Actions on flags (Agree, Disagree, Ignore, Delete) have confused me and other moderators on our forum. It’s not always clear what is going to happen when you select one of the options, which we find prevents some moderators, including myself, from feeling confident enough to take action on certain flags. Flagged inappropriate content is, thankfully, rare enough that we don’t have these buttons and all their actions memorized. For some context, our forum is around a year old and most of us have been moderating for that entire period.
More guidance to moderation on the Review page would be greatly appreciated, such as
hovertext or (?) icons near flag action buttons to help describe what will happen when clicked,
some indication that clicking the button will open a subset of options (vs. cause a moderation action to occur immediately),
descriptions on the sidebar,
or even just a link to the Moderation Guide (editable, if a forum has their own).
Some points of confusion that have come up are listed below (these aren’t questions that I am asking to be answered, just questions that have come up based on the confusing-to-us design):
Will clicking the button immediately cause an action to occur, or will I be presented with a subset of options? For example:
Moderator is unaware: will clicking Agree with flag immediately hide the post? (No, after clicking Agree, you are presented with 4 options: Hide, Keep, Suspend User, or Silence User")
Being unaware that an automated message will be or was sent on the moderator’s behalf to the flagger to. Moderation action may have already occurred before resolving the flag.
Does pressing Ignore ignore it for just me, or does it ignore the flag for other moderators too?
A Delete button next to a flag is mostly likely to be read as Delete flag, not Delete post. Primary delete button should indicate what is about to be deleted.
thanks for your thoughts(, and feel free to just edit this post if I misrepresented how any moderation tools currently work)
It’s a bit like the fortune cookie game, where you add the same phrase (e.g., “in jail”) after reading every fortune. My reading of the flag actions is…
agreewith flag
disagreewith flag
ignoreflag
deleteflag??? – I don’t intuitively jump to “post” here.
My belief is that additional clarity–and fewer assumptions needed on the part of the user–can only be helpful.
The ... is the indication. Any button with ... will not take immediate action, but open a dropdown (or modal) where you then take action.
Interesting idea. On my long-term todo list is another topic which goes more in-depth into the review queue, if we add a link it should likely be to that once created.
We could definitely make better use of title attributes here, no question. At the moment, title for Agree... and Delete... simply repeat the text on the button, and there’s no title attribute or disagree or ignore.
I can see the confusion here. We in essence have “Agree with flag and …”, “Disagree with flag”, “Ignore flag”, and “Delete post and …”. That’s clearly not consistent.
As @ondrej mentioned, you can edit the button text for your site, but we’ll look into improving this globally.
Also, just to check, queue posts and queued users don’t cause any confusion for your staff, right? Those reviewables are a bit clearer:
As punctuation, it’s easily glossed over. Usually an indication of “More options” on a button is a stemless arrow, or if it is the ellipsis, styled differently to help indicate “something is here!”
Approve/Delete User seems clear to me (though I don’t recognize that screen / don’t think we have a queued users setting turned on on our forum. I am just a volunteer moderator, not part of the admin/staff). For the queued posts, yep, specifying “Delete User” is helpful there to distinguish from the other options.
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