Idea: flagging comments/posts

I was watching Matt Haughey's talk on moderating a community (a great presentation by the way, I command all moderators to go watch it) and got a lot of good ideas from it. Among them was the idea of flagging comments.

Right now you can vote on a comment. Up or down, good or bad. The problem is when you vote a comment down, you're not conveying that much information. Are you voting it down because it's a spoiler? Because it's racist? Because of bad spelling? All these things require different moderator actions. What Matt was doing previously was going through every post on a daily basis to see if anything needed to be dealt with. What flagging allowed him to do was, at a glance, see which comments were causing the most controversy. What I'd like to suggest is doing away with comment voting and replacing it with a flagging system. Is it a spoiler? Spam? Offensive? You could also allow for positive flagging, like saying a comment is funny or insightful.

From a moderator's perspective, this lets us zoom in on problem comments faster. Spoilers might take high priority, while offensive comments might lead us to leave user feedback.

A bit more controversially, I believe the same idea can be applied to posts. There's really no reason to unapprove something unless it breaks the rules. I'm not sure if there's value in splitting out the poorly drawn/non-anime/furry/watermarked/compressed/guro/nude filter rules. I'm also not sure how useful positive flags are here. They kind of overlap pools. Flagging would also allow multiple people to flag a post as opposed to only one currently, which lets moderators better gauge what popular opinion is.

These are all changes I feel are important enough that I'd be willing to spend time implementing for Danbooru 1.x.

I thought we got rid of comment flagging because in practice it didn't work unless you're talking about something else?

I am very much in favor of this idea. I think the problem with the comment voting system right now is that it puts too much power in the hands of too many. The fact that any priv+ can effectively delete someone else's comment, and anonymously to boot, is just ripe for abuse. But of course, restricting it to Janitors put too much of a burden on them. I think the flagging idea is a great way to let the priv+ community do most of the work, while keeping the real power in the hands of the Janitors. One caveat though is that it is important that Janitors have access to the context of the comment while judging. Some comments can appear far more inane out of context than in.

To be frank, I think positive flags are just as important, if not more so. I really love the community here, but one problem I have with it is that there seems to be this general push for Danbooru to become a silent art gallery, where images should be quietly revered in hushed tones so as not to disturb the other patrons. I think giving users a way to visibly flag good comments would go a long way in tearing down that image, and motivate users to leave insightful comments. Not to mention, it would very effectively do away with all the comments such as "LOL", "hahahah", "omg THIS!!", etc.

One thing to mention is that I, as a janitor, have exactly zero interest in moderating comments. I've been a moderator on a forum, and its a horrible, thankless job that I finally quit because it was pissing me off.

I have no issues with image approval, I don't use the queue, for a variety of reasons, but image approval is something that I don't mind doing.

But I'm not going to moderate comments. Period. If you can find people who will, great, but for myself (and probably some others on the moderation staff), its not what I want to do on this site.

I'd be willing to moderate comments. I suggested something to this effect in the other thread, I'm in support of it.

Sry for being stupid, but I don't understand. Are you trying to go back to the old comments moderation thing?
Because that was a lot worse than the actual system.

Flagging comments with a reason would help fighting the major misunderstanding/misusing of downvoting for mere disagreement.

Right now basically any negative or unpopular statement is likely to get hidden because the main userbase is so amazed at everything.

Hey, we have to provide a reason for flagging posts or repping users already. Why not take a similar approach to comments?

...well, several reasons, actually, but one of those definitely being that it would put additional pressure on the Janitor+ staff, pressure which many of them probably didn't sign up for.

I'm in favor of it, though, because of all the noise-making caused by commentators who insist on bringing up shipping arguments, powerlevel flamewars, hate for the series depicted, flaming about entirely separate websites, or (lately) spoilers. That's not even taking into account all the "LOL" "good pic" "so sexy" (etc.) idiocy. Those deserve more than just being buried in negative scores, or invisible deletion; they need to be removed, with a bolded "This comment has been deleted by the moderation team. Reason: (reason_here)" so as to stand as a warning.

Also, I once again humbly request that moderators' administrative comments be marked in some way that renders them unable to be downvoted. The last thing we need is for those warnings to be easily ignorable.

sgcdonmai said:
Also, I once again humbly request that moderators' administrative comments be marked in some way that renders them unable to be downvoted. The last thing we need is for those warnings to be easily ignorable.

I'm pretty sure that all Janitor+ comments are unable to be downvoted.

Edit: trying to brings back "Already voted."

sgcdonmai said:
but one of those definitely being that it would put additional pressure on the Janitor+ staff, pressure which many of them probably didn't sign up for.

Well that could be solved by adding a new level of "Comment Mods" who would in fact sign up for exactly that. That would not only take the pressure off said Janitor+ types, it would also add more people to the pool of mods, which I think we could use anyway.

What if anyone at the Janitor level wanted to get involved with comment moderation? Would they have to become somehow become a Moderator or 'change their job' in a sense to a "Comment Mod"?

I don't see why the Janitors couldn't be given such power by default. In fact that's how it probably should be. My suggestion just takes away the obligation to do something that they didn't volunteer for, not the ability to help out.

I would say that Janitors would still have the abilities of comment moderator.

Admin > Mod > Janitor > Comment Mod

Janitors would most likely have the ability to moderate posts and comments.

I think this is a great idea if it's implementable. Allowing multiple flags per comment & attaching reasons to those flags would provide a sort of populist vote on why a comment or post is good or bad, and gives a mod a lot of information when it comes to making a decision on taking action.

I can see good reason for positive flags for posts as well. First, it could help take care of some of the issues in the "Deletion Appeal" and "Deletion Request" threads. When a post gets flagged, a drop-down of stock reasons is given, along with a textbox for further clarification. A post can get flagged multiple times, indicating another person agrees and can offer a different reason if necessary.

Positive flags would work in the opposite way. Perhaps I see a negative flag for "ToS Violation: (guro)" that I don't agree with", I can then post a positive flag with a drop-down reason "Request to bend ToS rules: (borderline guro, and exceptionally good art)". Others that disagree with the flag can pile on their arguments as well. These images are then sent to a queue for moderators to decide upon, either someone can outright approve or outright delete the image based on the circumstances, or when the 3 day probationary period ends, the post is automatically re-approved or deleted based on the number of positive vs negative flags (flags could even be weighted based on the rank of the user that raised them). These flags could also be kept around for later for the benefit of anyone who might wish to bring the matter up for discussion later.

I can also see a positive flag of a different sort as being a special vote for "VIP-Quality". Not only do I like this enough to upvote it, and possibly favorite it, I think this image should be considered among the best of the best and here's why. Posts with this sort of flag could be collected in their own gallery, or that status worked into the score somehow.

Flagging in general in this way would make comment and contested post moderation easier by allowing one to automatically pick up on the worst hotspots, or the best posts to be featured.

It would also codify a lot of the aspects of the Deletion Appeal and Request threads, feedback given, votes in favor and against, and would allow any necessary discussion to be kept in the comments for that post which would be cleaner than the long unwieldy forum threads where discussion about posts can become interleaved.

In any case there would be a lot of details to work out, but it seems like a good idea to me.

Along these lines, in terms of improving comment quality a lot of places have a ten character minimum for commenting. It's derided by some, but if it's a legitimate comment, it's not easy for it to have less than about 25 characters.

Also, everything Shinjidude just said. I'd give it +1 insightful if I could.

DschingisKhan said:
Along these lines, in terms of improving comment quality a lot of places have a ten character minimum for commenting. It's derided by some, but if it's a legitimate comment, it's not easy for it to have less than about 25 characters.

Would that really help though? I mean say some idiot wants to post "Boobs!"? OK that gets blocked, but then they can just turn around and post "Boobs! BOOBS!" and that breaks through. So what did that really do? Besides make that comment twice as annoying.

ShadowbladeEdge said:
"Boobs! BOOBS!"

It might force the user to reconsider whether it's worth posting after having failed the first time (maybe an R9K-style timeout could be implemented for offenders).

Also converting "Boobs!" into "Boobs! BOOBS!" makes the comment twice as annoying, meaning it will be flagged by twice the people, thus garnering twice the attention of the mods, and with any luck get hidden and remedial action taken twice as fast.

Alternatively, the user may decide to expand their comment to include a more insightful critique on why he finds the breasts in question so exquisite.

Shinjidude said:
(maybe an R9K-style timeout could be implemented for offenders).

I was thinking about cooldowns too, and that would probably stop people who just fly in and out of here. For a few post least ways. That might make it worth it.

Shinjidude said:Alternatively, the user may decide to expand their comment to include a more insightful critique on why he finds the breasts in question so exquisite.

Heh, good times.

As an aside could we get a "edit without bumping button" for the comments? 'Cause personally whenever I post something even if I read it a dozen times I still misspell every other word. However I don't need to kick it back up to the top of the comments page when a fix them.

ShadowbladeEdge said:
Would that really help though? I mean say some idiot wants to post "Boobs!"? OK that gets blocked, but then they can just turn around and post "Boobs! BOOBS!" and that breaks through. So what did that really do? Besides make that comment twice as annoying.

Ten characters is just the apparent default on vBulletin. It's an arbitrary number and can be changed easily. In fact, it's seventeen characters now. There, done; I changed it.

The example is more to frame the idea of a minimum post length and prevent people from spamming "LOL XD" and the like. People who obviously circumvent it to post worthless things get warned (search a well-established vBulletin install for "(ten char)" or such and you'll see what I mean) and then progress through our chain of punishment on further infraction.

Cooldown of at least 30-60 seconds is probably not a bad idea either.