A customer pointed out to me that reviewable claiming of flagged posts is applied on a topic level, not on a post level. The intention behind this is made clear by the claim button’s preview text (“claim this topic.”) This seems to mean that once a flagged post has been claimed by a staff member, any subsequent flags for that topic’s posts will be automatically assigned to the staff member who claimed the flag. I can see how this could be useful to allow a single staff member handle multiple flags that are generated with a topic’s discussion gets out of control.
There are a couple of possible issues with this. The first is that it may not be clear to staff members that by claiming a review item they are claiming all subsequent flags that are generated for the topic. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that this is how the review queue works. If for some reason a moderator claims a flag and then neglects to act on it, the site’s other moderators will not be able to handle subsequent flags unless an admin removes the claim.
As an example, here’s a screenshot of my site’s review queue. I only explicitly claimed the second off-topic item. The first item in the list was automatically assigned to me:
The second issue is that based on my testing, when I take an action on one of the review items in the list, the other review item is automatically unassigned from me:
If reviewable claiming is intended to be applied on a per topic basis and not a per post basis, it doesn’t seem correct that acting on one of the review items would unassign the staff member from the review items that had been automatically assigned to them. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or if it’s the intended behaviour.
I can see from your description where claiming per topic may be desirable in some circumstances and/or for some forums.
On the other hand, we run into the situation where we get surprised by a flag being assigned to someone who claimed a flag days or even weeks earlier. That moderator may not be active when the new assignment is made (eg. vacation, etc.).
Perhaps the best solution would be to have an Admin Setting that let’s the admins choose whether claiming is done on a per topic or per post basis.
We don’t want to turn claiming off entirely because we find it very valuable in preventing duplication of effort in researching flags and queued topics before acting, and preventing one mod from acting on a flag while another mod is considering it.
The first is to decide whether or not there should be an option to allow claiming of flagged posts to happen on a post level. Currently, if a staff member claims a review item for any of a topic’s posts, review items for any other posts in the topic are automatically assigned to them. Allowing review items to be claimed on the post level instead of the topic level is the change that was requested by @Loki.
The second issue is just something that I noticed while looking into this. As noted above, if multiple review items are generated for a topic and a staff member claims one of them, all review items for the topic will be automatically assigned to the staff member. As soon as the staff member acts on one review item (agrees, disagrees, etc) all of the topic’s review items that had previously been assigned to them will be automatically unassigned. This confused me when I saw it, but possibly it’s the intended behaviour.
