We should copy Blizzard's "Blue Tracker"

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#1

Blizzard is a video game company, and their forums run on Discourse like ours. But they have a custom plugin that lets you skip to the next moderator post. I’m think it’s this plugin. Let’s copy that over here!

For an example, visit this link: [CS Lounge] Happy holidays - Customer Support - World of Warcraft Forums

Look under the timeline on the right. If you’re on a small screen device you might have to look at the bottom of the screen. There’s a little “Blizz ->” button and if you click it you go to the next staff member post. The “Blizz <-” button takes you to the previous staff post, and the “Blizz” button on top takes you to the first staff post.

Here’s a picture:

I see our new mods contradicting each other so I think this would help our mods as well as users. The downside is that I think it will track all the moderator’s posts, not just the ones where they use mod colors. Maybe that can be fixed.

~Max

#2

That’s an enterprise feature, though, so you’d need to be on an enterprise hosting plan.

The workaround is to bookmark the profile, or the group profile, e.g.

https://boards.straightdope.com/g/moderators

See the activity tab there.

#3

I’m surprised to learn that we aren’t. I guess it makes sense, since it’s almost all text content.

~Max

#4

And it’s understandable in the opposite direction. The consistent decision to avoid directly hosting images on the forum isn’t just a continuation of the previous “no inline images” rule of the earlier board system; it’s almost certainly intended to avoid having to go up to the Enterprise tier just to have the storage for locally-stored pictures.

I don’t know about Discourse’s pricing structure, but generally anything labeled “Enterprise” is comparitively expensive, and TPTB are already spending a lot for an endeavor that, AFAIK, generates little revenue or traffic to their main business.

#5

I don’t think that would work well here. Blizzard “blue names” post infrequently and when they do it’s usually an item of importance, which is why the tracker is so useful.

On the SDMB, our moderators are regular forum members who also happen to do moderator stuff. Tracking every post they make won’t be nearly as useful.

If you could differentiate “modhat” posts from regular posts in the tracker, it might be more useful, but even then you’re mostly looking at notes and warnings. I’m still not sure how much good it would do.

TLDR version: These aren’t the Blizzard forums so I don’t think this tool will be of much use here.

#6

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. I think it would be useful if we could only track the modhat/modcolor posts. But it’s become a moot point.

~Max

#7

If this was the reason then why are img tags disabled too?

#8

Because they’re unnecessary?

An img tag pointing to an external image resource is more simply served by inserting the bare URL on its own line.

An img tag pointing to a locally stored image would consume storage space better used to store the actual forum content.

#9

IIRC Jenny tried to disable images alltogether and it’s only by accident that the one-line preview works.

~Max