Suggestion: Allow staff to pre-define responses to common forum issues.
Background:
We tend to provide the same feedback to forum members repeatedly. eg:
- Please name your thread descriptively as per our guidelines, located [HERE].
- Your new topic is in the wrong category and has been moved. Our category descriptions are [HERE].
- Your post is off-topic and has been removed.
- Your post doesn’t comply with our [FORUM RULES]. Refer to rule [xx].
- etc.
There’s an opportunity to allow pre-defined text responses, that are accessible to staff when:
a) Sending a PM.
b) Responding to a flag &
c) Viewing a post.
Rather than choosing to vaguely agree / disagree / ignore flags, it would be faster for staff and more informative for forum members to choose a consistent, standardised and pre-defined response, that’s specific to the issue encountered. This also means all mods / staff are using the same messaging.
This would avoid the need to type the same messages repeatedly - and avoids the need to repeatedly look up the relevant URLs to include in the response, to help the user.
This could also potentially allow statistics to be collated regarding the frequency of each response, across all staff, thereby identifying the most recurring issues.
Given that staff are the one’s who buy Discourse, making their life easier seems like a good idea. And I suspect many forum staff are currently writing the same responses repeatedly, which isn’t good use of their time.