc) they don’t know that… the post just disappears and they don’t know if it even went through in the first place.

This encourages them to post bug reports in the lower-friction support forum, usually identically and without the information we need them to include to reproduce the reports. This is creating more work for us. I’d like to be able to reject with a reason, to educate them on how to appropriately submit a bug report, or to link an existing report, for example.

Here’s the logic flow of a user reporting this as a concern:

The way posts to Bug Reports now work, you might never see anything that clearly shows your post was received. Such posts need moderator approval before they appear – and that makes sense. A bug might affect many people, so that without the approval mechanism many different threads might result. Also, it might not actually be a bug. If the Bug Reports forum is meant to double as a list of bugs, that would be another reason for posts needing approval.

However, if the post doesn’t eventually appear, there doesn’t seem to be any clear acknowledgement that the post has even been received. And even if it (or a similar report) does eventually appear, that can take quite a while. If the problem persists, you can find yourself thinking, “Was the post even received? Should I post again?”. You can also spend time checking whether anything has appeared.

This is discouraging.

If it was posted as Suggestions & Feedback instead, though, the post would at least appear, so that you can see that it has been received. Even if it’s later moved or deleted, you at least know it wasn’t lost in transmission.

That is less discouraging.

From the POV of someone trying to be helpful by drawing attention to a problem, it therefore seems that posting in Suggestions & Feedback works better than posting in Bug Reports. To post in Bug Reports, you also have to supply at least one tag, which also discourages posting there. And you’re asked to supply a lot of information which may not even be relevant.

In effect, we’re encouraged by the forum’s behaviour to report problems as Suggestions & Feedback instead of as Bug Reports.

It might be argued that this could create the duplicate threads the approval mechanism is meant to avoid. However, we’re already supposed to look for existing threads before posting, and it’s easy enough to wait for a bit before posting, to give other posts a chance to appear.

So when it’s all put together, it still seems to work better (from the POV of someone wanting to submit a report) to post in Suggestions & Feedback.

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We needed this yesterday. I reject a lot of new topics each day because they are duplicates of existing topics, but those users will never get even a single word of reason why their topic was rejected.

I don’t have the time to:

  • Messaging them through PM’s and deal with the discussion that follows
  • approving the topics and unlist and lock them right after
  • approve the topic and then open it to flag it as a duplicate

When I reject, I would like to provide a reason and be done with it right in that moment. This can be a standard reason (duplicate, out-of-scope of community, poor writing, inappropriate), optionally followed by a short message.

Not having this is very discouraging for new forum users.

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I agree. If you reject a post or topic and it never appears for that user without an explanation it gives a bad impression unless you send them a personal message later on. I would really like it if this was implemented. In addition it is more time consuming to go from the moderation queue to their profile to send them a message. If it was all in one place it would be convenient.

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Isn’t this already on the release list?

Check #releases … oh wait, no, that’s for rejection of an account, my bad.

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Exactly, would like a similar feature for reviews.

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I’d also would like this feature.

I’m used to Mailman 2 where there’s a text box for “reason for rejection” so was surprised that the rejected message just vanished without trace so quickly!

(Ok, it hasn’t vanished without trace - I can see it’s in the staff actions log.)

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Bumping this because of @TheBaby5 her request in #marketplace.

I think we at least need to notify a user if a post gets rejected. Currently users get left in the dark.

Currently the proces for moderation approval is:

  1. User posts in moderated category
  2. After posted, user sees js.review.approval.description (Just a modal popup, no message from staff)
  3. If the post is rejected, the user get’s no notification.

I think basic functionality should be a message that the post has been rejected (maybe from staff). I don’t really need reasoning - we could for example edit js.review.approval.rejected.message and add the most common reasons there. This is just an idea.

Original marketplace post here

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I agree with this IF it for a legitimate user and one wishes to advise them as to why their post was rejected.

However, in the case of a spammer I feel that no notification would be justifiable. You wouldn’t want to notify a spammer their post was rejected (deleted) and have them return to try again. :slightly_smiling_face:

The SPAM reason should not send a notification. For the other reasons, yes.

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This is incase the team wants to build the requested feature, these are the current options for a pending post (moderated category).

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In case of spam, we could simply delete the user. On rejection, we could go for a simple solution like I suggested in my previous post. This is the easiest quick solution for the team. Assuming team has no interest for the full request and there is a #marketplace topic open for that, also this topic is from 2020… :thinking:

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The Mailman 2 equivalents are Reject (can opt to give a reason) and Discard (no notification at all) - in addition to Defer (decide later) and Accept.

Also there is “Discard all messages marked Defer”. Defer is the default so once you’ve accepted or rejected the real messages, what’s left on the page is likely all spam that you want to discard all at once.

There’s more to it that this but these are the most directly comparable options.

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