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]
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. |
