The “Needs Approval” page provides rather scarce (i.e. no) information about why a particular post requires approval. An important improvement has been to log the reason for these “automatic staff actions”, but that this information exists elsewhere is not immediately evident (especially for new admins) when they look at the approval page.
Of course, it would be ideal to have the reason displayed next to/under the post as it sits in the approval queue, but if that is too complicated to achieve, I’d like to suggest a static link to the staff actions log page, something like this:
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a route to the various filter options on the log page (I tried admin/logs/staff_action_logs/silence_user/, admin/logs/staff_action_logs/system/ as well as admin/logs/staff_action_logs/<silencedusername>/), so the link would just bring you to the overall logs, but it’s still much better than nothing and chances are that the relevant action happened very recently so that it’s probably easy to find.
You have all posts going to Needs Approval for those with a TL less than X (edit: looks like there are 4 settings that could put it in needs approval, post count (for new/basic users), approve unless TL, approve new topics unless TL, approve unless staged)
They typed their response too fast (default is 3 seconds), min first post typing time
I can’t say that I have a good overview of all the possible reasons (partly because staff is not really being educated into this (who looks at the logs just for fun), but isn’t there also the possibility of watched words which require approval (admin/logs/watched_words/action/require_approval)?
And what about blocked IPs and spam via the akismet plugin? I’ve never had any of these, but wouldn’t those go into the approval queue or are they simply blocked an logged?
As an aside: why is the “watched words” setting under “Logs”?
