Proposal for mod queue redesign

Posted under General

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.

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.

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.

Here's an idea: If a majority of mods have hidden a post, reduce the time that post has left until autodeletion. The idea being that if most mods have hidden a post, that post is probably bad and should be autodeleted more quickly than usual.

You could even change the deletion message in this case to something like "Rejected by N mods" instead of "Unapproved after three days". Currently some people think "unapproved after three days" means that none of the mods saw their post, not that the mods saw it and didn't like it.

I don't think the 3 day period should be changed since I use it as a barrier (I check every day most of the time, but sometimes I take a break, so to avoid not seeing stuff at all I take a maximum of 2 days' break).

But the other idea is really good: report how many moderators viewed the image (as judged by a "hide" count). I've always wanted this but couldn't think of a way to do it other than by tracing number of views from mod-queue, which would've been really impractical (not to mention vague). I heartily support that idea.

evazion said: Here's an idea: If a majority of mods have hidden a post, reduce the time that post has left until autodeletion.

I think the fact that we can hide it makes the need for this less, if not moot. When the page was hundreds of images long, I found myself wishing the whole bottom half would hurry up and die quicker, but now that I can get down to a completely empty queue, I don't really mind that there are hundreds of unapproved images sitting off somewhere.

You could even change the deletion message in this case to something like "Rejected by N mods" instead of "Unapproved after three days".

This might be a useful idea though.

I pretty much agree with the above two posts. Leave the unapproved post lifetime at three days (otherwise people will cry foul, and frankly it is a bit unfair), and the "rejected by N mods" might be a nice thing to have. The only thing to remember is that many approved posts will also have been rejected by at least one mod, so maybe we should use a different word - maybe something like "N mods saw and didn't accept this post before it expired".

I'm not too sure what the function would be to see how many mods viewed an image that's approved, unless you're terminally curious. I guess it could give a very vague indication of how good your image was (maybe with an "after spending [*hours, *days] in queue"). But, I know I accept more than most other mods/janitors, so if I happen to look at something first, it gets approved right away, but if i wait a couple days or don't see it, it might've been viewed by 6 other janitors before I come around to approve it, and it would be the exact same image.

So yeah to me the primary function of adding that message is to inform people who don't know that if your image is deleted due to the 3-day period, it means a bunch of mods/admins saw it and basically rejected it.

I would just say "Your post has been deleted after 3 days in the mod queue. 7 Moderators assessed your image." Something like that.

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