[meta] Moderation Frustration [closed]
Okay, I asked a while ago about moderator approval for everything so I get the spam mitigation stuff and that AskBot is too retarded to support a simple karma test but this is quite frustrating.
Today I posted an answer. I then realised I had not included something useful so I wanted to edit it - no edit option because it's not posted yet. So I decided to write another answer and merge them later. This involved copying stuff off a webpage, adding a link, blah blah blah. I click answer question, close several tabs that I had opened as a reference only to arrive back at the original page to find my answer has been rejected because I "should edit my question". So now I've lost an answer that would have been useful and have to wait to rewrite it.
We're just now wrapping up an update to askbot ( see the footer, "Powered by Askbot version 0.7.51" !). The moderation experience should be much better for all involved now. Something will be written up soon on the subject, probably for https://fedoramagazine.org .
Just before the update, I had 170 "phantom posts" in my moderation queue. Suddenly, shortly after the update, batches of them started showing up, all of them weeks old. I simply approved them all and for the first time since I became a moderator, my queue is actually empty. Finally!
That might not happen going forward, but if we do keep seeing phantom posts, we found a way to clean them out :)
Right now, it claims that I have 3855 flagged posts. Checking, there's more than a page worth. I suspect that I'm going to end up approving users, not posts.
Wait it out, we're still working on it. The end result will be that "new users" will be moderated, and we'll use the "Approve user and posts" button in the mod view to acknowledge that the new user is a real person and allow them to carry on. There will be some extra work upfront as obviously not new users get their status changed, but I think that between us moderators we'll get it down to something manageable quickly. For today, it's probably best to ignore the moderation queue, there are things happening behind the scenes to clean it up.