Who said there was no admin?
TubaDiva was the sole admin. Since she passed away, the position has been vacant.
Actually Ed Zotti is the Admin for the Dope.
The full staff is listed under About on the Burger Menu. Or click the link I just provided. The list needs eventually to get a little cleaning.
(I just learned this last night, thanks to @codinghorror )
The listing under About shows who has the Admin rights configured in the software.
The issue now, as I see it from my spot in the outfield bleachers, is that there is not an concerted organizational effort to:
- Actively solicit for public feedback on desired changes
- Use whatever instrumentation there may be to observe what’s working & what’s not.
- Have the necessary private (and perhaps public) discussions about the findings to convert them to well thought out proposals.
- Adopt some of the proposals as actual changes to be implemented.
- Prioritize those changes.
- Do whatever admin training may be a prereq to implementing the changes.
- Do the actual pointy-clicky-dev-y admin work to put them into effect.
Right now TPTB have the capability for Step 7 in place. The rest appear to me to be largely MIA.
Which may well be all the good it’s going to get for awhile. And the longer things stay as they are the greater the inertia to keep things the same because the “I just learned how to do X; don’t change it!!!1!” crowd grows in number.
An analogy if I may: I moved into my current residence 6 years ago. During the hectic move-in day some of the kitchen cabinets were filled with little thought to what logically goes where. So here I am today still using that illogical cabinet organization. Is today the day I upend 6 years of habit to make things “better”? Or is “better” just a fancy buzzword for what’s really just “different”?
Damn hard to tell. And I know me better than TPTB knows all of us.
Ah, my mistake. I forgot about Ed.
“Should suffice”! Excuse me while I scrape myself off the ceiling.
There. Look, I’ll concede your skills as a professional coder if you will grant me some credit as a professional communicator, who has spent time in the same room as coders trying to interpret their gnomic products for an invisible end user.
The best way to do that is through detailed information. Clicking a button that says “It’s inappropriate” conveys as much information as sending a help desk an email saying “my screen is blank.” Even seeing the post might not help much. You or I probably could think of a dozen ways in which a post might be inappropriate, but they might not be the same dozen. The SDMB community as a whole surely could bump that figure up to a thousand. The flags should be a feature designed to ease the burden on the mods. Right now, without the necessary information being conveyed, they make the process harder and take longer.
This is especially true in 2020. Cultural mores are rapidly changing in ways that make once normal, or at least uncommented on, words, sayings, expressions, and attitudes problematic, at least to different people and for different reasons. Virtually every reporting of “inappropriate” requires an exegesis to decipher the exact complaint.
Good communication similarly requires an accompanying text whenever a post is reported. As I said above, an explanation of a flag should be mandatory, with full orchestration and five-part harmony and stuff like that.
Groping in the dark is unworthy of the mods, the SDMB, and you.
Well yeah, I’m also somewhat of an expert on that as well. Look me up on Wikipedia under “Jeff Atwood” 
That isn’t to say I get it right all the time, I certainly don’t, but I believe I have an objectively reasonable set of credentials and product track record in this area. And I have seen, experienced, and actively participated in a loooot of Discourse communities in the last 7 years, not to mention I’ve been very active online since the dark days of Compuserve and dial up BBSes in the early 80s.
I’ve… seen things… in my day.
(Never was on “The Well”, though, and never took a huge liking to Usenet. Or IRC for that matter.)
Except everyone in this thread is trying to explain to you that having the ability to add a comment/explanation to a flag would be really helpful, both for the user and the moderator, and you seem to just keep circling back to the idea that just pointing a mod to a flagged post is sufficient, when a mod is telling you that’s not sufficient. It’s really unclear to me, and I suspect others in this thread, exactly why you think we’re all wrong.
Let me give you an anecdotal example. I don’t want to litigate the issue here, so I won’t go into details, but basically I was in a thread where another poster responded to me with a post that, on its own, would seem perfectly innocuous, if not cryptic. However, given the total context of our exchange up until then, I couldn’t read it as anything other than a thinly valued assertion that I was a liar and that my preceding posts were deliberate lies as part of a voter suppression scheme. I flagged the post, but the system didn’t give me any indication that I could see that the “It’s Inappropriate” flag would allow me to add a comment, so I picked the option that seemed the most fitting and flagged it, wondering if the next step would be to add an optional explanation or comment. And…nope. Off it went into the ether. And nothing happened after that. If a mod actually looked at the comment (and this is a separate issue, but is there any way for me to know if anyone actually followed up?), I have no idea if they disagreed with me, or just didn’t read the full thread and take into account the full context of the exchange.
All of which is to say: I agree that adding the option to add a brief comment to a flag would be a really useful feature, and I just don’t understand why that would be a problem.
I look at amortized feedback across dozens to hundreds of sites, is the primary reason. Granted each site has their own flavor / style / culture, and some sites are way more contentious than others.
So yeah, in the aggregate, “pointing a mod to a flagged post” has worked very well for the last 7 years across thousands of Discourse communities. Plus there is always the “something else” option which is really just a glorified PM to staff, but it’s also been there from the beginning to cover those unusual, needs-extra-explanation cases.
Could there be something specific to this community that makes it different in that regard? Perhaps.
I think that’s actually the far more important design error in this case, now we’re getting to root issues, which is always kinda my goal. It certainly feels bad to fire a flag into the ether and get zero feedback.
(The caution I will issue is that loss aversion means feedback of the “hey, we looked at your flag and don’t agree, sorry” type may not lead to great outcomes, either. There are sooo many unintended consequences that happen in social software design (frantically gestures in the direction of Facebook). I could list 20 off the top of my head that we thought “hey this feature will really help protect people” which turned into “the bad guys are using this feature, help”)
I’ve always found that the mods do respond quickly, every time. Yours probably did fall through the cracks.
When I flag a post, I get a message in the form of “Thanks for letting us know. We agree there’s an issue and we’re looking into it.” Sometimes a mod will send a more personal message like “We’ve moved this post to the appropriate forum” or “We edited the thread title,” but they almost always send some kind of feedback.
More than perhaps. Both mods and posters are insisting that there is.
Heh. The first time I flagged a post on the new site, I got this message and was sort of proud (a poster wanted thread title changed, so I reported it).
I didn’t realize it was an auto response until the next time I flagged a post and got the same reply from a different moderator. Then I died inside a bit. 
I try to add to the auto message if I’m moderating the flag. (Not the spam ones though). I think all of the Something Else flags I moderate, I respond to. Many of the It’s Off-Topic or It’s Inappropriate don’t generate a message for whatever reason. Its why I prefer the Something Else flags to the other 2. It allows communication which is what this board is all about in the end.
No, the problem isn’t “this is a change”. And yes, speaking as another mod, it IS a problem globally. Honestly, if we changed the names of the flags so that posters knew that they couldn’t comment UNLESS they picked the “something else” flag, that would probably be good enough. But right now, we get a lot of “inappropriate” flags, and almost all of them are cryptic.
If this were a board with a very narrow focus, and strict rules about not posting political comments, for example, I think the flags as you have them would be fine. But it’s not, it’s a general interest board with a lot of politics and a lot of personal history. And a post that’s appropriate in one thread may be inappropriate in another. And a mod may need to read a LOT of posts, and possibly know some background, to fully understand the issue. Whereas a brief comment from the reporting poster can make it transparent and greatly reduce the effort the mods need to expend to resolve the issue.
My first choice would be to modify the “It’s inappropriate” flag to allow a comment. If that’s not possible, my second choice would be to disable that flag, to force posters to pick “something else”. My third choice would be to rename the flags so every poster know they can ONLY comment in the “something else” flag.
“It’s Off Topic” is less problematic, but I would still prefer it allowed the reporter to comment. (or at least was labeled so reporters know up-front that they won’t be allowed to comment.) The “Spam” flag is completely fine.
I have flagged a post, selected “inappropriate”, and was taken back when I couldn’t explain why – I don’t now remember the details, but pretty sure it was a long post in which I thought there was a problem, in the context of the particular thread, with a specific line. I never got any reply at all, and don’t know whether that was because the moderators couldn’t figure out why I’d flagged it.
I don’t remember whether this was part of the issue in the above case, but the moderators and the posters come from a wide variety of cultural contexts. Something may well look inappropriate to those from some such contexts while appearing entirely innocent to a specific moderator. I’m not saying that everything that’s a problem in any context needs to be noted or warned in all contexts; but the moderator should be taking such things into consideration, and can’t if the moderator doesn’t recognize the problem.
Even if that’s not an issue, it seems to me that pointing out that the inappropriate line is the third sentence in paragraph 5 of a 9 paragraph post would save the moderators some time.
Plus, as others have said, the problem sometimes is only applicable in the context of what else has been said in the thread.
To elaborate: i also post on a forum devoted to photography. It has very strict, and pretty explicit, rules about what can be discussed. People’s personal experience outside of photography is rarely relevant, and never controversial.
On that forum, i believe “it’s inappropriate”, with no additional comments, would be acceptable.
But it’s routinely cryptic on this forum, and it would greatly ease the burden on moderators if posters could include an explicit comment.
I’ll join in with the other voices: we need to be able to add comments to anything that isn’t completely straightforward. “It’s inappropriate” could mean that it’s a threadshit, it’s rude, it breaks the rules on being a jerk, etc. An explanation of why it’s inappropriate and why the sender believes it breaks any rules is needed.
@codinghorror I would also like to add that arguing this hard against your customers is a strange business practice. Suggesting something as a way to solve the problem, other than waiting longer, would be helpful and not come off as being defensive or telling us we are all idiots. Further, if a customer does not agree with your fix, it’s a strange choice to explain why we are all insufficiently educated in OUR OWN BOARD and you know better. Being dismissive, even insulting, is foolish. You might feel like the SDMB is a captive board to you, but if you think that there aren’t any potential customers here, or that someone here doesn’t know a potential customer, you are wrong.
What just happened?
It looks like codinghorror had been a member of the SDMB since 2012, but in this thread, their replies read as if they were a Discourse developer who had no first hand knowledge of the SDMB. What exactly was their relationship to the SDMB, and Discourse? And what, if anything, does it mean for site functionality that they just deactivated their account?