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Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Arantor on April 10th, 2013, 01:49 PM

Title: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 10th, 2013, 01:49 PM
So, I've been thinking about what to do with this. The moderation centre is one of those things that the other platforms have and yet I find all of them fairly depressing and uninteresting places. I'd like to say they were functional, but I'm not even sure that's entirely true. I certainly know of no-one who actually *likes* SMF's mod centre.

I have already made some changes, stripping out the way warning history was shown and removing the latest news block[1] but the more I look, the more I think a deeper change is actually required.

So, here's what I'm thinking. I expect to keep a mod centre, as such, but substantially transform how we interact with it. First up, not on the menu. I'm not convinced you need to access it that regularly. In fact, what I want to do is pull it onto the board index.

Have each major section (reported posts, membergroup requests, unapproved posts) as a virtual board. Not physical boards (too messy, causes unnecessary extra logic elsewhere in ensuring access is maintained etc.) but virtual ones, that don't consume ids, but appear on the board index. This would also mean having an idea of whether there are new things to read or not but this doesn't strike me as a significant deal.

More interestingly this would probably encourage people to actually get involved with things there because they'd know what was going on.

Then pull the logs (warning log, moderation log) as 'sub-boards'. Mechanically would be redirection boards without having to do an actual redirection. Not hard (SimpleDesk did it)

As for placement. I think I'd be inclined to keep it as a single category that the admin can move around. But if people *really* feel a burning need for it to be per-board placement that's something we can work on.

I'd also be inclined to pull this stuff into the unread posts area too if there are new items not yet read. I'd want to keep them separate from the rest of the unread items, so there's no need to splice the two together.

As far as anything else goes, for the most part it would function much as it does right now, though I'd probably clean up the look to be more like other areas.

One last idea, food for thought... do we want to get into the situation where a user who opened a report can be allowed to comment on it later?[2]
 1. Seriously, what was up with that? I don't know any moderator that would be able to use that information, since only the admin could do anything with it. Was the hope that admins would magically be able to see it and do something with it?
 2. I know at least one person asked me for a facility in SimpleDesk where reported posts would be diverted to the helpdesk for that very reason.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Maxx on April 10th, 2013, 02:39 PM
I like the idea of revamping the moderation feature/section, and I was thinking? is it possible to have a post reported appear like the new member awaiting approval?  or even in the notification system that you already have implemented here!
 
 I know this may sound outrages,  but for me there should only be alerts or notification and action to be taken and that action logged, what would be nice is to have it so that if a member is reported that you could click that persons name an it would take you to  where you can deal with that individual like ban, or warn, approve or what ever.
And do away with the menu yes item, yes.
If not the notification?
User Area
like: Hello, Moderator "name"

Unread post
Unread replies
Awaiting approval
Moderate alert
Of course this is up to you guys and  the way it is, not very useful!
regards,
maxx
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 10th, 2013, 10:56 PM
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is it possible to have a post reported appear like the new member awaiting approval?
It already is. It already is even in SMF! It even shows up in the menu (that bit's not in SMF)
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but for me there should only be alerts or notification and action to be taken and that action logged, what would be nice is to have it so that if a member is reported that you could click that persons name an it would take you to  where you can deal with that individual like ban, or warn, approve or what ever.
Much more than that is actually needed in a meaningful fashion for most sites, unfortunately.
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And do away with the menu yes item, yes.
The moderate menu item has been gone for literally years - it's been under the admin menu for almost as long as I can remember - but I'm thinking about doing away with that too.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 10th, 2013, 11:27 PM
I'm for the suggestions in their entirety. been gunning fr something of the sort for quite some time.
I'll have to re-read this later and add a few thoughts or questions if necessary (just gave it a quick read for now)

As for the original reporter being able to comment later, I'd say this would have to be optional. I'm of the desire that they should not be able to but you and a few others have given convincing argument in the past of situations where it would be useful; however stubborn me would just rather the thing gets reported and the moderators deal with it according to site policy and be done with it.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 10th, 2013, 11:36 PM
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I'm for the suggestions in their entirety. been gunning fr something of the sort for quite some time.
I had a lot of our conversations of the past in mind when writing this up. ;)
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As for the original reporter being able to comment later, I'd say this would have to be optional.
I think it would be optional, but it's one of those things you can't really write in later, it either needs to be done up front or not at all.
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however stubborn me would just rather the thing gets reported and the moderators deal with it according to site policy and be done with it.
I would note that of course, there could be PM conversations that would serve much the same purpose. But that raises almost as many issues if you're not careful.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 11th, 2013, 03:37 AM
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I had a lot of our conversations of the past in mind when writing this up. ;)
I see :) reading it felt almost like talking to myself :lol:

Since it would be option I definitely say get it in there, especially as you point out it would be now.or never. Having it in definite covers both side of the debate.

So after rereading:
Instead of unread, how about resolved/unresolved. As a moderator I'd rather go for the reports that havent been dealt with yet opposed to being presented with all unread reports.

My desire would be more towards per board but of course in many if not most cases a category should suffice: so I'm willing to sacrifice my desires for the greater good if there are issues such as performance or difficulties in doing it per board. Again I'd throw this at the mercy of beong optional.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 11th, 2013, 04:07 AM
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Instead of unread, how about resolved/unresolved. As a moderator I'd rather go for the reports that havent been dealt with yet opposed to being presented with all unread reports.
Resolved/unresolved is an interesting concept but doesn't quite work properly for my money. I would rather envisage it as a variant of topics - open ones are open, closed ones are effective locked, and you only really need to track unread status for the open ones. But I can see the argument of not worrying about read/unread.

That said, the layout is totally malleable, because I'm not worried about keeping original code or anything, I'm quite happy to burn any of the original code and replace it with my own if that works. Most of the functionality isn't entirely bad, it's mostly poor UI from my perspective.
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My desire would be more towards per board but of course in many if not most cases a category should suffice: so I'm willing to sacrifice my desires for the greater good if there are issues such as performance or difficulties in doing it per board. Again I'd throw this at the mercy of beong optional.
Performance and complexity is pretty much the same either way. I would argue that a category would be simpler to manage.

The main reason for pushing for boards/category rather than pushing for the current menu arrangement is quite simple - increased prominence. The menu, as prominent as it might seem, doesn't give prominence for details like the number of open items (now, we have the menu item highlighter, like PMs)
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 11th, 2013, 04:45 AM
Open/Close is definitely where I was going with it.

I'm for ditching the menu items and going with the board/category setup indeed. I may have misunderstood:
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As for placement. I think I'd be inclined to keep it as a single category that the admin can move around. But if people *really* feel a burning need for it to be per-board placement that's something we can work on.
I took that to mean have all the moderation boards in a category by themselves or having the option of some facility to have each board display teir ow reported posts.

This is kind of where my crazy brain was going... while viewing a particular board the number of open reported post would be indicated maybe in the sidebar or something like the attached.
Posted: April 11th, 2013, 04:42 AM

Hmmmm bug maybe... editing my last post caused it to be marked as new for me.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 11th, 2013, 04:51 AM
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I took that to mean have all the moderation boards in a category by themselves or having the option of some facility to have each board display teir ow reported posts.
That wasn't what I meant. I should really make a mockup of what I'm thinking, might be easier to explain. I figured that you'd have a 'board' for reported posts, a 'board' for reported PMs, a 'board' for group requests, that kind of thing. You might want to put them in different places for some unknown reason, don't know why you would but you could.

That's what I was thinking but in hindsight a single category with that stuff in it would be enough.
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This is kind of where my crazy brain was going... while viewing a particular board the number of open reported post would be indicated maybe in the sidebar or something like the attached.
That's where it starts getting messy. The total number of open mod reports is currently known (calculated and stored). It's not subdivided by board, and while we probably could make it do so, it's likely to get ugly quickly if we do.
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Hmmmm bug maybe... editing my last post caused it to be marked as new for me.
That's actually something SMF has done in the past. We're not entirely sure whether we want to preserve that behaviour or not.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 11th, 2013, 04:59 AM
I get ya now.

Honestly the one category with a board for each as you explained really will suffice.

What I was hoping to avoid with my vision were situations where a moderator would see that # of open reports needed attention only to find that very few or none were from a board they were responsible for. I went thru that quite a bit with vb and likewise with SMF however I cant say it happens very often to the simpler solution of 1 category is completely fine.

Could the reported posts be "prefixed" by their board names and those be filterable, likewise for group requests?
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That's actually something SMF has done in the past. We're not entirely sure whether we want to preserve that behaviour or not.
I'd argue it should be changed, as I did the edit it's not new to me :niark:
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 11th, 2013, 05:09 AM
Just for the sake of clarity, I've attached what I had in mind. It's not perfect but it should be very illustrative of what I'm talking about. Of course we'd fix the new indicators to actually be highlighted if there something new in there, and I think we'd probably find new icons anyway for that.

I see no reason why the list of threads couldn't contain the board name as well. I didn't in the mock-up but I see no reason to limit it that way. I think I would probably have put that in actually, since the UI will be new. (Think message index but with a twist, rather than what we have now)

Actually if I'm honest it was vB that encouraged me down this path.
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I'd argue it should be changed, as I did the edit it's not new to me :niark:
I think we can take a look at it ^_^ I will note that this commit is very quickly escalating in size so it won't be fixed by me any time soon.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 11th, 2013, 05:24 AM
Crystal clear

I like the idea of differentiating between open/close for reported threads and pending/closed for groups etc.

this is probably the only feature I truly missed from my vB days along with the infraction system but I've been following your updates on that as well ;)
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I think we can take a look at it ^_^ I will note that this commit is very quickly escalating in size so it won't be fixed by me any time soon.
Very low priority indeed. I dont think it happens all the time anyway I had edited another post that did not show up as new.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 11th, 2013, 05:33 AM
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I like the idea of differentiating between open/close for reported threads and pending/closed for groups etc.
Switch of the language string, easy done ;)
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this is probably the only feature I truly missed from my vB days along with the infraction system but I've been following your updates on that as well
I actually think the infraction system in the works is likely to be quite effective because of the way it handles punishments, it's much more gradual than other systems.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 05:15 AM
So I started work on this today and that's also behind the last thought I added - I finally added a facility to *properly* set the items you're displaying in the board index (for posts/topics or redirections), so that I can also have open reports, or for WedgeDesk, there's the option for things like the number of open tickets. It's also firmly customisable in terms of numbers, so even crazy things like SD's tracker used to have, it would be possible to inject that too (e.g. 'Bugs', 'Features', 'Enhancements' as numbers)

I have the first part of this side of it done, with the reported board and its attendant counts, though I haven't yet got it to fetch the last open report. I'd show you a screenshot but it looks nearly the same as the above screenshot >_<

I'm still not really sure what to do with the moderation centre as a whole. I mean... I looked at the preferences bit again and I see no reason to futz with that at all, just show users everything they can see and be done with it. But I don't really know what to do with the front page anyway.

I do know that I want to get more filtering options in there, e.g. be able to see all the reports a single user's posts have accrued (so if you have a problem user, you can say 'he had all these reported posts') as well as moderation items perhaps relating to that user's posts and topics. I don't entirely know where to go with this yet - but I get the feeling I'd rather put it in the profile area for a given user.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 19th, 2013, 05:48 AM
Quote from Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 05:15 AM
I'm still not really sure what to do with the moderation centre as a whole. I mean... I looked at the preferences bit again and I see no reason to futz with that at all, just show users everything they can see and be done with it. But I don't really know what to do with the front page anyway.
Taking a look at the current setup yield no real suggestions in my head right now but my head's not exactly clear at the moment; long day ended with some rum so I'm a bit fuzzy at the moment.
Quote from Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 05:15 AM
I do know that I want to get more filtering options in there, e.g. be able to see all the reports a single user's posts have accrued (so if you have a problem user, you can say 'he had all these reported posts') as well as moderation items perhaps relating to that user's posts and topics. I don't entirely know where to go with this yet - but I get the feeling I'd rather put it in the profile area for a given user.
Agreed with the profile area for this. The way SD displays the users tickets in the profile area or similar is where my mind is.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 05:50 AM
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Taking a look at the current setup yield no real suggestions in my head right now but my head's not exactly clear at the moment; long day ended with some rum so I'm a bit fuzzy at the moment.
The current setup just provokes something between bile and a vocal WTF. I still have no idea what possessed the good dev folks to make a preferences setup for *that*. It'll be gone by the morning.
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Agreed with the profile area for this. The way SD displays the users tickets in the profile area or similar is where my mind is.
I quite liked what we did with that :)
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 19th, 2013, 06:05 AM
After staring at it for a few more minutes I still not nothing, maybe in the morning I may see it differently. Ditching preferences does seem to make sense though.

Indeed it's quite nice being able to navigate such things via profile area.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 06:13 AM
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After staring at it for a few more minutes I still not nothing, maybe in the morning I may see it differently. Ditching preferences does seem to make sense though.
Wait until you see what I'm cooking up right now ;)
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Indeed it's quite nice being able to navigate such things via profile area.
Full warning history is already there, as is IP tracking, profile edit tracking etc. Seems to me that all a user's posts that got reported would be an ideal extra for there.


:edit: Added picture. There's no prefs menu because there's no need for an entire extra page for it ;)
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 19th, 2013, 06:27 AM
Makes sense to do it that way. So preferences will always be the last item on the page?

Will the news block be kept in the Mod Centre? I ask because i never really got the point of it.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 02:28 PM
The news block is long since gone, the notes block (for general things an admin might want to tell mods about) is now full width, and the totality of prefs is that last block.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 09:14 PM
Because I'm a bit fed up of some of the comments going on, here's why I'm going out of my skull trying to cope with all of what's going on.

This is only part of it, too. There's still part of the ACP for creating infractions, the actual issuing of infractions, a scheduled task, various other stuff.

This is why I'm having trouble being nice to people or indeed concentrate on anything. I swear I'm going to end up having a breakdown when this is done.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 19th, 2013, 11:28 PM
Quote from Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 02:28 PM
The news block is long since gone, the notes block (for general things an admin might want to tell mods about) is now full width, and the totality of prefs is that last block.
Ahhh I see, I was asking from looking at the alpha copy I have installed which still had the news in there. Nice to know its gone.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 11:37 PM
Yeah, so much has changed since the last alpha.

I also wonder why there were 5 downloads of the infractions code, seeing how 1) it doesn't even work properly as mentioned, and 2) there are not, as far as I know, 5 people other than me with SVN access (since it is them, and only them, who can even use it)
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: spoogs on April 19th, 2013, 11:46 PM
I'm one of the downloads and definitely don't know how to use it :P I'm just staring at it
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 19th, 2013, 11:47 PM
Well, there's extra files whose positions go into the usual places, the rest is a fat diff that describes the changes between current SVN and what I have locally with all the integration. It shows *part* of the tangled mess.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: live627 on April 20th, 2013, 03:02 AM
I'm offering to help you finish it.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Johnny54 on April 20th, 2013, 12:04 PM
Guilty.
I was one of the people downloading infractions_wip.zip
I thought it contained a screenshot or something like that.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: ziycon on April 20th, 2013, 07:06 PM
Quote from Johnny54 on April 20th, 2013, 12:04 PM
Guilty.
I was one of the people downloading infractions_wip.zip
I thought it contained a screenshot or something like that.
Same here, thought it was a screen shot.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 23rd, 2013, 08:00 PM
Random question: when do I ever post screenshots that aren't attachments?
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: nolsilang on April 23rd, 2013, 08:24 PM
Quote from Arantor on April 23rd, 2013, 08:00 PM
Random question: when do I ever post screenshots that aren't attachments?
none that I known of.

if there any attachment in a post it will not indicated in the rss feed[1], that's why I'm pretty sure :p
 1. that's why when you talked about screenshot and nothing showed up it's probably attached
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Arantor on April 23rd, 2013, 09:45 PM
Nope. I was wondering why people who downloaded the zip did so - if it was a screenshot, I'd post it as an attachment.
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: ethankcvds on April 24th, 2013, 01:41 AM
I admit I downloaded the zip archive. I downloaded it so I could read some of the source code(even though I don't have access to SVN).
Title: Re: Moderation Centre overhaul
Post by: Johnny54 on April 24th, 2013, 02:08 AM
Quote from Arantor on April 23rd, 2013, 09:45 PM
if it was a screenshot, I'd post it as an attachment.
It was late and didn't realise that.
I clicked on it out of a habbit.