MisterPhilip Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 After migrating from SMF, our team has been pretty disappointed in the way that IPB handles moderation. While IPB allows us to have more flexibility, it also feels like some parts are either lacking or are just inconsistent across permission levels and overall somewhat clunky & inefficient. A forum moderator can see the "Moderator Options" or the checkboxes along each post despite not having permissions to utilize any of those specific moderator options. We feel this should be hidden from the user if they do not have the permissions to use it. On a side note, if a forum moderator does attempt to use this without having access they get "You cannot delete the first post in a topic. You should delete the topic itself" instead of a permission denied error. If this pops up in 3.4, I'll submit a bug report for it. Similarly, a forum moderator automatically has access to the Moderator control panel. This is fine and all, but by default "Edit Member" will always show up, even if they do not have permissions to edit users. And one more place this happens in under the admin control panel when you have restricted access. You can see menu options but get "You are not allowed to do this" The IP tools in the moderator control panel are practically useless. We've allowed our global moderators access to the admin panel and limited their abilities to certain functions to get around this... but the IP tool needs a lot of work. In all honesty, what is the point of "Find members who registered with this IP" when you're more likely to use "Find members who have used this IP," Yeah, you can see all of the users IF they've posted in the "Find Posts with this IP"... but if you have users with thousands of posts under that IP you have a lot of pages to scroll through. If a post has been deleted and you use the moderator IP lookup tool to find 'posts' by an ip address, the link in the resulting list of posts goes to the ORIGINAL thread the post WAS in. So, when you delete posts, they no longer appear in any method you can use through a profile to find them, but they do show up in a list when you search for posts by an IP address, but that list shows and links to where they were, not where they are at. It would be nice to be able to see hidden or deleted content under the "Find Content" button on the profile if you have the right privileges. It becomes a real pain if you hide or delete a lot of content and you try to find all of one user's content, publically visible or not. IMO something similar to what is currently in place for when a moderator is viewing a thread - where it is there inline, but just collapsed. It would be nice to have the ability to add in a reason for a deletion. This is currently allowed for hiding a post, but not deleting (at least not that I could find.) It would be nice to have the ability to reply to members in reports. In my eyes, a report should act as a sort of support ticket: UserA reports UserB for whatever, and ModeratorC comes in and can reply to UserA asking for more details, etc. or have a staff-only reply so that AdminD can come in and make the ultimate decision. Somewhat related, it would be nice to be able to act upon a report within the report (e.g. hide the post, delete it, warn a user, etc.) instead of going to an external page. That is a long shot, I know, but when you have a lot of reports a day a little bit of time saved here and there adds up. Finally, this seems more like a bug than an improvement, but moderators do not have the option to specific an edit reason in the full editor. It is visible on the quick edit but not in the full editor. Only admins seem to have this option.. A lengthy list, and this is only for moderator options. There are a few others but that is for another topic at another time (most of which we've solved by custom hooks / skins) PS - why is it that everytime I post a tl;dr it always just kicks me back to the forum index instead of actually posting it... sessions set too short (or am I just too slow at typing?) I take that back... it took 3 tries for this thread to actually go through... What the heck? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimi Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 :) If I may...I would like to add the ability to search through deleted content. As for your issues with posting, it's because this site does not support dynamic IPs making it impossible to post. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterPhilip Posted October 18, 2012 Author Share Posted October 18, 2012 If I may...I would like to add the ability to search through deleted content. That is another one, yup. Even if it is just a search filter in the regular search, I'd be happy with that ;) As for your issues with posting, it's because this site does not support dynamic IPs making it impossible to post. :smile: Hmm, my IP isn't changing every minute though. It took 3 tries to post this thread within 2-3 minutes before it actually posted (good thing I copy/pasted it beforehand!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimi Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 :) Oh maybe it's something else then? I thought it was IPs because at school my IP changes every two seconds and I can't post here. Try submitting a ticket. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 1) Moderators should only be able to see options they have permission to use. There is specific code in place to do this. I'd recommend submitting a ticket so we can take a look. 2) I thought there was code to handle this as well. If not, this is a nice suggestion (although we'd have to show *something* for a homepage, so we'd have to think about it a little - maybe a portal of some sort). 3) Options you do not have permission to use in the ACP should also be automatically hidden I thought. I'll need to double check this. 4) Something to consider. This is partly a holdover from older versions of the software that only searched posts. 5) This is a fair point. Keeping deleted posts in the database is fairly new in IP.Board, so this was simply missed and could be improved. 6) This is a fair suggestion. 7) We can consider this, although if you want to hide the post from view and keep a reason, why not just use "hide" in the first place? The idea behind deleting a post is that it is 'gone' (even though you can keep it in the database now). You'd rarely even find the deleted post to see the reason anyways, so I'm not sure how much value this really provides. 8) This is debatable. There is value in not allowing members to see reports, as moderators may wish to discuss them privately. It is not, after all, designed to be a ticket system. 9) This is a nice idea too, although challenging (because any type of content, including files, IP.Content articles, comments, calendar entries, and so on can be reported, so the system will need to know the content type, available actions, actions available to the specific moderator viewing, and then how to carry them out). 10) If this is the case (I haven't tested), it would be a bug, yes. I would recommend submitting a bug report about it. (If your post wasn't going through, that's likely an issue with our SSO code that we are aware of and working on - apologies for any trouble) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterPhilip Posted October 18, 2012 Author Share Posted October 18, 2012 Thanks for the reply bfarber - here are my notes / replies: 1. I will do that; we thought it was a little strange as well. 2. Right, it works for all of the other tabs. "Edit member" just seems to be the odd man out and is always visible (at least in our initial testings.) 3. I guess I should clarify a little bit. A specific example of this is when a user has access to list something but not edit it - like the forums. Right now our moderators can view the forum listing but cannot edit them. However, it still shows the edit / add icons & if they click them then they get a "permission denied" error 7. The main reason for this is just having a moderator log & to remain consistent with hiding posts. We've been used to deleting posts, however I'll likely be having the staff hide moving forward so that we can retain posts. We were always a fan of having a "trash can" forum where we could move posts / topics to when deleting and I was hoping the deleted posts within the moderator cp would be like that... but I think now hiding it would be our best option with the current setup. 8. Fair enough, we might take on doing a hook or a new app for reporting for this then. 9. Right, and that's why I labeled it as a "nice to have" ;) 10. Will do Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimi Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 2) I thought there was code to handle this as well. If not, this is a nice suggestion (although we'd have to show *something* for a homepage, so we'd have to think about it a little - maybe a portal of some sort). A portal sounds cool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfarber Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 3. I guess I should clarify a little bit. A specific example of this is when a user has access to list something but not edit it - like the forums. Right now our moderators can view the forum listing but cannot edit them. However, it still shows the edit / add icons & if they click them then they get a "permission denied" error 7. The main reason for this is just having a moderator log & to remain consistent with hiding posts. We've been used to deleting posts, however I'll likely be having the staff hide moving forward so that we can retain posts. We were always a fan of having a "trash can" forum where we could move posts / topics to when deleting and I was hoping the deleted posts within the moderator cp would be like that... but I think now hiding it would be our best option with the current setup. 3) Ah, ok. That makes more sense. We've actually begun (slowly) updating buttons in the ACP to hide/remove them when you don't have permission to use them. It's an ongoing process right now. 7) You can actually use a trash-can type setup still, but it requires manual work on your part. You create a forum (probably hidden to all but moderators), then tell your moderators to split posts out of a topic, moving them to the trash can. Similarly, they can move topics to the trash can (rather than using delete/hide). It's the same net effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterPhilip Posted October 18, 2012 Author Share Posted October 18, 2012 @ 7 - right, it is the same effect but is nowhere near as easy as hitting a single button to do it for you like previously found. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigPaws Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 Can I add a suggestion here? When viewing a user's profile in the admin area - there should be a link to view all the posts and/or topics by that user. It seems crazy you have to go to the forum and manually do this search. Or am I just not seeing this feature in admin? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alfa1 Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 9. Somewhat related, it would be nice to be able to act upon a report within the report (e.g. hide the post, delete it, warn a user, etc.) instead of going to an external page. That is a long shot, I know, but when you have a lot of reports a day a little bit of time saved here and there adds up. I had this functionality created for vbulletin and it really saves a ton of time on my busy big board. If a report is clear enough then the moderator can simply click one of the following buttons: - 'warn member & delete post' - 'warn member & close topic' - 'warn member' - 'close topic' Or: - 'request more feedback from reporter' As a side note, we have the same for reputation reports: - 'delete rating' - 'delete rating and warn member' - 'ignore report 'tell the reporter that the rating is valid' Screenshot: I know IPS doesn't have reputation comments yet, but in case it will be added, this suggestion may be of use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterPhilip Posted October 20, 2012 Author Share Posted October 20, 2012 That is exactly what I'm looking for Alfa1. I guess I really need to look into if that is hookable or not :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alfa1 Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 It was a fairly simply modification in vb, so I expect its fairly simple to create for as a hook IPS as well. I added it as an addon for vbulletin, because vbulletin simply doesn't care much for customer feedback and suggestions. Its quite the opposite here with IPS. So hopefully IPS is willing to add it to their stock feature set. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimi Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 Can I add a suggestion here? When viewing a user's profile in the admin area - there should be a link to view all the posts and/or topics by that user. It seems crazy you have to go to the forum and manually do this search. Or am I just not seeing this feature in admin? :) You're not seeing it. Click the "Find Content" button in profiles and you can filte by topics or by posts. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreenLinks Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 Another improvement that can be added is if a post has been reported X times by different members , it should be put in moderated state until modorators handle the report. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterPhilip Posted October 21, 2012 Author Share Posted October 21, 2012 Another improvement that can be added is if a post has been reported X times by different members , it should be put in moderated state until modorators handle the report. Also a +1 here too. I thought there was something similar, but I think I'm thinking of another software (non-forum.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterPhilip Posted October 28, 2012 Author Share Posted October 28, 2012 It'd also be nice to have a list of what actions have been taken against the item. For example, if a ModeratorA hides a post / topic, have that show up, just like a new comment. Same with editing, deleting or warning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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