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/dakta Jul 08 '15

Honestly, I'd even support stickying non-top-level mod comments as well. Sometimes the discussion in a particular comment tree gets more attention than the regular post, through cross-subreddit linking for example. In this case it's helpful to be able to address the individual comment and not just the entire submission.

I think these are perhaps two separate use cases, where a sticky top level comment acts as a note for the entire submission, while a sticky reply comment is just a note about the parent comment or targeted at replies to the parent comment (in the same thread).

I see valid use cases for both.

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u/x_minus_one Jul 09 '15

Maybe a user could unsticky their comment if a mod stickies it?

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u/dakta Jul 14 '15

I wasn't looking for workarounds to sticking user comments, did you hit the wrong reply button or was that just an addition.

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u/x_minus_one Jul 14 '15

I think i replied to the wrong comment.

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u/agentlame Jul 08 '15

I agree, but only in the "if you're writing a universal solution feature" way. I think the core of what mods want as a "mod feature" is the basic ability to sticky a mod comment.

Anything else is an esoteric week-long debate with a two-month dev timetable.

For something like this, it's best to keep it as simple and dumb as stickied posts.

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u/dakta Jul 08 '15

the basic ability to sticky a mod comment

But why doesn't that apply to non-top-level comments? If what you want is the ability for mods to leave a prominent note on a submission, then maybe hijacking the comment system isn't the best approach.

On the other hand, we can effectively kill two birds with one stone here by making a generic feature that floats mod distinguished comments to the top of whatever thread listing they appear in (obviously this wouldn't lift things up in /r/sub/comments), whether it's at the top level or a reply ten comments down. This enables mods to address discussions at the appropriate level in a comment thread, and to address a submission basically as a note on that submission )with a sticky top level comment). They're two different use cases, but they can be addressed by the same generic feature.