Proposal: Consolidated Review Queue

Feature
8

I’ve made some good progress on the design spike of this feature over the last week. I’m working in this branch (which I force push to frequently) if you want to follow along:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/reviewable

Current Design

The current design is you have a Reviewable model, which uses Rails’ Single Table Inheritance. If you have a thing you want to be added to the review queue, you create a model for it that extends Reviewable. For example a ReviewableUser would represent a User that needs review.

Each Reviewable has a polymorphic association called target. For a ReviewableUser you’d set it to be the User you want reviewed:

reviewable = ReviewableUser.needs_review!(target: user, created_by: current_user)`

You can then establish the actions that can be performed on a ReviewableUser:

class ReviewableUser < Reviewable

  def build_actions(actions, guardian)
    return unless pending?

    actions.add(:approve) if guardian.can_approve?(target)
    actions.add(:reject) if guardian.can_delete_user?(target)
  end

  def perform_approve(performed_by)
    target.approved = true
    target.approved_by ||= approved_by
    target.approved_at ||= Time.zone.now
    target.save!

    PerformResult.new(:success, transition_to: :approved)
  end

  def perform_reject(performed_by)
    destroyer = UserDestroyer.new(performed_by)
    destroyer.destroy(target)

    PerformResult.new(:success, transition_to: :rejected)
  rescue UserDestroyer::PostsExistError
    PerformResult.new(:failed)
  end
end

A few notes about actions:

  • They can be built based on the user requesting their list of stuff to review. So it’s easy to add logic that says only certain user types (admins? in a group?).

  • The UI will build buttons for those actions. When selected, the call will delegate to the perform_#{action_id} method to do the thing. The results of operations can be success/failure, and can optionally return a new state for the reviewable. So in the code above, the perform_approve action handler will transition the reviewable to approved when complete.

More Fun Stuff

  • Reviewable content has its own system for choose who can see it. You can restrict a reviewable to be shown only do admins, to moderators, or to a particular group.

  • I am building in the ability to “claim” a reviewable. Claiming topics for moderation currently works via the discourse-assign plugin but it’s very awkward and buggy. Most people probably won’t use it but having the ability to do at a row level will help a lot.

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