My sock puppet has not been on its best behavior so I’ve had to warn it and suspend it:
Clicking on the “1 suspensions” link takes me to the staff actions logs where its suspension is listed, which is pretty handy if it starts acting up again. Moderators can decide how long to suspend the next time.
But there’s no link behind “1 warnings”. Poking around the logs, I don’t see a report of official warnings for the user. I can see my warning if I look in the user’s inbox, but I believe other moderators do not see my warning there. They can see the actual message if they have a link, but other than sharing the link out of band, I don’t believe there is a way for them to find it. Worse, I don’t think there’s a way for other moderators to know who warned the user or when.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but this seems to make warnings less useful for a team of moderators and could lead to mistakes. For instance, if I warn a user on their first day about spamming their website and they go on to become a model citizen, the warning count sticks around without context. Then if that user has a bad day sometime down the road, another moderator might assume they’ve been warned about that behavior and issue a suspension when they would typically just warn. Or the reverse: the other moderator might warn about the same behavior again rather than issuing a deserved suspension.
In summary, why display the number of warnings if there’s no context for that number? Or, alternatively, how might moderators have access to a user’s history of warnings so they can make informed decisions in the future?