Say I’m reading a lengthy topic on a controversial subject or current event when 900 posts in, someone brings up a point that I vaguely remember a moderator post saying that was a digression and to drop it. How can I find any moderator notes or warnings in the topic?
Warnings are fairly easy, the word Warning should always be in it.
Modnotes can be tougher. Collectively we aren’t as consistent.
Scanning through a long thread can make this very hard. If I see a post likely to cause an off-topic conversation in the thread, I now try to add a Staff Notice too.
I added an example of one to my post.
Note that staff notices don’t come up in Discourse search. So while notices are great for drawing attention when you’re reading the thread, they aren’t helpful when searching for a post buried deep in the thread history.
I keep misreading this topic as “F**king moderate notes and warnings…”
And on that note…
Remember you can hit Ctrl-F twice to still use the browser Search. That does check the Staff Notices.
Only if it’s part of the content loaded on the page. If it’s 100 posts back, ctrl-F won’t find it.
There is that little icon of a human and a shield next to the staff notice, but I don’t think such things are there for moderator warnings or moderator notes. Ideally, there would be a standard icon for such things and it would be possible to search the thread for any such posts. Perhaps that’s a question for @codinghorror? How do other Discourse boards handle such things?
I know it wouldn’t be easy and there wouldn’t be a whole lot of usefulness derived from it, but if each modnote or warning started with (or at least contained) the phrase “Modnote” or “Warning”, then they’d be somewhat searchable.
ETA, that is, if those words were in the body of the post.
Ctrl-F searches for “moderator” don’t work as well with infinite scroll (and custom titles).
True, and I do that already.
From a desktop,
- Click the magnifying glass icon:
- Click:
🔍 in this topic - Type:
group:moderators - (if necessary) click:
More...
This will show you a list of posts made by moderators in the current topic. Not all posts are official actions but it should help a lot for those large topics.
~Max