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 wasnât 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 theyâre awaiting approval
a separate section dedicated to pending posts; only visible if the user has pending posts
âPost Needs Approvalâ Dialog
link to the âpending postsâ section on User Activity Page
â3 staff who are online have been notifiedâ? - This can also be a bad idea
Topic list / post stream
could display the pending topic/reply with clear indication that itâs invisible and awaiting approval
the pending postsâ 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 âPost needs Approvalâ 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 âPlease be patientâ, âIt usually takes about 4 hours for posts to be approvedâ, 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.
âDeleteâ by end user require no confirmation. 1 click and it is deleted forever with no undo.
No way of âeditingâ once in review queue, you must delete and re-post
âAwaiting approvalâ posts do not display full context (what they are in-reply-to)
We do not link you to the place where you can see all pending posts: (not a hyperlink to activity)
Admin area links to âtop postâ in the topic, not to what you just replied to, or to end of topic.
I would say we made a lot of progress since I first brought this up, however I would not like to close this prior to:
Adding a confirm OR undo for delete
Linking â2 posts pendingâ to user activity, so you can easily find them.
Showing what something is in reply to in the paper trail
Improving linking so it takes you to the post, not to the first thing in the topic.
Edit, is a fine stretch goal, it is somewhat tricky cause there are race conditions.
I guess we need to decide how much we want to gold plate the feature, I feel we should give it 1 more week of dev time and then close this off, do all the easy very clear wins.
Also from an admin perspective, I always find it really hard to decide what to do with a post that needs approval, cause I lack context in the approval queue.
Specifically I have seen spam bots cut and pasted a reply and change a word or 2 and just post it again. It seems reasonable without context, but as soon as you visit the topic and get context you can see what they just pulled off. I guess it may make sense to add support approval directly from the topic, that way you can approve a post in the place where people replied if you seek a lot more context. This though can clearly wait.
just scope how this should work for now.
