Selective Delay/Prevention of Notification for Screened Comments

[sanguinity]

Title:
Selective Delay/Prevention of Notification for Screened Comments

Area:
Comment Notification and Comment Screening

Summary:
Notifications for automatically screened comments are sent to others AFTER the journal-owner makes the moderation decision to unscreen the comment. No timing change for notifications sent to the journal owner. Complementary changes to who can see a screened comment, to support the notification timings.

Description:
Currently, when a commenter (commenter2) replies to another commenter (commenter1) on a post where commenter2's comments are automatically screened, commenter1 gets an immediate notification about the comment, with the comment's complete text. This happens BEFORE the journal owner can make a moderation decision about whether to permit the comment or not. This is a problem for those of us who use automatic comment-screening to try to protect our commenters from harassment, since the notifications are mailed to commenter1 automatically. (I.e., a journal owner cannot use comment screening to protect a trans commenter from being harassed with transphobic comments; the journal owner can only keep the harassment from being conducted publicly.)

I suggest that there be two rounds of notification for automatically screened comments: the journal owner is notified immediately (no change from current system), while commenter1 gets the "someone replied to your comment" notice only after the journal owner unscreens the comment.

To support this, screened comments should only be visible to the journal owner; they should be invisible to the person the commenter replied to. (Alternatively, there could be two levels of screening -- owner-only or visible-to-other-people-in-the-thread -- but that seems like it might be confusing, and lead to errors in comment moderation.)

Poll #3833 Selective Delay/Prevention of Notification for Screened Comments

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

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This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
20 (50.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
9 (22.5%)

(I have no opinion)
11 (27.5%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)