Speak with the Discourse product team about moderation

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

We’re doing some research around how people handle moderation and use the review queue in Discourse, and would love to connect with folks that use it.

To help us get started with our research, could you please fill out the poll below? Note that you can select multiple answers, including opting in to chatting with us further on this subject.

I’ll reach out directly to anyone who’d like to share more feedback about how they use Discourse’s moderation tools. We can chat on a video call or via text in a private message, if you’re more comfortable with that.

On average, how many flags appear in your community’s review queue each week?

• Less than 10
• 10-20
• 20-50
• More than 50
• I’m willing to share feedback about the review queue

[Teafh]

The “It’s Inappropriate” flag reason is too general, please provide a text box for users to input detailed reasons.

Not speaking about “Something else”, this flag reason doesn’t count towards achieving TL3.

Also, for custom flags, there lacks an option for whether counting towards achieving TL3.

By now custom flags don’t affect TL3, which is why out community doesn’t use this feature.

@codinghorror

Must not have received more than 5 spam or offensive flags (with unique posts and unique users for each, confirmed by a moderator)

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

So users are just hunting higher trust level, and they really don’t care about cleaning up a forum and keeping places tidy In such situation you should not reward them with anything. The idea of higher TL is give more righta to who understand why they are doing what they are doing.

[Overgrow]

It would be great to hear how others use the interface.

Personally, these two improvements would be really helpful for my workflow.

We also use an Approval Queue for the first few posts by users with trust level 0. For these posts, I usually explain to the user why their post was rejected. It would be super handy to have a tool that automatically sends one of the preset templates along with the rejection. Right now, it’s a bit of a hassle to copy and paste the post, then reject it, and finally search for the user to send a PM explaining why the post was rejected.

Additionally, what I’m missing is a way to quickly start a PM regarding the flag with the flag author, so we can clarify things before taking any further action.

[tobiaseigen]

@Overgrow

It would be super handy to have a tool that automatically sends one of the preset templates along with the rejection. Right now, it’s a bit of a hassle to copy and paste the post, then reject it, and finally search for the user to send a PM explaining why the post was rejected.

There’s a great plugin for this: Discourse Templates

@Overgrow

a way to quickly start a PM regarding the flag with the flag author, so we can clarify things before taking any further action.

That’s a good practice! You can always select the flagger’s picture from the review queue to see their user card, which then has buttons to start a chat or message with the member.

[Overgrow]

@tobiaseigen

There’s a great plugin for this: Discourse Templates

Yes, this plugin is pretty essential. I’ve been using it for quite a while now.

But still on the mobile the workflow could be improved as long as the case use I’ve described makes sense for more Discourse administrators.

[rahim123]

Hi, thanks for interfacing with users/moderators about this. These are two limitations that I’ve run into over the years:

Profile spam: Option to delete account and block email but not the IP address

Also it would be good to have a quick option for permanently suspending those accounts instead of deleting them, also without blocking the IP address for the reasons mentioned in the first post.

Please add "spammer" as reason for user suspension

Hi there, Just a small annoyance when a user gets reported for spamming, when agreeing with the flag and suspending the user there should be a “spammer” option pre-selected in the list of reasons so we don’t have to type it each time. Also when flagging a user as a spammer I can’t think of a reason to ever want to restore the account, so it should auto-select the suspension period until “forever” by default. [Screenshot from 2023-07-16 22-32-21]