We call it fluff. It isn’t really good content that encourages the discussion, but it isn’t spam either. So we really don’t want the post, but it isn’t grounds for permanently blocking them.
And having these posts get picked up by the Approval Queue, is “sort of” nice, but at the same time, makes it difficult, as we either have to Approve it, then go and delete it, or Reject it, and then Unblock the user (if we remember to)
It is kind of not what this feature was intended for, but I am not against adding context.
Is there a way to turn off Post Approvals, I’m sure we have it at the default settings, which seem to be the lowest setting you can make it, as maybe it would be better that we not utilize that feature and just let Akismet drive spam. (@ralphm can you confirm they match the below settings?)
Edit: @ralphm just confirmed the settings pictured above are what we are using.
It depends, if you want to micromanage every new post by every new user, then it might be better to have someone in charge of simply reading every post that’s made every day?
In other words, read the posts in the topics with full context… and if you don’t like the post, edit it or delete it.
The goal of approval is to prevent really bad stuff like spam, super hateful content, etcetera from new users – where the difference is stark, black and white, good and evil, not the shades of grey of “is this good enough?” In other words, to prevent unspeakable evil from appearing on your site, ever, not just a mediocre or badly written post. The implied post approval queue question is, “how bad does this post hurt your site if it is allowed to appear there?”
Approval is not really meant as a general post quality check. if you are doing post quality checks, I suggest doing them by reading all new posts / topics every day.
Exactly, that is what I’m hearing and for us, we are getting “fluff” in there more than spam, and sometimes when we approve said fluff, Akismet then picks it up. So I really think Akismet is our preferred Spam solution and we really have zero use for the Post Approval process.
Their are plenty of “staff” on our instance that if there is a really poor quality post, we can handle it quickly or at least refute it publicly (if need be to provide the OP with better knowledge). We are just finding our work cumbersome now with Post Approval because Reject doesn’t unblock the user, so we manually have to do that, and/or, we have to go to the Post Approval area, read the post, go to the thread, re-read the thread, then act. Versus, if the post wasn’t picked up by Akismet, we see it in the thread and deal with it there (much easier workflow – for us).
Right now it is two systems that are not working with each other, and causing us more effort as a lot of New User posts get into that queue and then they have to wait for us to figure out what to do with it (which is proving to be difficult for us since we get a lot of “grey” related posts there).
Yes, I suggest you use Akismet for this, if the goal is to prevent spam. I am sort of unclear what the goal is based on what you have described…?
To encourage quality posts. The two categories/facets that are primarily hitting the Approve Posts queue are for Marketing and Business. Those two areas get a lot of crud for advice. Heavily promoting backlinks through forums, etc.
These really aren’t spam, but they aren’t necessarily posts worth keeping, because that same topic has already repeatedly said that same thing 4 times already (by other users who still believe it).
The Approval Queue is making our efforts harder in this regard, as we chase context, details, unblock the user after rejection, or approve it, then go visit the topic to address it, etc. Whereas, prior to Approval Queue, we’d just address it in the topic or at the topic, silently remove it, or refute it, etc. It was far more straight-forward as the post along with its context was all there in a single view.
Sure, that’s why I said
Yes, but that also implies there is a way to turn off Post Approval, which I have yet to figure out how to do…