Here I'd like to collect some of the ideas I and others put forward about a month ago in forum #14060, and hopefully get some momentum.

First, a screenshot of the current mod queue:
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/7246/20090212103328cs1.png

As you can see, it's just one extremely long column of post thumbnails (in order from most recently posted to almost-expired). There are 328 as I type this, though it's abbreviated to the first and last 6 in the screenshot above. Each thumbnail is accompanied by some data on the right (uploader, score, rating, tags) and a checkbox on the left. You approve posts en masse by selecting the checkboxes of the posts you want to approve, then scrolling waaay down to the bottom where there is an "approve" button.

What's wrong with the mod queue as it is?

• Problem: The queue is REALLY LONG. Trying to wade through it and find anything actually interesting and good among the crap that everyone else has left for dead is a thankless task.
• Proposed solution: Allow mods/janitors to hide posts that they have seen and are not interested in, without deleting them, so that other mods/janitors still have the opportunity to take a look at them. Since there are relatively few mods/janitors, this can be tracked serverside without too much trouble. Ideally, this would be done with javascript, so that one row in the queue would gracefully disappear when you clicked "✘" or whatever, while a message was sent to the server, thereby allowing you to continue browsing the queue. If you deleted a post by mistake, you could search for it in status:deleted. Possible put an "unhide in mod queue" function on the post page.

• Problem: It is impossible to know whether to approve a post just by seeing its thumbnail. Thus, a mod/janitor must click the thumbnail, which takes them to the post page. From there, there is already an "approve" link in the toolbox in the lower left, so there's no reason to even approve posts from the mod queue - it's essentially the same thing as just carefully browsing through status:pending and approving whatever is good.
• Proposed solution: Clicking the thumbnail of a post should swap in the "sample image" of the post, not send you to the post's display page. (Clicking a second time would swap the thumbnail back in.) There's not usually anything on the post page itself which should influence the approval process, beyond what's already shown in the right-most column, as far as I can tell. Note: this can be done in the same way that the post page can now swap the sample image for the full image.

• The checkboxes on the left are useless. The queue is so long that by the time you reached the end you'd have forgotten which posts you checked off. The alternative is to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page after every few posts you've checked off to approve.
• Proposed solution: Replace the checkboxes with individual "✔" (approve) and "✘" (delete or hide) buttons/links placed next to each post in the queue. Preferably AJAX based, like the vote links on post pages, so you can continue down the queue without being redirected to another page.

• Problem: Old pending posts about to reach their 3-day limit accumulate near the bottom of the queue, where (as I gather) few people tend to look. Thus, if an image is not approved soon after it is uploaded, it has somewhat less of a chance to be approved.
• Proposed solution: If we implement the "hide" feature I suggested, I don't think there would be any objection to ordering the queue from oldest to newest to solve this problem.

Miscellaneous suggestions:

• Add a "similar" link in the rightmost column, or somewhere, which would pass the thumbnail in the mod queue to piespy's iqdb facility. Or maybe even automatically mark posts as probable duplicates based on high iqdb similarity results, though that'd require some interfacing to be coded between danbooru and iqdb.

Comments? Other suggestions, perhaps?

Instead of a similar link, have the image be fed into the iqdb when it is first uploaded and display any results in the queue to the right of the image, along with % similarity and dimensions. But then, that would probably stretch the height out a bit more and be more trouble than it's worth. Speaking of dimensions, maybe that bit of information should be added for each image.

While not a mod myself, I agree that your suggested upgrades to the queue area seem simple and very beneficial to the current system. Good luck on getting these fixes worked in.

Far as I know, everyone agrees on all of these points (from previous threads and such), so I don't think there will be any significant opposition. It's all about programming, really...

And yes as you noted, swapping to oldest first is indeed entirely dependent on getting a foolproof and efficient 'hide' option. Otherwise it's not a good idea.

0xCCBA696 said: * The checkboxes on the left are useless. The queue is so long that by the time you reached the end you'd have forgotten which posts you checked off. The alternative is to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page after every few posts you've checked off to approve.

I always mod all a specific user's posts (so I only see average ~6 at a time when approving instead of hundreds) when I see something good, which works around this issue. But of course being able to approve right then and there would be nice too.

I'm not a programmar, but could the post hiding function works similar to, say, the 4chan Firefox extension?

As a slight workaround during the heavier coding, a second frame could be added fairly easily. The second frame could contain things like the approval button ,and anything else the mods might find useful, making the current checkbox system more viable until a final solution is found/coded. However, this doesn't solve the issue of the list being so long.

A temporary solution regarding old pending files could be working out a system in which each mod has a specific day to check only old files, employ mods for this specific purpose, or maintain the current system of appeals until a permanent solution is coded.

I've implemented a rough version of your suggestion. Let me know what you think.

Very good first step, I think. I just need to be careful not to accidentally hide something I didn't mean to, because it'd be impossible to find again.

I guess the next major step would be letting us view a larger side of the image without going to the individual page.

One glitch I'm getting: I don't seem to be able to approve from the actual individual image page anymore. I have to do it from the queue.

Suggestion: Maybe a line break or two between Approve, Delete and Hide. It's easy to misclick when they're close. Different font colors too, perhaps.

It's easier to accidentally approve something you didn't mean to approve. But maybe that's because I just got through the mod queue a few hours before and is now hiding a bulk of them.

Maybe approved and hidden images shouldn't disappear from the page entirely, but rather be relegated to a "quarantine area" at the bottom of the page until you browse away from the moderator page. That way if you accidentally hide/accept something you didn't mean to, you can undo it easily.

Overall, huge improvement!

Would a lightbox style popup of the full image work? I'm not sure if it's any better than actually going to the page but loading the image in the table would mess up the layout.

albert said: Would a lightbox style popup of the full image work? I'm not sure if it's any better than actually going to the page but loading the image in the table would mess up the layout.

Would you be able to load the sample size image? I know for small images this = the full image, but for anything large the sample would be a lot quicker to load than going into the image.

As for the lightbox thing, that sounds fine.

Hidden posts are now moved to the end of the queue (just reload).

albert said: Hidden posts are now moved to the end of the queue (just reload).

Cool. Is there an easy way to add something to visually indicate that it'd already been hidden once? I guess it's kind of obvious from the age of the post (and the sudden wave of crap images that will show up) but some coloring or a border or something would be good.

albert said:
Would a lightbox style popup of the full image work? I'm not sure if it's any better than actually going to the page but loading the image in the table would mess up the layout.

Lightbox is evil, it'd force us to sit there and wait for each picture to load. If you load the images in the table, I can at least click a bunch of posts and start reviewing them from the first while they load. Danbooru is slow, remember.

If the lightbox popup is permanent, can we at least have a link to the actual post page so modifications like adding tags or finding similar images can be done.

This lightbox thing needs to go, it doesn't work at all.

I don't see why we can't just load each image in a new tab (middle click = open in new tab, y'all). That way you don't have to sit around waiting for anything to load and you can keep going.

I basically don't think this "load the sample/full image inside the queue" idea is worth pursuing. I can't think of any scenario where it would work as well or better than just loading images in new tabs, it'll always do something annoying like mess up the layout, make stuff move about in ways you don't want, and so on.

Didn't know we would lose a link to the individual image page, and if that's the case then I'd rather go back to the old way too.

I was under the impression there would be a nice, easy, super fast was of just displaying a slightly larger version of the thumbnail that was a simple click to open, see it, click to close and move on deal. If this is what is meant by a light box, then it's... well it doesn't seem as horrible as others make it out to be, but it has drawbacks.

It doesn't seem like there's a good way to implement it. Opening each one in a new tab is still a pain in the ass, especially for high res images (I don't want to turn sample image browsing on simply because of the mod queue, as I don't want it in normal situations), or if the site is being sluggish at the time. But it's better than what the alternatives seem to be, or at least definitely better than losing that option entirely.

Keep the lightbox (though if you could make it like the ones used on Sankaku, that would be even better), and add a link to take us to the page itself.

Also, can you color code the tags?

I'd like the changes, but if you could add a similar link and a direct link to the image it will be much better.

I don't think the lightbox was a workable solution considering how slow it was.

Instead I made the thumbnail open in a new window. I think the workflow is a lot better if you open a bunch of questionable posts in the background and use the Approve link in each page after reviewing it.

Hidden posts are now hidden again by default but accessible via a link.

albert said: Instead I made the thumbnail open in a new window. I think the workflow is a lot better if you open a bunch of questionable posts in the background and use the Approve link in each page after reviewing it.

Hmm, in that case I'd rather retain the option to do either - open in the same window or open in a new window. If I want to open in the same window, I just click. If I want to open in a new window, I can just middle click. Pretty sure all browsers support the middle click thing nowadays, though I only use FF. As it is now I can do the latter but not the former. Not sure how everyone else feels.

Hidden posts are now hidden again by default but accessible via a link.

That seems the best solution, thanks.

Bit of an oddity, I noticed that the table cell that contains the thumbnail seems to be resizing its width almost at random. This means that if I have my mouse over "approve" and am clicking it for multiple images in a row, the column might suddenly resize and my mouse is now pointing to "hide", or even "delete".

Granted, I just need to be careful and not be hasty with my clicking - but it's still a potential source of misclicks. That's one thing I liked about having them in their own column, whatever your mouse was hovering over would always be the same thing as new rows filled up to take the place of the one you just dealt with.

Any way to tweak this?

Wow, a lot of positive response here.

albert said:
Hidden posts are now hidden again by default but accessible via a link.

Great! This is better than the previous setup of just moving hidden posts to the bottom of the queue. At least now it does seem like the queue is dwindling when you dismiss posts :) By the way, small quibble, but maybe in the "?hidden=true" page, the link at the top should say "click here to view non-hidden posts" or something.

Fencedude said:
Keep the lightbox (though if you could make it like the ones used on Sankaku, that would be even better), and add a link to take us to the page itself.

Oh god, anything but that, please. Sankaku's lightbox is particularly slow and bad. I agree with LaC about the lightbox being a bad idea. In general, I don't like lightboxes, since they force you to focus on only one element of the webpage at a time - this only works in extreme cases where one thing really is the one and only main content of the page. The Newgrounds flash movie player lightbox comes to mind. The mod queue, however, is the opposite.

jxh2154 said:
Didn't know we would lose a link to the individual image page, and if that's the case then I'd rather go back to the old way too.

This is absolutely not necessary. Look at the post page currently: clicking on "original image" swaps the sample image for the full image and vice versa, but you can still middle-click it (in firefox anyway) to get the actual image file in a new tab. If I'm not mistaken, this works because single-clicking triggers the onClick event, whereas middle-clicking does not - the actual <a> element has an href pointing to the image file, but the onClick code does something entirely different. I don't see any reason why this couldn't work here too.

I still don't see what's wrong with simply having the thumbnail expand in place. This is the same as what many imageboards do (as well as what the 4chan firefox extension does to 4chan, by the way) and works just fine. If you want to expand a bunch of images at a time, just scroll down to the last one you want to expand and click from there upwards - as the images expand, you don't need to scroll to get to the next image you wanted to click. As for the layout getting screwed up, what about putting the thumbnails on the right? Is that too strange?

In any case, forcing the user to create new dozens of tabs is never a good solution, IMO, especially since most modern browsers have massive memory leakage problems which are exacerbated by opening and closing tabs.

jxh2154 said:
I was under the impression there would be a nice, easy, super fast was of just displaying a slightly larger version of the thumbnail that was a simple click to open, see it, click to close and move on deal.

Hmm... do we want to create a third image size just for the mod queue? It could be deleted after three days, but the question is I guess whether the cost of having sample images is disk space or CPU/memory time (i.e. storing them or making them).

By the way, the yellow background for posts tagged duplicate is nice, but maybe we should tie directly into piespy's tool? See if there are any matches in the 90-100% similarity range, for example, and color the background differently in such a case.

0xCCBA696 said: This is absolutely not necessary. Look at the post page currently: clicking on "original image" swaps the sample image for the full image and vice versa, but you can still middle-click it (in firefox anyway) to get the actual image file in a new tab.

Hmm, I'm not sure what you are replying to here. For a time, what happened was that clicking on the image (left or middle) brought up the light box. There was no way to go to the individual post page, if I wanted to, say, vote it up or favorite it or add tags or anything like that. That's what I was commenting on, but the behavior was changed shortly afterwards and that point is now moot.

I still don't see what's wrong with simply having the thumbnail expand in place.

Personally I don't either if, again, there's a way to do it that's a bit quicker than lightbox.

Hmm... do we want to create a third image size just for the mod queue?

Rather than literally create and save a new size, is there a way to just display the existing sample size at 50% or something? I have no idea if that's feasible, not being a programmer.

Basically, I just would love some happy medium between the thumbnail on the one hand, and going to the individual post page in a new tab on the other.

As long as I still have access to the post page, I'm a happy mod. :)

albert, can you add "approve" and "hide" links inside the "This post is pending moderator approval" bar? It'd be easier than hunting for the "approve" link in the sidebar.

jxh2154 said:
Hmm, I'm not sure what you are replying to here. For a time, what happened was that clicking on the image (left or middle) brought up the light box. There was no way to go to the individual post page, if I wanted to, say, vote it up or favorite it or add tags or anything like that. That's what I was commenting on, but the behavior was changed shortly afterwards and that point is now moot.

OK, I didn't actually get a chance to see the lightbox in action before it was removed, but anyway, yeah. Ideally I'd like left-click to swap the thumbnails with sample images, and middle-click to open the post page in another tab.

jxh2154 said:
Rather than literally create and save a new size, is there a way to just display the existing sample size at 50% or something?

Sure, but it's kind of a waste of bandwidth. I think storage space is generally cheaper than bandwidth, but that's something for albert to decide. One thing about just downsizing the existing sample image would be that you could have a "stretchy layout" - i.e. the swapped-in sample image would always be the maximum size that wouldn't create horizontal scrollbars in your browser window (this is possible in just simple HTML). It's kind of frowned upon in web design circles though.

Does anyone else feel that restricting explicit images to privileged and up could reduce the amount of crap being uploaded?

Do you mean uploading them, or viewing them? If the former, that'll probably result in rating fraud (which could be controlled with bans I guess). If the latter, well, we could go even further and just close registration again. But I'm guessing that's not what albert wants.

0xCCBA696 said:
In any case, forcing the user to create new dozens of tabs is never a good solution, IMO, especially since most modern browsers have massive memory leakage problems which are exacerbated by opening and closing tabs.

This makes me sad. Anyway, as long as the option to "open/open in new tab/open in new window" is at least there, I'm fine with alternatives also being available, of course.

0xCCBA696 said:
By the way, the yellow background for posts tagged duplicate is nice, but maybe we should tie directly into piespy's tool? See if there are any matches in the 90-100% similarity range, for example, and color the background differently in such a case.

This is a really good idea and I second it. Only potential problem I can think of is that it might flood piespy's server a bit--then again I already use his service on about half the mod queue anyway, so if one other moderator does the same thing I do, we're already talking about the same amount of bandwidth usage.