Announcement
Upcoming changes to topic moderation due to core platform improvements
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be rolling out an update with some core improvements to our platform.
Since we’re migrating one-by-one to ensure a smooth transition, your community might receive this update earlier or later than other communities, sometime in the next few weeks.
Most of the changes will be silent/unnoticeable and mainly concern improving the stability, consistency, and quality of the inSided platform.
However, there are a few changes to topic moderation which will take effect once your community has been updated:
We expect this update (and the changes detailed above) to be rolled out on your community anytime from the beginning from the middle of this week until towards the middle of December.
Please share your opinions on these changes. If there’s any change here that will negatively impact your experience as a daily or weekly Control moderator then we want to hear from you, so that we can improve it in the future.
Since we’re migrating one-by-one to ensure a smooth transition, your community might receive this update earlier or later than other communities, sometime in the next few weeks.
Most of the changes will be silent/unnoticeable and mainly concern improving the stability, consistency, and quality of the inSided platform.
However, there are a few changes to topic moderation which will take effect once your community has been updated:
Converting the topic type of questions/conversations
- To convert a question to a conversation (and vice versa), we will no longer show the 'contains question' switch.
- Instead, to convert between these content types on the topic moderation page, you'll need to go to More options > Convert to conversation (or Convert to question).
Moving multiple replies to a brand-new topic
- It will no longer be possible to move multiple replies in one go to a brand-new topic.
- To achieve this, you first need to ‘promote’ a reply to a new topic, and then move the replies in a second transaction.
- We’d like to improve the user experience of this part of the moderation workflow (related ideas like this are on our radar). This didn’t fall under the scope of our core improvements, which are more focused on platform stability/consistency/quality.
- To help us assess the priority of improving this, it would be great to hear real-world examples of how you use this feature and how often.
Moving the opening post of a question/conversation/article
- It is no longer possible to create a brand-new topic from the opening post of an existing topic (we hope you’ll agree with us that this makes very little sense) 🦆.
- You’ll only be able to move the opening post of a topic to another topic if the topic has no visible replies.
Moving replies to an existing question/conversation
- It’s now possible to move opening posts/replies from one topic to another topic without replacing the opening post of the topic you’re moving to, even if the opening post/reply that you're moving is older than the opening post. This change was based on the feedback in this idea and based on the fact that moving an opening post to a topic is essentially ‘convert to reply’.
- At first, this will only be possible for conversations/questions (not articles).
- We have the same behaviour changes planned for articles, which will be available at the same time moving replies to/from articles becomes available again. We'll update the idea that inspired this change once it's available for all content types.
Changes to moderator approval of posts by new users (aka ‘Pending Posts’)
- If you enable the pending posts feature, then until you turn it off all posts submitted to the community will become ‘pending’ (not visible, awaiting explicit approval by a moderator).
- Beforehand, if a user had been active on the community (created a new topic or replied to an existing topic), they were exempt from the pending posts system. Now, it affects posts by everyone except moderators, community managers, and administrators.
- Since launching Akismet, we haven’t seen any demand for this feature due to the lowered incidence of spam on our platform.
- If you foresee these changes to pending posts as a problem, please give your opinion below.
Character limit per post - enforcing a 30k limit
- This will become standardised at 30k characters.
- This limit is liable to change (increase) in the future - it is currently limited to 30k due to a need on our side to optimise performance.
- We’d love to hear from you below if you find 30k characters too limiting! We’ve heard specific feedback about the need to increase the length due to the need to include code samples/logs in posts.
We expect this update (and the changes detailed above) to be rolled out on your community anytime from the beginning from the middle of this week until towards the middle of December.
Please share your opinions on these changes. If there’s any change here that will negatively impact your experience as a daily or weekly Control moderator then we want to hear from you, so that we can improve it in the future.