Moderation queues need context
Moderation tools are an important part of managing any online community, but the tools aren’t always up to snuff. “Moderation tools” can cover many different features; in this post, I’m specifically talking about queues where messages are held for moderator action.
There are two main reasons you’d use a moderation queue. The first is to restrict incoming messages on an announcement-only list. You want to keep them low-traffic so that people will stay subscribed. This reason is focused on addressing merely-annoying behavior. The second is to ensure a particular message is appropriate. This might be implemented as “hold all messages from a particular user” or a flag system for moderators to review a specific post after it is sent. In either case, the second reason is focused on addressing abusive behavior.
Regardless of the motivation, the moderation queue is essential the same: a message is held until someone comes along and makes a decision about it. Where many tools miss the mark is in cooperation. Any community of more than trivial size should have multiple moderators. These moderators probably overlap in the time they spend moderating. But most tools I’ve used don’t have a great in-band way to coordinate.
The inspiration for this post comes from a handful of times where I, as one of the moderators of an announcement mailing list in Fedora, released a message that had been intentionally left held. There was no good way to notify the other moderators that this message was still held on purpose, and certainly no indication in the Mailman web interface. So I let the messages fly. That was mostly fine — the messages were supposed to be released eventually, just not quite yet.
In the abuse-focused case, a moderator might be looking into the poster’s history, or asking follow up questions of someone before they choose to act on the message. Or maybe they want to talk to some other moderators for a second opinion. Without a clear indication that the message is being worked on, another moderator may come in and act on it.
So if you’re designing a tool that includes a moderation queue, please make sure it supports an indication that the message is acknowledged. Ideally, include a field to indicate why it is still in-progress.