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?
Updated by a moderator