koobas.hobune.stream
Moderation queue suggestion: no pre-moderation
We're all unhappy with the current state of the moderation queue, and the fact that any work put in there goes unrewarded. It's very common to get pinged by users to help get their posts in the queue approved due to the long waiting times, and it's just not beneficial to anyone.
We wanted to use the moderation queue as a filter for quality control, choosing which posts would get published or rejected. We then added the Help Room section as we received too many complaints from users getting their posts rejected, and there seemed to be enough people willing to answer the beginner and more general problem-solving questions that are very common.
Not only is the Help Room hard to find (and most new users don't know about it), but is it really helping the site overall, or just adding more to the pile? Many posts in the Default space could just as well be in Help Room, so what difference is this making in terms of quality?
Discussions in other posts around this topic have suggested we get rid of pre-moderation, which would mean all questions and answers submitted to the Default space will automatically get published, regardless of reputation. It would then also make sense to close down the Help Room, either making it read-only or merge the content there into the Default space. We would keep the moderation queue for post-moderation, so that users with moderator permissions can send published content there when needed.
We can do a test run of this, and revert if it goes completely ballistic.
Edit: it's now turned off, so let's see how this goes.
Yes this would mostly fix the long queue times for users.
I'd suggest keeping the HelpRoom for now, just to avoid answering "where did the help room go?" questions. For whatever reason, it seems to get about the same use as Default, and it won't hurt having it still be around.
I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean by post-moderation queue?
I assume this is the :Send to $$anonymous$$oderation" button for published Q's? That might let 1000 Rep users, who can't delete Qs, to at least do something with spam.
The queue is now at 564. I vote in favor of trying it out.
I've used to moderate more than 30 posts to 100 posts a day in the moderation queue. Then, about two weeks ago, I realised than all the comments you send while the post is in the moderation queue are not sent to the poster by mail (any others comments of posts already published are sent by mail thanks to automatic subscription).
Before I rejected any question, I've used to post a comment to the OP so that he/she understands why its post is being rejected (sometimes a reminder of the FAQ, sometimes a link to the doc / the solution). When I understood it was meaningless, I've stopped doing my "job" of moderator.
The people responsible for Unity Answers (not the moderatos, the Unity employees I mean) is responsible for the poor quality of the questions asked (about 75% of the questions can be answered by a simple Google / Unity Answers / documentation search) and the lack of investment of the moderators (we badly lack tools to make our "job" easier) Just an example : more than 1 year and a half, I asked to have a "send message" directly in the moderation queue. I am still waiting for an update about this question.
Yeah - I gave up moderating the queue too. It took a lot of time to explain the reason for rejecting questions and, like you say, neither I nor the question asker gained anything from it! You try to conscientously review and only allow questions through that are non-trivial, where the OP has done some research to try to answer them first, and then someone else comes along and just blanket-publishes 100s of questions from the queue without any reviewing and you just think "what's the point?"!
Damn, the e-mail notification system keeps co$$anonymous$$g up with these surprises. An e-mail is suppose to be sent instantly to the user if a comment is made on their Question/Answer, as they automatically become followers of their own Questions/Answers once submitted.
Yet another bug to file...
And to follow up a bit on developing new features or doing any design changes - that's become quite the long shot as we don't have control over the software, which is why it's taking so much time and are now looking into workarounds ins$$anonymous$$d. The Forum we have full control over which is why we're able to change things over there much quicker.
Regarding the 1st sentence of the last para: Unity3D was originally aimed at game designers, and the docs were written for them. The trouble started after it became popular with beginners. Learning game design is hard, and its unrealistic to think UnityLearn or UA can $$anonymous$$ch it. They need something like this, but nicer, in the New Users section: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1252826/is-unity-for-beginners-if-not-what-else-should-i-k.html
But writing, redoing, checking flow is hard work (what do enthusiastic jr. high students see and read during their download? or is it just word of mouth and they read nothing?) and won't pay the bills.
BUT, But, but: the 1st two paras points up a problem with us moderators - we don't agree. I almost never outright reject a Q. I send it to the HelpRoom.
@Hellium can you give me some examples of users you've left comments for that they didn't receive notifications for? this is being investigated now.
@SaraCecilia : I can't find the comment I posted. I've created a fake account to test ("UnityAnswersTest" i think) about 3 or 4 weeks ago. I can't connect to the account anymore, and I can't find the comment in my "Activity log" (The system to retrieve the activity / comments / answers is horrible). If I remember right, I've copy-pasted a part of the FAQ.
Yeah, I've tried as well using a test account. I also tried with a post that I sent in to the mod queue to see if that affected the behaviour, but still received the e-mail notifications.
Found your test posts, left some comments to see if it sends you notifications.
I know I could have deleted this straightaway, but just thought I'd leave it for a moment to make a point.... if spambots realise that moderation is turned off, is UA about to be flooded by "questions" like this? http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1364600/i-am-planning-to-order-flight-ticket-back-to-my-co.html
Thanks for that, let's leave it undeleted so I can use it as an example for the new spam manager (that's suppose to take care of posts like this) not really doing its job and send it over to Answerhub so they can have a look.
Another one @saracecilia - thinking about it, I probably deleted a couple of these each day, so this rate is probably about right : http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1364843/why-seo-is-necessary-for-any-company.html
I actually deleted both of them ^^. However in the past i was able to suspend such a spammer in the moderation queue. Since the posts now don't go through the moderation queue we, as moderators, can't suspend anyone anymore.
Actually suspending users and deleting posts should require a vote of at least 3 moderators. Too much power in single hands is never a good idea. Also what UA is lacking is transparency. We could not see who has approved a post from the mod-queue or who has deleted a post.
Since the mod-queue is now pretty pointless, how about rena$$anonymous$$g it to something like "Quarantine". The most important thing when fighting spam is to get it off the site as quick as possible. The only intention of ad-spammers is to get into the search engines databases. Since Google and co are scanning UA quite frequently there's no much time after a spam post to get rid of it.
I think every user should be able start a vote for putting a post into "Quarantine". At least 3 or 5 votes should be required. $$anonymous$$aybe moderators (from a certain karma level) can directly move a post into Quarantine.
Spam bots are extremely difficult to fight as moderator as he usually is flooding the site with hundreds of posts in a small timespan. For this it would be great to move all posts / all recent posts of a user into Quarantine. This feature should only be allowed on low karma users and only available for high karma moderators. And as i said before it should be clear who has executed such an action to prevent abuse.
Have enabled a reCAPTCHA plugin now that will hopefully fend these off. We can tweak the settings on it, let's see if it helps.
If there are no strong objections against this, I will switch off pre-moderation on Monday June 12. Let's see how it goes.
Does this mean that all posts in the mod queue will be published or only new posts?
It doesn't take long just to press Accept a few hundred times as a 1-time thing. Are you seeing some long-term problem?
I don't mean to be rude, but I see this as the worst possible resolution to the issue.
Why not implement a "point" or "karama" scheme that will get the community to ACTUALLY DO moderation, and do it right?
One does not exclude the other - looking into this as well (for post-moderation and clean-up.)
The basic problem is that a human has to decide how to handle each question, for no reward. All any system can do is push around where that happens.
If you give points for accepting/rejecting, every Q will be handled in whatever way gives more. Sure, they could decide to handle every Q the correct way, but will have even less incentive than now, since they'll be losing possible points. If you have a review process, that's really just handling the mod queue and risking offending other mods (who, I assume, lose points when a decision is reversed?) If you give points for reviewing, every Q will be be reviewed in the way giving more points, unless someone wants to lose points doing it for real ... .
But for the past year, UA has been using the "Publish All" system. It's just that Q's have been delayed for a few days before a mass publish had to happen. No $$anonymous$$od queue is much, much worse than the system from 5 years ago, but an improvement on the current one.
"If you give points for accepting/rejecting, every Q will be handled in whatever way gives more." Precisely! I don't understand why don't you think a scheme where the community rewards the correct mod procedures and penalizes (by removing any rewards previously given for) poor mod choices, is viable?
I'm ok with down-votes possibly offending someone (don't down-votes ALWAYS offend someone, anyway?). The goal is NOT to keep people from being offended but to improve the site.
Oh. Didn't realize it automatically did some kind of "publish all": yeah the whole point is kinda moot, in that case.
I don't think there's an automatic mass publish. I'm saying that for the last year Q's have been mass published by various humans. For a responsible example, all the 3-day old Q's.
As to why I think a point system can't be done - sketch one out. You're a game designer, right? We make point-reward systems all the time. Suppose you give 1 point for an Accept, 2 for a Reject, 2 for a comment and 2 for moving to another Space. Give it a quick mental playtest. See how Arne AcceptAll would be motivated.
Such a system would indeed require penalties as well as incentives. As a sample, that could i‘m sure could be improved endlessly:
$$anonymous$$ark question as duplicate with link to other question: +1
per upvote on “duplicate mark”: +1 (no max)
per downvote on “duplicate mark”: -2 ($$anonymous$$imum 0 points)
Approve question: +0 points
per upvote on question: +1 (no max)
per downvote on question: -2 (max loss: -2 points)
per “duplicate mark” upvote sum: -2 (max loss: -3 points)
upvote a question or answer
+1 per following(date/time-wise) upvote (benefit to being first, no max)
-1 per following downvote (max loss: -1 points) (possible penalty for up-voting all)
Downvote a question or answer
+1 per following downvote (benefit to being first, no max)
-1 per following upvote (max loss: -1 points) (possible penalty for down-voting all)
I really like the first two sections - "$$anonymous$$ark question as duplicate with link to other question" and "Approve question". I believe this would be a good solution for the queue.
That seems like a system for the old pre-HelpRoom UA. The way the system is now, almost every Q should be accepted -- the major task is sorting into the correct Space.
In the old days, you handled the $$anonymous$$od queue top to bottom. That was the obviously correct and fair way. When things started to break down, exhausted $$anonymous$$ods started skipping. It takes 30 seconds to accept only the obviously good Qs and serious answers. The borderline Qs (and some are excellent if you take a few $$anonymous$$utes to figure them out) piled up until someone had to mass Accept/Reject. Wouldn't this point system encourage the same thing?
Wait, so a system like this was in place, and removed?
No question the point system presented could be improved, significantly. was just trying to show how particular behaviors can be encouraged/discouraged by setting the appropriate incentives and penalties. A proper system would, i'd expect, take hours and hours to design properly (i spent 3 $$anonymous$$utes), and even then would still require going back and tweaking after seeing actual user responses.
"Wouldn't this point system encourage the same thing?" it would certainly encourage better questions be approved sooner, but it would also encourage all duplicate questions in the queue, actually get marked as such. Additional tweaks and reasons for granting/removing points can fill in the rest of the holes.
It's not very often I ask questions - but is it not true that when you first try to submit a question, you get a prompt something along the lines of "Here are some existing similar questions that are already on the site - are you sure that you've checked them out before adding yours?". I know when you submit bug reports you're forced to search the existing database before adding a new issue. @SaraCecilia - if this is the case, do you have any facts on the number of times that it's used and whether it's actually effective at stopping duplicate questions being asked?
That for me is the biggest problem with auto-publishing all new questions, because there's nothing to prompt people to look before asking and, before you know it, UA will be completely flooded with "Why do I get "object reference not set to the instance of an object"" or "onTriggerEnter is not firing", and all that noise means that genuinely tricky, non-obvious questions get lost.
Yes - for fun click the "ask a Q" button and type "null reference." A list of related Qs instantly appears (plus a pop-up re$$anonymous$$ding you to write well.) Looks very nice (the list - the popup is equally annoying as all popups.) But I don't think going or not going to moderation would change that. It's not like the site says "your Q is in moderation. While you wait, here are some places to search... ."
But very important point. It's possible that many needless Q's are invisibly prevented by what the user reads between downloading Unity and pressing "Submit Q," and we want to be sure to keep whatever part of that is working, even though we have know way of knowing.
We don't have any stats on that, unfortunately.
This is what Owen-Reynolds is referring to (the suggestions):
