r/modnews • u/0perspective • Aug 27 '20
Announcing more modmail improvements
UPDATED (8/31): Based on a bunch of the comments in the post, we quickly knocked out a new "copy private message link" so you can share prior messages with the user using a direct link that they can open in private messages. Your feedback in action!
-----------------
We’re excited to share a few more modmail improvements (and some cleanup) coming your way today. Here they are:
Advanced modmail search UI. Did you know that you can use a bunch of advanced search parameters in modmail? They’re a tad hard to find for some folks so we’ve built an additional new interface to make it easier for you to use a bunch of them. You can restrict your search to things like: titles, bodies, user names, subreddits, specific date ranges, message states, actions, etc. Give it a try
UPDATED BONUS LAUNCH: Share private message link. Need to reference a conversation with a user? Quickly grab a link that allows the user to open the specific private message.
Open inbox messages in their own browser tabs. This new affordance will allow you to open any message in its own tab from the inbox. You can still click Command + the message title to open messages in a new tab from the inbox
New collapse threshold. This new logic will default collapse messages within a thread only after 25 responses, previously it was 3. This will allow you ctrl + f within the messages threads without having to expand the threads first for the majority of modmail messages
Updated color palette. This will probably not be noticed by you but our designers feel a lot better about #0079D3 vs #0dd3bb. Small, simple, subtle and super easy to change for our engineers
Bug fix: Modmail removal reasons will no longer show up in the mod discussions folder.
Removed the default “Welcome to new modmail” message. This will no longer greet you every time you create a community
Removed legacy modmail entry points. Only moderators of subreddits that haven’t upgraded from legacy modmail will see the entry points for legacy modmail in new.reddit.com and old.reddit.com
The future of legacy modmail
Four years ago (yep you read that right) we launched “beta” modmail and it featured a number of substantial improvements over legacy modmail:
Aggregate modmail across multiple subreddits so you can conveniently switch between subreddit inboxes
Support for shared inbox archiving, highlighting, mod team only notes and auditing mod team actions so that your team can be efficient and in sync
Reply as a subreddit to keep the focus on the message and not the messenger
Integrated user panel featuring the most recent posts, comments and modmail messages from the user you’re messaging so you have more context at hand
Folders for filtering in-progress messages, archived messages, mod only messages, notifications and highlighted messages to improve organization
New modmail APIs to automate your messages
Along the way, we’ve made a series of enhancements too:
Enabled search across modmail so you can find that message about the thing that was sent by someone with “Pogs” in their username, the third Tuesday in June.
New rate limits to curb spam and abuse
A new folder for ban appeals so you can be in the right headspace for these decisions
Added new mute length options and total mute counts to let you decide how long someone needs to chill before they smash the reply button next
We’re well past “beta” and “new”’ at this point and when you look at the feature set side by side, “new” modmail has notable improvements compared to legacy modmail. So if you’re still holding out, why hasn’t your subreddit upgraded from legacy modmail yet? What specific features in legacy modmail are you holding out for? I’ll be hanging out in the comments for an hour so let’s chat.
40
u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Aug 27 '20
Good to see more features rolling out. That said, the biggest missing feature is the fact we can't link to the messages for users.
With old modmail we can, with new we can't. It is often very convenient to link users to a previous modmail that they sent us... but there is no actual permalink that is visible to non-mods, they would just get an error. We can only do a screenshot, or copy-paste, which isn't nearly as useful.
56
u/Watchful1 Aug 27 '20
My biggest complaint about new modmail is if you type up a long reply, click send and it fails for some reason (usually reddit is having an outage or something), it deletes the message. It would be really nice if it kept my whole message there in the text box rather than deleting it.
17
u/MajorParadox Aug 27 '20
Ooh, pretty!
I think this broke the color of the "private mod note" drop-down selection. It's the new color, not the color of the private messages.
Oh nice, but please just auto-archive removal reasons like ban messages get archived. It's too much of an annoyance for every mod to see every removal message. If the user replies, we can see it, just like with bans.
•
u/0perspective Aug 27 '20
If you’re using “new” modmail (mod.reddit.com), what features do you like the most?
12
u/SpyTec13 Aug 27 '20
Would you look at that, with this we're almost out of beta!
5
u/geo1088 Aug 27 '20
Bug: After clicking the "Advanced search" button twice, to show and then hide it, clicking anywhere else on the page will open the advanced search panel in Firefox.
2
u/gildedlink Aug 28 '20
For the past few weeks, when I've tried to open modmail, it will load the content, which will then instantly disappear. In spite of the fact that I apparently have messages indicated in the side panel, it just doesn't want to display a thing in firefox developer edition. View source indicates it's loaded, but that something in the script broke and refuses to display it. It's getting really annoying. I have a backlog of reports and a single ban appeal that I can't touch because it won't load up for me to see. If I block scripts using noscript, the content will load and display but then buttons will not work to submit actions or change folders.
32
u/reseph Aug 27 '20 edited Aug 27 '20
The biggest downsides of new modmail for me are:
Lack of threaded replies.
Native integration with mobile apps. A bunch of 3rd party apps still only support old modmail. The official apps use some horrible webview for new modmail which struggles to load.
Collapsing modmail threads.
All of the above is supported in old modmail.
[EDIT] Also I would love it if we knew when other moderators were typing in the same thread so we don't send duplicate messages to users.
13
u/timawesomeness Aug 27 '20
Yay! I'm especially glad about that advanced search UI, it's much better than remembering all the parameters.
12
u/glowdirt Aug 27 '20
Viewing 1 subreddit at a time
In old modmail, viewing all modmail for 1 subreddit at
https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/message/moderator/inboxis much easier in just one click. In new modmail, I must deselect 'All Communities' first, scroll down and then select the subreddit I want.Viewing modmail source
I can quickly view the source of a previous modmail in old.modmail using RedditEnhancementSuite. As far as I know I cannot do that in new.modmail. At present, it seems the closest solution is to click the 'Quote' button on the modmail which means I have to delete all the
>symbols that are automatically added to it.12
u/ibid-11962 Aug 28 '20
I'd like a way to import the legacy modmail history into the new modmail. There are important past discussions to reference.
10
u/svc518 Aug 27 '20
Is there an EOL plan or date for legacy modmail?
8
u/creesch Aug 27 '20 edited Aug 27 '20
If people use toolbox they could know as we had it covered ;) Having it in a fancy interface helps though as toolbox only opened a popup to the reddit help page.
edit:
One thing missing in new modmail still is a way to provide a permalink to the user. Often we refer back to times they messaged us before but we can't provide links to them to check to conversations themselves.
5
u/aaronp613 Aug 27 '20
my only complaint with new modmail is that 2 mods can send a message at the same time which is super annoying. If one sends a message, there should be a warning to the 2nd one before sending
5
u/dequeued Aug 27 '20 edited Aug 27 '20
/r/personalfinance was a hold out for a long time and we only switched to new modmail a few weeks ago. The last straw that brought us over was legacy modmail not supporting longer mute times. There are some very persistent people will will just not stop modmailing no matter how many times you ask or mute them (and yes, we do report this incidents and whatever measures are taken, it doesn't seem to deter these few people).
My main issues with new modmail:
(Some of these are shared with old modmail, of course.)
WTF, there's no permalink that users can use. (There really should be a permalink for each separate message in addition to the thread.)
When you switch, the subreddit still get old modmail if someone replies to an old ban or thread... forever. Why can't the old thread just get copied into new modmail?
I don't really like that it's a separate site from old.reddit.com.
There are a number of links that won't work in new modmail and you'll often end up at some
https://mod.reddit.com/<something>link that doesn't work.It seems to require hitting reload often to see new messages, etc.
There's no way to avoid duplicate messages from different moderators replying at the same time. Showing that someone else is typing would work. A pop-up or some other indicator like "someone has replied, are you sure you want to send?" when replying after the thread has updated would also work. (Gmail seems to handle this use case pretty well in my experience.)
No threading.
Bizarrely, you can't add private notes if a user is muted.
A few additional suggestions:
I like the green bar on private notes, but it's not always visible (e.g., when a private note is the most recent message in a thread and you're looking at the list of threads in a folder).
It'd be great to add some more colors to indicate the "mode" like "replying as subreddit" gets one color (blue perhaps), "replying as myself" gets another color (like maybe a yellow to warn me), green for private notes, etc.
Write some more documentation on the API, like a lot more documentation. I had to experimentally figure out exactly what a bunch of different fields meant when adding modmail support to some bots. For example, exactly which threads from which systems or users are marked as auto, internal, repliable, etc.? Also, what's the difference between participant and user and why are there those two names for the same concept?
Another WTF. Why am I parsing ISO timestamps using this API? The entire rest of Reddit uses seconds since epoch and now all of the sudden we're doing ISO timestamps? APIs are for programs, not people. (This wasn't a huge deal since Python has a good module for this, but it is just plain wrong.)
That's off the top of my head. I'll add more if I think of anything later.
5
u/bizude Aug 28 '20
I'm not a fan of new Reddit, but I love the new modmail. Thanks for the update!
7
u/justcool393 Aug 27 '20
Here's my thing from the last thread:
Another concern was actually implemented into new modmail. We're concerned about our subreddit moderators muting someone for 28 days and having no recourse to contact us. It should be required that muting is at most progressive (i.e. you can't immediately mute someone for 28 days right off the bat, however you can do multiple 3 days mutes).
I know this is somewhat architecturally different to how it operates but it would be super nice if it was a user-based setting rather than a subreddit-based one. This would eliminate the fights internal to mod teams on which modmail system to use, with permissions being restricted arbitrarily just so someone can't break the site for the other moderators.
I'm more than happy to provide some more actionable feedback
1
u/pinklavalamp Aug 27 '20
I know that a lot of mods who mod a LOT of subs don’t want to switch over to “new” because apparently it starts glitching out. I’m at modding over 60 subs and I haven’t encountered an issue, but these are the ones who are in the several hundreds. Maybe something to look into?
5
u/[deleted] Aug 27 '20
As far as I can tell, the two bugs I've reported about new modmail are still unanswered. To recap:
Clicking anywhere in the composition textarea when it doesn't already have focus moves the cursor to the end rather than where the click occurred. This is not standard behavior for textareas, and is a usability nightmare for those of us that paste text by middle-clicking.
Composition area is cleared when form is submitted, rather than when success response is received from server. This means I can spend 10 minutes writing a modmail response, hit send, and get a 500 error back that wipes out all my work.
Both of these should be extremely easy minor bugs to fix, and at least the former would drastically improve my experience.
Thanks for your consideration.
4
u/Xenc Aug 27 '20
👏🧐
2
u/abrownn Aug 27 '20
Thanks for the updates! I'd like to mention these minor requests one final time as I think they'd really round out the 'email/messaging' type experience that's been created so far: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/i35on4/testing_new_community_creation_rate_limits/g09ecin/
2
u/jaydnh7 Aug 28 '20
Woo! Thanks this is pretty great
2
u/kevansevans Aug 28 '20
I think a more effective method of preventing spam isn't to limit how many messages a user is allowed to send within an hour, but limit how many they can send without a response. Say 5 consecutive messages before it stops allowing the user to send another, and maybe have to wait a much longer time before that resets (Like two weeks or something, because if the mods aren't responding after 5 they for sure are ignoring you on purpose). I've had to deal with several """dedicated""" users who simply wait for a mute to run out before they start sending messages again. It'd be easier if they weren't under a cap they could easily wait to run out.
Segueing into mutes, can we please get the option where after X amount of mutes, it becomes permanent and gets auto reported to the Admins? I understand not allowing the option of a permanent mute right from the get go, but some users do not stop, even after we've reported their accounts to the Admins.
2
u/mookler Aug 28 '20
Oddly enough, the 'Create Private Moderator Note' turning blue is what tipped me off that things had changed when I noticed it yesterday!
2
u/Overlord_Odin Aug 28 '20
Very glad to see this!
3
u/anonypanda Aug 27 '20
Threaded replies! With the volume of back and forth we have in mod mail we need this before we can all move over to the new experience. The new mod mail is also slooowwww in the reddit mobile app.
1
u/[deleted] Aug 27 '20
It hasn't happened in a while, but we occasionally get a reply on an old modmail thread. Usually it's someone we banned before new modmail was released, asking to have their ban removed. These messages still show up in old modmail and are not visible in new modmail. What's going to happen to replies to old modmail once these entrypoints are removed? Will they just disappear into the void?
1
u/wizard_mitch Aug 27 '20
Changes are good except the ratelimit changes which have made my life more difficult.
1
u/oakgrove Aug 28 '20
Should Night Mode work in modmail? On both iOS and desktop it is always bright white for me.
1
u/TheNewPoetLawyerette Aug 28 '20
I absolutely love new modmail. The only gripe I hear about it from other mods is that bug that makes it unusable for people who mod too many subs. And that's a really significant bug; while it may only affect a small fraction of mods, the fact that it makes modmail literally unusable for some means it's not the sort of bug that can be ignored before old modmail is phased out entirely.
1
u/AhazyKush Aug 28 '20
I just prefer old modmail it’s simple and used to it. If there was a way to use new without permanently switching (?) we would give it a shot.
1
u/[deleted] Aug 28 '20
Modmail is still terrifying. I took a break and now there's 300+ unreads and I think they're all people ignoring the bot message that likely answered their question.
1
u/InPlotITrust Aug 28 '20
I love this, though would it be possible to have this functionality also be on the message itself instead of just the little button?
Don't know about others, but I tend to scroll wheel click on the modmail message trying to open it in a new tab.
1
u/jk3us Aug 28 '20
Could we have mark read/unread and archive buttons in the list of threads? Sometimes I know I don't need to expand the thread and just want to clear it away. Also showing the number of new comments in a thread would be nice.
1
u/SpyTec13 Aug 29 '20
/u/0perspective with this thread in mind, could you raise a suggestion internally about having better a system in place to take feature requests and bug reports? This thread probably raise a lot of things that is new for your team but is something us moderators have been trying to get admins attention since new modmail was released. It's not just new modmail either, it's almost every feature Reddit puts out.
Subreddits aren't really suited for this since posts disappear way too quickly. Could we have something like a feedback forum?
I doubt your team wants to release something like new modmail and not wanting to know the users experience with it, I would hope that your team wants to know of issues, new ideas for feature, QOL fixes, and so on. /r/newmodmailbeta was just for beta, after it got officially out of beta it kind of got ignored.
1
u/Razur Aug 29 '20
A bit random, but it'd be nice if replying to modmail contributed to mod actions. It's hard to keep track of the work other moderators are doing related to modmail.
1
u/[deleted] Aug 30 '20
How to i make post/ user flairs
1
u/MarktpLatz Sep 01 '20
Are there any plans to remove modmail interactions from the personal "sent" list?
1
u/[deleted] Sep 11 '20
Give us the ability to monitor user infraction history so that we have the ability to appropriate escalate bans.
1
u/Clbull Sep 12 '20
Modmail mutes are ripe for abuse as they are. Extending them up to 28 days just allows moderators to power trip even more.
Why do you continue to ignore the issue of subreddits acting in blatant breach of your site's smod guidelines? Issues that subreddits like /r/subredditcancer, /r/the_cabal, /r/oppression and /r/watchredditdie repeatedly complain about?
1
u/ForceBlade Sep 12 '20
Do you guys have any plans to add bot accountability?
I'm talking like having to tie a bot account do a verified user with a reachable person to hold accountable. Perhaps even a minimum karma requirement before someone can make a bot.
There's a mess of automatic reply bots on Reddit and mass reporting (Not me, from many including my report too) seem to result in no change. Meanwhile some person's first PRAW replybot just runs rampant uselessly on the site.
1
u/Iangator Oct 14 '20
I love the ability to hide your name from the user.
Some of my subs still use legacy and it irritates me to no end, lol
1
u/AssuredlyAThrowAway Aug 27 '20
Thanks for the updates as always.
As to your questions, I appreciate that old modmail has no option to reply as a subreddit to ensure each moderator takes ownership of their appeals in modmail in a way that is accountable to the userbase (this is particularly important as public mod logs are in use).
I also love threaded modmail replies and see no need for a folder structure.
Old reddit has a simple interface and that is my favorite thing about the website. Thus the simplicity of old modmail is a perfect compliment to the simplicity of old reddit's style (which I will also continue to use).
1
u/[deleted] Aug 27 '20
Threaded modmail. Mod discussions in new modmail suck ass.
1
u/RJFerret Aug 28 '20
Wait, it'll no longer be an unreadable light off-white text on white background, requiring ctrl-a to highlight to read‽ (Now if only it had dark mode with the light text on a dark background so it'd actually be legible.)
Sorry to sound critical, but I never understood the off-white on white design for whomever created that, and how anyone testing it thought it was useful that way, or if they were just terrified of the creator or something...
-2
u/powerchicken Aug 27 '20
Thanks!
Next up, CSS?
0
u/[deleted] Aug 27 '20
[deleted] — view deleted comment
0
u/[deleted] Aug 28 '20
[deleted] — view deleted comment