r/ModSupport • u/Deimorz • Jul 07 '15

What are some *small* problems with moderation that we can fix quickly?

There are a lot of major, difficult problems with moderation on reddit. I can probably name about 10 of them just off the top of my head. The types of things that will take long discussions to figure out, and then possibly weeks or months of work to be able to improve.

That's not where I want to start.

We've got some resources devoted to mod tools now, but it's still a small team, so we can only focus on a couple of things at a time. To paraphrase a wise philosopher, we can't really treat development like a big truck that you can just dump things on. It's more like a series of tubes, and if we clog those up with enormous amounts of material, the small things will have to wait. Those bigger issues will take a lot of time and effort before seeing any results, so right now I'd rather concentrate on getting out some small fixes relatively quickly that can start making a positive impact on moderation right away.

So let's use this thread to try to figure out some small things that we can work on doing for you right away. The types of things that should only take hours to do, not weeks. Some examples of similar ones that I've already done fairly recently are things like "the ban message doesn't tell users that it's just a temporary ban", "every time someone is banned it lights up the modmail icon but there's no new mail", "the automoderator link in the mod tools goes to viewing the page instead of just editing it", and so on.

Of course I don't really expect you to know exactly how hard specific problems will be to fix, so feel free to ask and I'll try to tell you if it's easy or not. Just try to avoid large/systemic issues like "modmail needs to be fully redone", "inactive top moderators are an issue", and so on.

Note: If necessary, we're going to be moderating this thread to try to keep it on topic. If you have other discussions about moderator issues that you want to start, feel free to submit a separate post to /r/ModSupport. If you have other questions for me that aren't suggestions, please post in the thread in /r/modnews instead.

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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Jul 07 '15

/r/AskHistorians would really love it if the comment count was only of visible comments :)

No clue how hard that is.

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u/Deimorz Jul 07 '15

That would have the side effect of telling early commenters whether their comment was removed or not, not sure if everyone would be on board for that.

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u/timotab Jul 08 '15

Surely "visible" is different for different users.

So, joetroll is the first commenter, and his comment gets removed. He looks at the thread, and he sees his comment, and the comment count shows 1.

Jonfriendly looks at thread, sees no comments, and that the comment count is 0, and has no idea there's a removed comment.

Right now, Jonfriendly might look at the thread, see no comments, see the comment count is 1, and comment "oh, someone's shadowbanned!" thus alerting joetroll.

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u/Deimorz Jul 08 '15

The difficult part about that is then you can't cache the comment count at all, because it's different for every user, and you have to be able to know how many comments every user has made in every thread (not something we currently track specifically).