Improvement to "Akismet has temporarily hidden your post" email

Feature
1

I commonly find myself in this situation at https://community.letsencrypt.org/:

  • Get on the forum for the day, see I have a PM, and no flags to review.
  • Click on the PM. The thread started with an automated email from me (my account is the “system” [edit: “site contact”] user), saying “Akismet has temporarily hidden your post,” and has a reply from the affected user saying “when will the post be published?”
  • Try to figure out if the post has been published already. This is challenging because there’s no link to it from the email thread.
  • Almost always, the post has been reviewed and approved by some other moderator already.

I’d like to find some way to reduce the hassle of this workflow. For instance, perhaps Akismet could reply to the threads it creates saying “your post has been reviewed and [accepted/rejected]”. Or perhaps the initial post in the PM thread could include a link to the flagged post?

Also, am I doing the right thing by having an individual’s account as the “system” user? It seems like part of the issue is that other moderators can see the flags for review, but they don’t see the PM threads, and so can’t reply there.

Thanks,
Jacob

5 Likes
2

Your suggestions for improving the email sound good to me.

I am not sure how you have set this up. The system user is a user that is created by Discourse to perform various actions. For example, it is the user that flags potential spam posts. You can rename the system user and give it a custom avatar without it causing problems.

3 Likes
3

Can we make sure the email has this link @techAPJ? Though the user might find it strange to have a link to a nonexistent (in the topic, as akismet has deleted it after submission) post…

2 Likes
4

Ah, thanks for explaining. I realized I was using the wrong terminology. My account is the “site contact username”, and checking the docs for that setting I see it does say “A valid staff username to send all automated messages from.”

I also realized above I talked about an “email thread” when I actually meant a “PM thread.”

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Done via:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-akismet/commit/945c42a53d50f324281d9a8b510b483da9630ebf

4 Likes