Whispers vs Staff Notes

Feature
1

Hi,

I wanted to see how we could communicate amongst Admin and Moderators and found Whispers and Staff notes.

Could anyone clarify a few things for me?

  • Whispers is part of the Settings and Staff Notes is a plugin?

  • Whispers is for adding notes to posts while Staff Notes is for for adding a note to a user profile? ie. if I don’t approve a user, I can leave a Staff Note in the user’s profile for others to see why this user has not been approved? and if I see something dodgy in a posts I can add a whisper such as “do we take language used in this post as acceptable?”.

  • How can we find all the whispers left? If I start a shift I want to see what the previous moderator has “whispered”.

  • Are both seen ONLY by Admin and Moderators?

Thanks.

2

Correct

Correct

There is no page that shows all whispers. Typically whispers would only apply to a specific topic, so they are only visible within the topic. If you want to record something about a user which other staff need to see across the forum, staff notes would be better.

Correct

7 Likes
3

Using the report API it would be very easy to make a plugin doing it.

Something like whispers_report.rb · GitHub will do it, probably would need refinements, made it very quickly.

6 Likes
4

Thanks guys!

@joffreyjaffeux, I’ll see if our IT guys can install that little plugin, I cannot do it myself :frowning_face:

If there is no way of showing what posts have Whispers, I don’t see the point of having Whispers at all. In a very active forum, whispers would be lost very quickly and how would one remember where they are?

5

It’s just like any other post, you read the topic and see it. It’s not meant to be a special kind of info you should be able to retrieve on demand. In most of the use case I have seen it has only a contextual value.

6

I think it could be very useful for those sites with more than one moderator as they could leave notes (sort of Post It notes) to each other about specific posts and once the post has been revised, they could be deleted. It would allow moderator discussion without having to flag posts which we keep for extreme cases.

At the moment we keep an external document with links to the post to comment on. Sometimes a post needs action, take note of suggestions, get a second opinion from other moderators, highlight praise or complaints to other moderators… Maybe it would only be useful to us! :joy::joy: