Dreamwidth Suggestions

Description:
One challenge for community administrators is sometimes keeping track of various activities in their community. Different community populations require different levels of admin attention, and sometimes an administrator does not realize they need to know about a specific action in their community until something happens and they're left trying to sort out what exactly happened and who they need to talk to.

These are all community actions that currently leave little trace in the system, but can be crucial to sorting out what happened and why.

Entry deletion -- some communities ask that their members not delete their entries. Some communities ask that only one specific administrator delete any entries. Sometimes, as in the case of communities like dw_suggestions, a deleted entry means administrative work to track down the entry and reconcile the public-entry-to-private-admin-entry counts. Entry deletion should log the username of the entry owner, the server time the entry was initially posted to the community, the entry's subject and first ~100 characters (raw), the time of entry deletion, the username of the party who deleted the entry (and possibly their position: self or admin), and whether the entry was marked as spam.

Comment deletion -- some communities ask that comments with problems be left in place for an administrator to handle. Sometimes it is accepted for the person who left the comment to think better of what they said and delete their comment, but it is frowned upon for the entry poster to delete a comment even though they have the power to do so. Comment deletion should log the username of the comment owner, the subject and first ~100 characters, the server time the comment was initially posted, the entry (and thread, if applicable) in which the comment was posted, the username of the party who deleted the comment (and possibly their position: self, entry poster, admin), the time of the comment's deletion, and whether the comment was marked as spam.

Comment screening/unscreening, freezing/unfreezing -- I have seen entry poster vs. community administrator freezing and screening wars before, and they are not pretty. I did not know that I would want this logged until it happened to me. This should log the username of the comment owner, the subject & first ~100 characters, the server time the comment was initially posted, a link to the comment & thread (because sometimes you want to go straight there, sometimes you want the whole thread, possibly the direct parent too), what the action was, and the username of the person who did it (and possibly their position: entry poster or admin).

Entry editing -- I'm less concerned with editing of the entry text in this context as I am with things like editing to turn off comments, or that it would be really nice to log when community admins bump the NSFW setting or security. But other community admins may have different concerns. This should probably log the username of the entry poster, title & first ~100, server time of post, server time of edit, who edited it (and possibly position: entry poster or admin), and the attributes that were edited. Subject edits could probably display old subject & new subject. Body edits could display ... net change in character count? (Other community admins, please weigh in on what would be useful.) Entry attributes should display old value & new value if there was a change.

Tag editing -- this could be useful for mistaken tagging or tag vandalism, like if someone accidentally detags an entry, or selects all tags for an entry and saves it. Log should include information to identify the entry (username, server time of posting, subject & first ~100, link), the old tags, the new tags, and the username & position (non-member, member, entry poster, admin), and server time of change.

I'm not sure that comment editing needs to be logged, because there already exist notifications that can be emailed, admins from paid communities can subscribe to all comments (including all edits), and people edit comments a lot (and it could clog up the logs).

Anything else?

Description:
Community moderation queues are one of the unfinished areas of the site that could use some sprucing up.

Currently there is no visible record of which community moderator took action in the moderation queue, nor exactly what that action was.

Keeping a record of the moderation queue from the beginning of time could conceivably take up a hefty chunk of space, especially in high-volume communities. Instead of keeping the records indefinitely, we could log them as they happened, and show up to a certain number of them (I suggest 200, as that is double the size of a paid community's maximum queue depth). Or, if hanging onto them indefinitely would not be a strain, they should be paginated maybe at 100 records at a time. They would be displayed on a special page that can be accessed only by users who have the right to see the moderation queue.

(While community moderators can see the moderation queue, administrators can grant themselves the right to moderate, and should probably be able to see the page whether or not they currently have that attribute turned on. Please do submit scenarios where an administrator should not be able to visit that page in the comments, if you can think of any, because I can't -- at least not until admin rights can be granted piece-by-piece, in which case we'll probably have owners by then, and owners should then be able to visit it without explicitly turning anything on.)

The page should log the following:

Username of submitter
Timestamp of submission
Title of submission
Escaped (plain-text with all HTML symbols displayed) version of first X characters of submission
Username of moderator
Action (disposition of submission)
Note (if any)
Timestamp of action
Link to entry (if posted)

It should log approval, rejection, and reject-as-spam.

It should display (by default) in the order of action, with newest actions on top, but it would be awesome if the page could be sorted by some of the other fields. Records would remain visible until pushed out of the active area.

This would be useful for community management tasks. Moderators could spend less time on communicating basic details to each other and more time talking about other community management needs. It would be easy to look up recent actions of other moderators even if they did not mention the incident. In case of problems on a moderation team, for example if moderators were taking actions by accident, by a mistaken understanding of the community policies, or out of malice, their actions would be visible to others and they could be spoken with based on a record of their actual actions rather than one person's word against another's.