What happened to Approvals?

Product Support
1

Am I going insane or have the new user approvals reversed?

I am used to going through the list of new user approval each day and clicking Yes. Today I realised it had changed to Yes = Don’t Approve - which seems crazy. How is the negative option the default for approving something positive like Accept New User?

This is going to lead to a LOT of confusion, especially among people like me who just quietly administer forums and don’t check the World of Discourse every day.

When someone applies to join, I really don’t want to have to remember that No means Yes.

2

I’m guessing it’s related to this change:

Perhaps user approvals were overlooked :grimacing:

3

They were not, the request from feedback was to make everything align in direction so yes/no always mean the same thing regardless of queue item type.

So with user approvals the new framing is “is there a problem with this account” where yes would mean it doesn’t get approved. This follows the “is there a problem with this post” framing that flags use. Yes always means “yes, there is a problem” now.

If the new structure for approvals is causing issues, we’ll have to consider further changes… which at this point will likely be moving away from the yes/no framing entirely.

4

First of all, I want to thank the team for their effort and understanding in analyzing and restructuring all this. My humble contribution:

Perhaps the rest of the users could correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that the majority spoke in favor of unifying the post/topic flags. Therefore, this vision of unifying those types of flags could be maintained, and adapted to also be compatible with an exception in the list of users for approval where the decisions are opposed.

I find both compatible, and I believe that is what could finally clarify both processes simultaneously, without causing any inconvenience to any admin/user.

5

Flags were already aligned, yes meant there was a problem consistently before the change. The outlier where the logic flipped was post and user approvals.

An alternative approach we could consider is completely abandoning the the yes/no framing for approvals and using approve/deny instead while keeping the ordering consistent so deny is in the same position as the “yes” flag action.

6

That makes sense, it just need to evaluate the impact on admins, I imagine via a feature that can be enabled experimentally.

The issue here is that the reports queue shows two different processes:

  • Reported posts → “Is there something wrong with this?”
  • Pending users → “Approve user?”

And their responses are naturally inverted. Reported post yes is something wrong, approving user yes is something good :slight_smile:

7

Sorry for that accusation :grimacing:

I’m guessing OP and anyone who frequents user reviews just needs to update their frame of reference.

Personally (and thankfully), I don’t have much to review, so for me it’s always new-ish regardless of what the execution is :sweat_smile:

I think this approach avoids confusion :+1:

8

But then don’t we get back to the earlier issue where Approve can mean that a post is deleted when it’s a flag, and that it’s kept when it’s the spam queue?

I agree it’s not an easy problem to solve if user approval is also in the same queue but having “Approve” means two opposite things, even if the buttons are flipped, is still a bit confusing.

9

Right — would using yes/no only for flags, then approve/deny only for approvals be different enough to avoid the previous confusion?

I’m still interested in collecting feedback on the current state from others, so I’m not in a rush to change anything quite yet. If anyone would rather not deal with the current state until we’re settled you can disable Review queue consistent answers from /admin/config/upcoming-changes

10

Perhaps this would help?

Spam queue

Keep this post? => yes/no

Flag queue

Keep this post? => yes/no

(Making the subject of the question the post rather than the flag)

User queue

Approve this user? => yes/no

With this setup, you always click yes to keep the queue item, and no to reject it, just a suggestion

11

This is a very difficult issue. I always thought the review queue was a little wonky and made a habit of double checking my choice. I thought the change made sense and made the review queue more intuitive. I never considered the scenario in the OP and I can see his point as well.

But I only do spam filter review not new user acceptance. Maybe the two need split up???

12

I think something like this is worth considering, where the underlying thing is the content or the user being approved or rejected. It’s a pretty good fit for my mental model.

Things like spam are are bit more complicated still because there’s often an action on the post and the author of the post.