Remove Moderator Approval for Posts with Photos
HaramDingo-ING
Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭
As per the title. I understand why there might be a need for approvals for the Wayfarer forum in particular, considering that much of the Pokemon Go player base are lurking and engaging in discussions here, and with that possibility may be underage. But really, have there been instances where explicit or awful content had the necessity to be blocked?
- Other Community Forums such as Catan, Ingress and Wizards Unite (afaik) do not have the same moderation process when posting photos.
- The amount of time a post with a photo takes on average to be approved and appear in the discussion thread spans from 12 hours to 48 hours, so by the time your post with the photo appears, the conversation has already progressed and moved on.
- Vetting every single post with a photo must be tiring for your moderating team and it detracts from the work you should be going. I am sure there must be a setting in the Vanilla forums to change the vetting from strict (all photos) to a more suitable filter (i.e. identifying potential posts or photos that could be nudity or bad, etc). I'm sure the Wayfarer community is sensible enough not to post a photo of something from a certain hub.
- And if you are still concerned about people posting explicit things, give maybe new accounts who signed into the Wayfarer forums maybe a 3 day compulsory moderation approval (for just posts with photos) that you are currently doing, and maybe give some leeway or clearance to those Wayfarers in this forum who have at least 2 Stars on their profile for participating and engaging with the activity, stop having the need to moderate everything.
- Finally, if someone actually decides to post an explicit photo that is completely against the nature of Wayfarer, just ban their Wayfarer access, revoke their nomination privileges and probably do some game sanctions on their account. They know the rules, enforce it.
Just like the robots that you have now enabled for forum and discussion indexing on this forum, evaluate whether making photo moderation less intense would be beneficial. Have you had instances where you did have to keep something unapproved? Has there been explicit photos coming through and you needed to block them?
Please consider this.
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I would also like to add that there have now been several instances were photo attachments were allowed into the forum that several minutes/hours after approval were identified by @NianticCasey-ING as having PII and were edited, but not before being visible to the community.
If they require moderation to review, they clearly aren't looking for PII.
Possibly, it could be allowed that members of the forum can vote to allow photos to be attached. We're already trusted with the Wayfarer database.
I concur. It's often valuable to illustrate discussions with examples, and waiting for them to be approved can really break the flow of the conversation and slow down the exchange of ideas.
Agree, while I've already made long posts to address this problem and suggested an improvement.
But those posts were unanwsered and removed yesterday. I don't think you would get a solution.
Speaking of which, there was a bug report @NianticCasey-ING promised to look into MONTHS ago about editing forum posts causing them to disappear into moderation. Now the post has been deleted. Good going.
Also missing was a complaint about the word **** being blocked on this forum.
Given Niantic can't even do a good job of moderating this forum, it's no wonder there are plenty of people who don't trust a word Niantic says (and even believe conspiracy theories). I really don't blame them. If precedent is anything to go by, there's a good chance the suggestions in this topic will ultimately be ignored. If I was The Pokémon Company I'd be wanting answered about the persistent mismanagement.
The mod approval on posts with pictures is alright for me. Understanding the safety in this forum. What triggers me is that posts which got edited sometimes needs to get approved. In special if you only changed one letter to correct a spelling mistake (which is often the case on a German autocorrection while writing English) or add something to your post. Very annoying.
The current system does indeed require some improvement.
The feedback for the user that post an image is very poor and most of the people think that their post has failed. A more "obtrusive" message would be better. -> Better information for new users.
For the people that has reached 2+ stars in the forum and have already posted several images it seems that it should be necessary to keep on baby-sitting their pictures. -> Less overload for the administrators.
And of course, the most difficult one: less time waiting for review, but that would require monitoring the forums 24/7
Yeah, even posts in Bug report subforum will be removed. I'll no longer take time writting so many sincere words like OP is doing. Nobody cares about that. Raise invalid portal appeals and that's it.
Raising this again because there are numerous instances (very much in the recent times) where a user has double-posted because they were concerned that their first post didn't go through.
There is zero need for photos to be moderated and having the need to go review and mull over every single post with an image for moderation review. How many posts or photos exactly are being blocked by moderators? Like what everyone here has said, once a forum user has at least maybe 2 or even three stars, as if they would subject themselves to posting something that shouldn't be in the community forums.
For one star forum users and accounts that maybe are brand new (30 days or post very sporadically between), yeah sure moderate and manually review their posts. But for established users with stars and are trusted (the people in the Wayfarer Discord come to mind), stop babysitting us and treating us like we're children/adolescents. No other forum has this overarching moderation.
i have a post i made this morning with photos pending approval around 7 hrs ago and still not approved, meanwhile another thread has been made about the same topic with no photos, making my post useless.
Yeah. Talk about total lack of respect for your community: Wayfarers make a deliberate effort to report and characterize a bug or problem, and the administrators ignore it into oblivion, then quietly erase it.
Problem? What problem? Never mind that they never investigated the issue, let alone fixed it, and the OP may just want to quote or copy and paste from it, because the problem is still here.
Agreed with this request. Also, to somewhat piggyback on it as it does relate to the moderation of this forum and to user abilities, can we please have the ability to delete our own comments? If I've posted something with images, and then realised the post is incorrect (or indeed, it's taken too long to be approved and has lost relevancy by that point), I can delete the text via an edit to the post (if it's within one day), but I can't remove the images. If you give us a 24 hour period in which we can edit our posts, surely the same could be applied to the ability to outright delete the post?
I have a pending post about this right now actually.
The irony is it posted with a typo in the title, and when I quickly edited the post to fix the typo, it got sent to limbo. It's been there for hours. I have comments with images from this morning that also are sitting in queue. Its ridiculous.
I too find this frustrating. I often choose not to add helpful visual examples to posts and comments because I don't want to wait for approval.
It's not only posts with images. I almost completely stopped quoting others in my posts as almost every of my post with quote go to moderation too, and they often wait a really long time for approval.
There was a thread about lack of Niantic response some time ago, I answered someone with quoting they posts, and my post go to moderation. It took a few hours for it to be approved and appear, and it was approved after a post that was written by Niantic - my post was useless and it looked like I wasn't reading thread at all (I posted much earlier than any Niantic worker responded in this thread) 😅
So I also agree it can be very frustrating and moderating posts should be changed to maybe just new users with less that 2 stars, like others mentioned. Or just turned off completely, it doesn't looks like it's needed on this forum.
The most prime example of posts with photos going into moderator review happened with these series of posts yesterday (note this is AEST in Australia so the times might be different):
At August 25, 3:01am, Hosette posted this with no photo attached:
Then at August 25, 1:51pm and 1:58pm about ten hours later, THIRTEENm and Roli112 posted both the following respectively, both including images and went into the moderation approval queue:
These times of moderation approval are not reflective of the original posting time in which these users posted these and the timestamp is the time of approval and release into the forums. It's possible that either of the above posts were composed before Hosette's post, but by the way the forums work, moderation unnecessarily occurs and by the time someone has their post approved, already someone else has gotten a conversation going, and alas the duplicate post is often closed and has already lost its relevance in the sands of time (usually).
By the way, THIRTEENm already has two stars given that they've only created two discussion posts. Dunno how the system works, but maybe three stars can bypass the moderation system, for both posts with images AND post edits? There is no need (for Niantic staff) to spend maybe an hour per day approving endless comments and new discussions with photos and restrict yourself to this work when you can streamline it and work on something else productive like the months-old title/description and photo appeals.
Moderation is absolutely garbage.
To Niantic staff (tagging @NianticGiffard and @NianticTintino because this has been ignored), if you can answer the following that would be great:
There is no demonstrated need to have moderation in this community. All moderation does is cause annoyance, and without any sort of open policy as to why you think it is neceessary to moderate "all posts with photos", it just causes grief and leaving people wondering why their post hasn't appeared, so they double-post. Your response (or lack thereof) matters.
Cc: @NianticDanbocat
Hi Folks,
Thanks for tagging me and apologies it fell through the cracks. Let me take a look into the history/context of the moderation tool and get back to you. I appreciate y'all sharing context about your moderation experiences and will share those with the feedback as well.
Test for moderation (i.e. linking an image from another hosted website such as imgur or postimages) to here, instead of directly uploading.
Any updates?
The moderation in this forum is bad already, they let that single "C" word went through without filtering for 3 hours.
Resurrecting this thread. But good lord, I was trying to help someone with technical issues (browser incompatibilities with Wayfarer) and responding with a "quote" sent my comment into manual review... FOUR TIMES...
And still having issues with photos all needing to be approved obviously.
So come Monday that thread is going to have me saying the same thing 4 times in a row but slightly different each time... Sigh.
I would also like to see this gone, lately my posts have been disappearing for days or they never show up at all.
Have you been able to complete it?
BTW, another thing that I hate is that when I edit a post to fix a typo (usually adding or removing one letter) it very often goes to moderation. It is teaching me to just leave the typos there.
Anecdotally I've noticed that my more recent post edits don't seem to be getting sent off for mod review. Could just be a coincidence of course, but it does feel like something has changed.
I've just had one edit go to moderation. I just deleted one letter.
So, I wonder how that conversation with that non-existent Trust & Safety team is going eh? A forum that cannot moderate effectively should just do away with it as it stifles conversation.
Well, it takes me a while to scroll past all the stale pinned "Announcement" posts to get to the actual user discussion threads anyway.....