Hi,
FYI I'm not very satisfied with these plans. They are not in line with existing feedback, partly, and partly are not in line with the practices I've observed at various on-wiki village pumps. Please look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Prior_discussion-thread-roundup#Post_Mod... a bit more. I would like to encourage more thought put into this while performing programming work. And put early.
S Page wrote:
- To deal with spam topics and posts, we're going to append "(hide)"
(and delete | suppress for admins) to "created new topic"/"commented" lines on board and topic history pages. These will work the same as hide|delete|suppress actions do on Flow board and topic pages.
"Concerns about access to viewing or editing others' posts" in the link I gave has a bunch of topics about this. Looks like people want anyone to be able to delete others' comments. I haven't seen this as a problem for years. Please don't restrict delete to admins. (Suppress is another story and limiting it to admins makes sense.)
S Page wrote:
- We're going to rename Close topic to Lock topic. This better matches what
it actually does, which is prevent new posts and changes (with lots of bugs currently). To make it more obvious what Lock does, we'll remove the Reply and Edit links from a locked topic, instead of them failing on submit.
Note many use case of "This topic is closed" fit well with the Summarize topic action. People can and should put {{done}}, {{abandoned}}, {{answered}}, etc. templates and markup in a topic's summary.
This wasn't discussed with people at Talk:Flow before, but I plainly think that's a wrong way to do it.
The reason is that I follow-up a resolved topic rather often. "Hi this template is broken" "I fixed it in this edit" "thanks!" "[locks thread]" - and then I want to ask how to fix another one a day later, I tried the same fix but it didn't work?? I should spend hours of my time pressing UNLOCK when nothing should have locked it in the first place???
Hm. On the other side, with Flow, we don't have archives. We don't want old topics to resurface with 'thanks!' and go all way to the top of 'recently active' list.
OK, please redesign the LOCK feature a little. :-) 0) Please add a 'this answer solved the problem' button - anyone should be able to click it. It could go to 'this topic has 3 comments and 1 solution' subtitle in the topic title. 1) When a thread is active recently (less than N days), it can't be locked. People are able to follow-up within the same thread. 2) When a thread is inactive recently (active more than N days ago), it's automatically archived. This means it takes extra effort (and warnings dumped onto your head) when you try to reactivate it. 3) The number "N" should depend on a page activity. If a talk page of an article is dead, it makes no sense to archive anything, even if it's a year old. 4) It should be possible to 'HAT' a topic if it's inflammable before the N days time.
I hope this will ease usability too - it's much easier to click a specific message and click "it solves the problem" than go through the process of locking down the entire thread.
Related topics: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:S0duk9t3t90a4c67 - Stop making reply impossible to closed topics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Gryllida/Flow - thoughts on moderation in Flow - DONTs: "Nothing should prevent anyone from replying to a message under any circumstances."
We'll probably begin developing these in the next two-week sprint. Hope this helps. -- =S Page Features engineer
svetlana