Allowing edit is possibly a spam vector if implemented incorrectly (cause people could edit it JUST as you are approving a previous version) however if we were careful you could very cleanly allow safe edits. Which enormously improves the end user experience.
The situation for posting in a topic is even worse.
I can not tell it exists in my profile, I can not tell it is out there for approval on the topic. I can not edit it.
As an end user, when I experienced this whole thing at https://discuss.reactjs.org/ I felt absolutely terrible. It is like you are driving completely blind.
@xrav3nz as you are improving the moderation queue I really want you to keep this in mind, making a user hostile feature even more easy for moderators may not be the correct order of operation here. We got to think about the users.
Akismet and moderation queue really need to be unified, having 2 systems now that have radically different features is really bad. Akismet is now missing all the fancy edit stuff @xrav3nz just added.
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)
Additionally, what about a system generated PM similar to the one we have for Akismet? This is to empathize with the user, and it is only sent the first time that a user submitted a post pending approval.
Allowing user edits to posts in the queue would be very valuable for us. I anticipate that members of our community will post topics without reading the pinned topic we have. Providing a list of a few things to make sure their post includes in the ‘Post needs Approval’ dialogue would reduce the amount of back-and-forth between our moderators and the topic creator.
I can not tell in which topics I have pending approval posts
I can not edit my pending approval posts
I can not tell when my thing is going to be approved
What I would like:
On topics, simply display my unapproved post as the last post in the stream with special formatting saying it is pending approval. It will always be last no matter what. This is editable by me.
When I post instead of “Please be patient”, “It usually takes about 4 hours for posts to be approved”, we can recalculate weekly.
Extra super bonus points stretch goal, allow 2 TL3s to approve one of these guys so it happens faster
@eviltrout maybe we can assign this out once your review queue is shipped? It would be a nice little first project for someone who is not yet familiar with the review queue.
just scope how this should work for now.
