Thoughts on moderation in Flow
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Thoughts on moderation within Flow
“Do”s
edit- Do provide means to edit others' messages.
- Do provide means to delete own message. It would only remain in history and no trace of it should remain on the board itself.
- Do provide means to move messages, subsections, and groups of messages (message + replies) easily, using drag and drop. This is crucial to handling large volumes of feedback.
- Potentially from one browser tab to another tab?
- Do introduce "solution", "question" type of comments for some activities. Show "4 comments, 1 solution, 3 questions" sort of thing in the subtitle (beloe title).
- Do provide means to mark a message as "this message solves the problem". This should be enough. (See how support.mozilla.org does this in forum threads.)
- Do add +/- buttons to each message to sort out poor messages and perhaps approach talk page noise.
- Do not provide means to move a message to a 'offtopic' section of a page (such as (discussed here). +/- would be sufficient.
- Do provide means to tag discussions (threads). Have a lot of feedback on something? A half of it related to a feature which has already been fixed? Tag them (i.e. add them to a category and have it visible on the board page too). Should be possible to filter topics from a board by category or invert selection.
- Do remove "lock". It's not needed. Threads are best locked by protecting the page where it's truly out of options to further discuss (such as a closed request for permissions).
- Do provide a button to insert {{hat}} when editing someone else's post. Used for flammable discussions — messages, parts of messages — without showing who hid the message (this is in history) and with easy means to view the hidden content.
“Don't”s
edit- Don't hide anything, except when someone {{Hat }}'ed a flammable discussion.
- Don't hinder replying (not even when someone {{Hat }}'ed a flammable discussion or a discussion is old).
- "Close topic" in Flow currently does both of the two above. This is stupid.
- Don't mark entire topic status as solved. People should be able to see whether it's resolved on their own. (Showing "4 comments, 1 solution" in subtitle is acceptable, as pointed in the “Do”s section.)
- Don't hide contents of summarized topics when full view is active. This is what compact view is for (which isn't on by default, either).
- Don't allow to lock right away, before a contributor has a chance to follow-up a (even solved) conversation.
- Don't limit moderation to sysops or other privileged contributors (including, don't limit it to logged in contributors). The only exception is protecting pages which should not ever be edited again (such as past requests for permissions).
- Don't limit participation in discussions to privileged contributors (including, don't limit it to logged in contributors).
- Don't provide means to lock topics, other than by protecting the thread using standard wiki page protection tools. This has a use-case such as past requests for permissions which should not be edited.
- Don't do anything special about archiving. Existing sorting (recently active discussions, recently added discussions) is enough.