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dw_suggestions2009-08-05 12:55 am
Add Posting Filters to Communities
Title:
Add Posting Filters to Communities
Area:
Entries
Summary:
Allow the creation of posting filters in communities, just as they are in personal journals.
Description:
There are times you, as an owner or moderator of a community, wish to speak to only a subset of the community, usually the other owners/moderators of the comm. You can set up posting filters in your personal journal to make an entry that's only visible to a selected group, but not in communities. Yes, you can do a workaround by sending your fellow admins email, but it can be useful [as well as easier] for there to be a record of "admin backchannel" right there in the comm itself. And right now, while a whole comm can be made private, you can't drop in posting filters to further create subsets.
If it existed, it could be managed by just adding another tickybox [or two] to the permissions the comm owner checks off when adding comm support personnel: one allowing the selected individual to see filtered entries, the other allowing them to create/edit filters. If the person left the comm, they would not longer be able to see such filtered entries; if they were removed as a moderator or administrator they could be removed from the filter. Their ability to delete filtered posts would be governed by the same permission they'd have to delete member posts, or, if they didn't have the user rights to create/edit filters, that could automatically deny them the user rights to delete filtered posts.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
12 (31.6%)
Should be implemented with changes.
10 (26.3%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
9 (23.7%)
(I have no opinion)
6 (15.8%)
(Other: please comment)
1 (2.6%)
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Okay, edited to say I don't quite get the scope of your suggestion. On the one hand you say "Allow the creation of posting filters in communities, just as they are in personal journals." and on the other you mainly speak about moderators. Which of it is it? :)
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General community filters aren't necessary to cover the ability for mods to administrate within a community.
And if I understand correctly these filters would only be used by moderators. General filters for a community seem counterintuitive to what a community is supposed to be.
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No equivalent posting function/tool/utility exists for communities. The owner, or those to whom the owner designates administrative powers, cannot create posting/reading filters where they can determine who may read what has been posted under that filter, with that group being a subset of the community. Because of this, moderating functions and discussions among owners/administrators/mods must take place offsite instead of within the comm.
I want to be able to create reading filters within the communities I own and administer in order to be able to leave messages for the other mods and admins *there*.
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I think one point here is that in communities many people can post, so it's not as simple as saying I decide who can read what I write.
There would need to be several considerations:
1) who can create filters
2) who can add people to filters (for a mod filter you would want to restrict this, but for a simple content based filter like one pairing in a fandom you might want people to be able to add themselves)
3) who can post to filters (only those who are on the filter, only the owner or could it be useful to let non-members post to the filtered group, like a question to the mods)
What happens once reading filters are implemented?
If I understood you correctly, your concern is being able to send messages to admins in the community itself. This makes sense to me, but I believe other suggestions mentioned in the thread (i.e. either using the community account itself with private setting or adding a new access level "moderators") would cover your needs without opening up other issues that haven't been fully addressed.
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In some comms that's true: but in a comm where posts are moderated, not as true. I run several comms and maillists, with permissions varying from "go away and do whatever you want, I'm not even reading here" to: "I will micromanage every word let out of the modqueue".
There would need to be several considerations:
1) who can create filters
Anyone to whom the owner gives permission. Or, conversely, only the owner, who will have to be asked by other mods for new filters.
2) who can add people to filters (for a mod filter you would want to restrict this, but for a simple content based filter like one pairing in a fandom you might want people to be able to add themselves)
Again, I visualize this as a choice the owner should be empowered to make. It would just be another range of tickeys while the owner was bestowing rights.
3) who can post to filters (only those who are on the filter, only the owner or could it be useful to let non-members post to the filtered group, like a question to the mods)
I'm puzzled by this, since how and why would someone post to a filter if they aren't on it? Regardless of that, if a member has a question for the owner/mods, I'm presuming they'd either post it publicly in the comm or PM the owner/mods. After which, of course, were discussion required, the owner/mods would c&p the question into a filtered entry for discussion.
What happens once reading filters are implemented?
Um... whu? I'm not sure I understand this question.
The idea of posting filters onto which the owner or those to whom the owner has granted creation privs (similar to the way tagging now works in a comm, where the settings can be either owner/mod only creation and implementation, members may tag from existing tags but not create new ones, or anyone may create tags and tag posts) is, in my mind, a way to do the following:
1. Keep discussion of whatever admin policy needs discussing as a comment thread in the comm itself.
2. Allow the owner/mods to easily contact all the rest of the admin staff for the comm (who are presumed to be subbed to the comm) quickly and easily with whatever the owner needs to discuss.
3. Allow the owner/mods to create a filter to post to some subset of the people reading the comm, whether it's a private post in a normally public comm, a post merely to some subset of the members, or another possibility I haven't considered.
Yes, having filters will allow for wank. This is the internet. There will always be wank.
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I was wondering whether instead of just having the options of public and members-only when posting to a community, making a third option of 'maintainers' would be a better solution for the problem. Maybe I worded that weirdly?
I didn't mean 'people who can post', but 'a new posting option for who can read the entry', which would be easier than creating custom access filters for communities.
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Allowing those posts to be made 'Private' would restrict access to just the maintainers, theoretically.
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It's more a housekeeping thing than "drama" oriented. Oh, should we set up this deadline here or here? And draft "mod posts" and stuff like that. It would be handy to have an admin "locked" entry within the comm if that happened, but I agree it would gel better with the discussion last week.
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Post members-only? Or am I missing something?
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I can see a lot of functionality that would be considered useful to a lot of people in this suggestion.* I don't see it as something I would use in any community I control, because all it looks like to me is a way to squish multiple unrelated or indirectly / marginally related sets of content into a single community, much like bandwidth multiplexing, which I consider totally unnecessary given how easy it is to just create another community. For that matter, even the given original justification, mod chat, can be easily handled by creating a commname_mod community to carry the proposed traffic.
None of that, though, means that it shouldn't be done. If that's how people want to use the site, and it's technically feasible, I think it's worth pursuing. For that reason, I would support both versions of this solution being implemented: allowing postings to be made to a certain privelege level, and allowing the creation of access filters within communities for whatever special purpose the maintainer(s) can devise.
* Picture a $fandom-fanfic comm. Create custom filters for all the popular pairings, so people who get grossed out and/or triggered by certain combos don't even have to see them. (Read so much FFVII with insufficient warnings that certain characters' names have become triggers? Opt out of the whole title.)
Alternately, consider a comm name that could have two unrelated meanings, that two unrelated groups of people both really want to use, but neither wants to read all the other group's crap. Hypothetically, let's call it the_who. Create two custom posting filters: [we mean the band] and [we mean the international health org]. If whoever got there first is willilng to share, that means both groups get to use the name they like without some silly underscore_word at the end of it.
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I do like the idea of being able to post as the community, but I wonder how many assumptions in various bits of code this would break?
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And yes, we definitely need a "I won't use this, but go for it" option in the polls. :)
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But limiting viewing to subsets of members would be awfully complex, as it's likely some would mention the filtered posts in other posts and comments... The benefit seems minimal and the cost potentially very high.