Feature Request: Semi-Transparent Moderation · 4:46am Dec 11th, 2015
Just hear me out, guys.
What is it?
To put it simply, it is a way for users to see what is in the moderation queue, what stories failed moderation and perhaps comment. Moderator feedback, such as reason for moderation failure, would appear as a comment, but NOT under the moderator's username. Stories in the queue would not appear anywhere else on the site (this is how it works already), and the queue would not be visible unless logged in, and even then might not be on the homepage.
Why?
It would make the job easier for the mods, (crowdsourcing!) while holding them, as a group, accountable. Our present mods are all pretty great people, but nobody's perfect. The fact that their actions, at present, are largely behind closed doors gives them the ability to do things they might not do in public. Additionally, if their actions are public, claims of misconduct can be more easily refuted (or confirmed)
This might seem unimportant, but it's the sort of thing that could become much worse on the much-rumored genfic site
How would it work?
Well, implementation could be done any number of ways.
The simplest i can think of would be to leverage groups for the queues, and have a pseudo user posting the stories to the appropriate folder, and adding the moderator comments
Of course this would mean making it possible for a group to display unpublished stories, but no-one says that the setting has to be visible to regular users. Really, the group itself doesn't need to be visible, either, just links to the folders.
Under this setup, when an author submitted a story, the pseudo user would add the story to the pending queue. Users could then check out the story, and look for possible rules violations. They could probably use the existing report feature to flag it, or maybe just the comments.
If it were to fail, then the users could help the author fix it so as to be passable next time. The failed queue could also serve as a log.
One thing that could make this much more viable, and would be cool site-wide, would be to add youtube-style partial threading to comments. Then, comments responding to the Mod comment could be deleted en-masse (or hidden) when or if the story passes moderation.
(Some may have an idea as to what inspired these ideas. If you are one of them, please don't mention it. Drama need not spread)