Re: [EE] upcoming changes to Flow moderation and undo

Hi Svetlana, Yes, what you're describing is the problem that we've had with "Close". In the feature that's live on the site right now, any user can Close a topic, which means: * The topic header turns white, and there's a "Closed by user name" line. * The posts are hidden by default, so all you see is the topic header. You can click on the topic header to view the posts. * The main entry field for replies is suppressed. * The Reply links still appear on the individual posts, but if you try to post a reply, you get an error message. This is a broken feature, and it doesn't even align well with what wiki communities mean when they "close" a discussion. It was a decent first draft, but it didn't land. Redoing the moderation actions has been on my list of things to do since I joined the Flow team in April. Hide doesn't hide enough, and Close closes too much. These problems have come up several times recently, on Talk:Flow and on the mailing list. We're going to be testing out Flow on a couple of mentorship spaces in the next month, and I've been concerned that when someone answers a newbie's question, they'll think that the next step is to "Close" the discussion, to mark that the question has been answered. (Wiki people like to keep things tidy.) That would lead to exactly the broken experience that you describe -- people closing and opening topics with every response, which would confuse and frustrate everyone. Meanwhile, there's a bigger and more interesting idea that we're working on -- using "resolved" as a way to celebrate successful decisions, rather than hiding them or pushing them away. We're also starting to think about how to use the "Summarize" feature in a different way -- maybe encouraging people to use it as an editable scratchpad built into a particular spot in the discussion. That idea hasn't quite come together yet, but there's something interesting there that we're talking and thinking about. So -- while that idea is still percolating on a back burner -- I wanted to take a step that would discourage people from using "Close" to penalize a successful conversation that's reached a happy conclusion. That's why we're changing that word to "Lock", which expresses more clearly that cutting off replies is a negative act which people shouldn't do very often, if at all. It definitely should not be the typical way for a conversation to end. We're going to keep making changes like this -- small shifts and iterations that build over time. We have an unbelievably long list of features to build, experiments to try, horrible mistakes to make and learn from. We will be periodically breaking and fixing and re-breaking Flow on a regular basis, from now until a long while from now. That's the only way to build a big complicated feature like this. It's more of an art than a science, and it's not even that much of an art. As a team, we're trying to be more open and transparent about the work that we're doing -- that's why we've started sending these emails out to a public list. We want to talk more about the problems that we're wrestling with, get more ideas and questions from the community, and then channel that energy into actually making changes and trying things out. If you're on this mailing list, that means you're interested in seeing how the sausage gets made. It is not always pretty. But I'm glad that you're here, and that you're into it. That means you're on the team. Danny On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 6:02 PM, svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote: