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Who helps moderate?
Hey guys... Does anyone actually moderate questions in the queue? I used to do moderation around 4 times a day, so would moderated 40-50 cases each time. I am spending a lot less time doing this now... so look at the queue every other day, something like that. There are currently 161 questions in the mod queue... going back over 24 hours. (This always seems to be the case... earlier in the week there were over 200 questions that needed approval.) So, I guess, I'm keen to know who else is doing this work (on the community site). Thoughts?
If tried doing that once, but didn't feel like making the right choices there so I stopped. $$anonymous$$aybe updating the guidelines to what should and what shouldn't pass would be an idea, especially with the new spaces. Would give me the confidence for doing the right thing.
I do what I can during my work day and deal with the obvious ones, but not enough to keep up with the queue. The recent site changes have made moderation much more difficult since many of the tools we had to communicate easily are gone or difficult to use.
For example, it used to be easy to leave a quick comment as to why something is being rejected. Now it's a hassle to open up a new tab, add a comment, change who sees it to OP and moderator, then go back to the first tab to reject. And I only recently figure out I could do that, and I don't feel right just hitting the reject button with no reason why - nobody learns that way.
Also before the changes I could open the answer in a new tab and see the original question in its entirety along with all of the answers and comments. Now all I see is the original question and the particular answer I'm moderating. This makes it very difficult to make quick judgments, so these often sit in the queue.
And another complaint is that there's still no way to pick a space to publish the question in. It has to be published, then opened up and moved to the appropriate space. And you have to remember to open it in a new tab before publishing it because it gets removed from the screen on publish - otherwise you have to go find it.
Anyway, yes, I do what I can, but it's certainly not as simple to do as it used to be.
If the Reject button had the exact same functionality as closing a question once it's been published (pop up the Close Reason dialog) that would go a hugely long way toward fixing moderation.
@hexagonius - good to know you've tried. :-) $$anonymous$$aking choices that you feel good about are just perfect.
@Dave Carlile - and good to know you're getting stuck in too. I find the moderation not tooo difficult. Anything that's a comment or Answer that looks okay I just approve. Questions that are a bit simple/repeated I'd move into the Help Room section. To do that I have to open the case from the mod queue into a new window, and then change the area it's in. Then drop back to the mod queue and approve it. Any question that is too much of a dupe I'll comment and then close it. (Dupes that get me mad are ones that ask about specific compile errors...)
Hi Graham, I find the new sites changes make the mod queue a pain to maintain.
The workflow you describe to publish to Help Room, is I$$anonymous$$HO, too much effort; put a 'publish to Help Room' button in mod queue
The numbing number of comments or follow-ups posted as Answers is too much of a hassle to convert; please put a Reject button and reject comment in mod queue so we can easily Reject and drop a note explaining why. It should not be our job to constantly convert, users should do that and after they've had one or two rejected they will learn. If they don't feel a little bit of the pain themselves, they never will.
Answer by meat5000 · Sep 29, 2015 at 10:42 AM
I'm back now. Don't worry, I'm on it :P
Could use a hand tho. Im sometimes at it solo for days on end and I take a surprising amount of flak given that I have to make all these decisions alone.
Ive painstakingly trawled >300 questions in the last few days.
I've just been doing a few a day lately. It gets hard to stomach all those clicks to do it right, and there seems to be no progress towards fixing the mod tools, at least none mentioned.
Answer by DoTA_KAMIKADzE · Oct 03, 2015 at 10:32 PM
Apart from problems with new UI that were already written in comments - I used to moderate ~once or twice in 1-3 days (depending on RL free time) a lot of questions and few answers/posts (don't find myself moderating those a lot as they take quite some time to consider if they are relevant especially if question is huge), but since changes in "Moderator Guidelines" I'm no longer as actively moderating as I used to as well as I now skip questions that I don't feel like approving nor rejecting, as I don't want to repeat myself - you can read why OVER THERE in the last paragraph (though I have to say that it is also partially due to lack of RL time, just to be fair). There is a suggestion for private moder queue in the same paragraph.
Also it would be great to have a "duplicate" button in moder queue (alongside publish and reject, obviously for questions only), I could have used that one quite a lot. This is how it ~should work:
1) Press duplicate button.
2) In pop-up window input Unity answers link or just number (e.g. 1071565/who-helps-moderate.html or just 1071565, doesn't really matter).
3) Press OK to confirm.
4) Question is posted completely closed with "Duplicate" frame containing a link to duplicated question, and goes straight to the end of hottest questions, but since I don't think that Updated/Created queue could be modified (if I guessed correctly of how it is pulled) without time traveling of question - it would be even better to have a separate Space called "Duplicates" just to sort everything better, and if someone will be obsessed with confirming duplicates being duplicates then he/she will know where to go ))
One more thing that no one mentioned about in UI - make Reject/Publish buttons Red/Green respectively and make them align-stretch or add some more spacing...once I rejected instead of approving and that leads to the final suggestion of this post - make rejected list navigation properly working as it is still not (just tested), back then when I accidentally rejected question it was the time of "movement to the new engine with lots of bugs" but it is still there.
For anyone wondering of how I posted that question (you didn't think I could leave it rejected, or did you? oO), as it does pull the oldest first by default - you can navigate "by hand" aka changing numbers in urls, e.g. HERE is the link to currently newest rejected list.
P.S. When all of that will be done/changed, or at least few of those - at least I'll moderate a few more than I do now. And don't forget that with UI you should focus on:
1) Speed (aka time it takes to access and moderate 1 entry, e.g. the less clicks and movements - the better), because I guess that most of those who moderate don't count but rather spend X amount of time moderating, the faster they do the more they can handle (obviously enough).
2) Design (aka visual representation). As unobvious as it might be - just making buttons of reject/publish different in color will increase accuracy and #1 (speed) by some %, especially for new moderators.
And I don't even mention such obvious thing as coloring questions/answers/posts with different colors and/or sorting them, etc. etc.
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