New user reviews: admin assignment and logging of progress

Support
1

I lead‑admin a discourse instance for an established technical community of just on 1000 participants.

We screen all registrations unless the email address supplied is from a recognizable university or company or we know the person involved. Part of that screening process involves sending an email requesting information on the applicant’s particular interest in the community and any related outputs. We also share this review workload among three admins.

The following feature would therefore assist this screening process and reduce confusion:

  1. a way of noting which particular admin is processing a given application — probably just a “this is mine” button to hit

And to continue with the wish‑list:

  1. some way of logging progress via text input would be additionally useful

To note some obliquely related traffic:

Also to record that new users often comment favorably on being screened — as an indication of the presence of some level of social curation.

Any thoughts happily received, R

2

Maybe Discourse User Notes would help.

Also, you might include the info that you want in user custom fields that are required when they open the account. You coyly also use a custom field that was staff only that you could use to mark who is processing.

I think you can also use their email address to add them to a group that could help automate things.

1 Like
3

Are applicants also “users” before they have been approved. This is a semantic question, I guess. TIA.

4

A user record gets created when they fill submit the form, so they are a user in that sense.

I’m not entirely sure how user notes works with users who are not approved. The custom field idea might be better for you and is in core rather than a plugin, so you can try that more easily.

A custom field for the reviewer may be what you want.

5

Thanks. I’ll experiment later this week.

By the way, I highlight and copy three lines of the displayed pending user fields, paste this into the emacs editor, and then run some lisp scripting to generate an outgoing email. I am not suggesting this functionality gets built into discourse — it’s just my work around to save some error‑prone typing. R

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6

I too use the One True Editor. I’ve started using VS Code for the bulk of my Discourse plugin/theme development, but Emacs is always open. And just now I had to pull stuff into Emacs to solve an issue using a keyboard macro, which I don’t think exists in VSCode and don’t see how anyone lives without it.

Well, it would be a bit more trouble to develop than your Lisp script was, but it could be done in a plugin!

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7

My mock‑up is below — and I guess it is correct. Note also this topic:

That screenshot then:

user-screening-field-2.screenshot
user-screening-field-2.screenshot1000×640 55.1 KB

Caption: Mock‑up of a custom user field for the discourse discussion server to track which admin is screening a particular applicant.

8

You can do that right now with the existing features in core, so that covers.

The other piece you want is

For this you could use either user notes as suggested above, or another custom user field where you could just type in whatever you wanted. Or, if the process is predictable, you could have another dropdown with stuff like

  • contacted user/waiting for reply
  • approved
  • denied

So I think that might be all you need and you can recategorize as support?

1 Like
9

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