Pending post feature

I think it would be very nice that in some category we accept pending post. So users can contribute, and staff can keep the quality of a category by choose which suites the best.

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By “pending” you mean a type of moderation queue where it’s hidden until approved?

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yes, that’s exactly what I meant. It will be hidden until we approve or just disapprove [ delete ]

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Our forum has need of similar and AFAIK it’s on the todo list. @HAWK would know better than I where things stand at present.

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nice, can you help me linking to the post which discusses about this. I’ve tried to find , there is no luck. Thanks !

It’s nice to know that it’s on todo list.

So far it’s only been discussed in a Staff-only thread at the SitePoint forums, so a link wouldn’t do much good. But I promise to let you know as soon as I do.

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Great, thanks for your help !

While not exactly the same, this sounds similar to this earlier request which it looks like @neil was planning on working on at some point, though its not clear what the current status is.

Nope. Not the same. What this feature is would be a piece of functionality where a user would be allowed to create a topic, but it remains hidden until a moderator approves it.

In the SitePoint example, we have a forum which allows users to post requests for site reviews. When this forum was first created, we found that everyone was making review requests, but no one but staff was willing to provide a review, so a “pay it forward” approach was created where users are now required to provide three decent reviews for other users before they can make a review request. To enforce that, all new threads in that forums go into our moderated state so that a team member can review their request for appropriateness (no warez, no pr0n, nothing illegal), and that they’ve made an honest effort and done their three reviews. We’ve actually got a hacked solution now which prevents posting without three posts in the forum first, but we still moderate the post so a human can review their reviews and ensure it is more than “Hey! Looks good” or “Nah, don’t like it”.

For us, this provided two benefits. One, it cut down on spam as people can’t join just to post their link in there. Two, users found benefit as while they reviewed other sites, they started to take notice of areas of improvement on their own sites, so when they started their own review requests, it was one a more polished product out of the gate.

I was just guessing that’s technically very close to:

a user would be allowed to create a topic, but it remains hidden until a specified date

so it might build on work already being done for the other feature…

I suppose, but one requires a distinct human action (i.e. like flagged posts), the other is a time delay feature where Joe User is going away for the weekend, but wants to publicly wish his wife and mother a Happy Mothers Day (if he’s living in the US, of course)…or Star Wars Day or New Years or Christmas or whatever mad holiday celebration he chooses to partake in.

It sounds to me like you could turn this into a group with automatic entry, and it would be pretty similar to what you had before.

Here’s my mediocre design:

Category: Reviews
Security:
  staff      can create/reply/see
  reviewers  can create/reply/see
  everyone   can reply/see
def after_create_post(post):
   u = post.user
   return if in_reviewers_group?(u)
   return if post.category != reviews_category

   count = count_review_posts(u)
   if count >= 3
      Jobs.enqueue_in(18.hours, :promote_to_reviewer, {user: u})
   end
end

The code is just a rough overview of what you would need to do.

The “promote to reviewer” job would check to make sure that this third post didn’t have some kind of negative response, then give the user the “reviewer” group, which would allow them to create topics.

We’d still want it moderated though to have someone verify the link it’s going to - you’d be AMAZED at the kind of sites we get links to in the reviews section that never see the light of day. Doesn’t happen on a regular basis, but when they do, some of them are doozies, and definitely NSFW (or anywhere else for that matter :blush: )

This is definitely on our list. Doubt it will be a V1.0 feature though.

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Because the below topic is closed and as advised, I would like to know the status of the feature. Is it active ? Any ETA ?

If it’s not in the “Focus” list of the upcoming Stable Release or the one following that, it’s safe to assume there’s no plan to implement it in the immediate future.

I know it’s hard to wait in uncertainty, but if you can come up with decent workarounds in the meantime you’ll have concrete use cases that you can add to the discussion.

@erlend_sh Thanks for the links. It is helpful to know the roadmap.

Actually, I thought of using the pending post feature as a workaround for my below request. (My Plan → All topics in a specific category will not be approved and therefore submitter cannot see the list of all topics whereas admin/moderator can reply without approving it.)

@sam @codinghorror @eviltrout I understood the roadmap now. If you guys can sneak in any of this feature for a weekend hackathon or something, it would be great for so many usecases…obviously I am greedy :smile:

This really is not appropriate. It sounds like this to me:

That’s not cool even if you’re the one signing their paychecks.

I can tell that you really want this feature, but please take a moment to consider how you can help move this forward in a more constructive manner.

Rather than demanding that the core team work on this for you, describe in more detail your use case and engage the rest of the community here in the details of the feature you have in mind.

Try to build consensus around how the feature should behave and what value it really has.

You may want to read this topic as well.

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@mcwumbly apologies for the wrong tone my post has indicated. Thanks for the link and the inputs.

I have been trying to build the consensus through the poll and the post details. I would explain if more details are required.

This is scheduled for Discourse 1.3, which is currently in beta.

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