History:Moderation Interface Suggestions

Moderation System Improvements

The previous notes from Phidauex and GavinClarkeUK have been incorporated into these notes.

This page seems to be rather outdated. See ModerationImprovements for a more up to date list of improvements that are planned to the moderation system.

Reduce the number of bad moderations

It seems fairly common for people to enter Various Artist compilations incorrectly by entering the entire "artist - track" string as both the artist name and the track title. Would it be worth blocking such entries when they are made rather than catching them at voting time?

With a couple of minutes thought I can think of only one track in my collection that has track title and artist the same ("Belle & Sebastian" by ... ) so I doubt there would be many problems if anyone who entered a release with (e.g.) over 50% of tracks with identical artists and tracks was met with a polite notice explaining how to use the various artist features of MB properly rather than being allowed to submit the data.

Reduce the number of moderations that need to be reviewed

More than 2/3 of moderations fit into two categories:

• Add Album moderations
• Edit basic metadata (album name, track name, etc)

Thus we should create a new edit_album moderation that allows the user to edit all the tracks in an album at the same time, edit the name of the album, flexible convert to/from MAC, case guessing and more. I see this new moderation making heavy use of JavaScript to automate tasks for moderators.

This will reduce the number of moderations, and pack more information into a single moderation.

Make it easier to vote on the moderations

• We're seeing a lot of blind voting, where people vote without really considering the moderations. If we can make it easier to decide the vote, people are more likely to spend the time to decide the right thing to do.
• The most heavily used moderations (see above) should be completely clear to evaluate right from the voting page.
• The Add Album moderation should show the entire album.
• The new Edit Album Moderation should show the album before and after. (some kind of highlighting diff view would be super)
• The voting page should get a new layout to facilitate the points above.
• Create a feature to flag albums for future moderation work.
• Ability to restrict the moderations listed by criteria such as whether there have been notes added or whether there have been "No" votes. That would make it easier to find moderations where there's need for clarification.
• Bigger text boxes for entering notes would be useful. Also, long comments have a tendency to stretch the view, meaning you have to horizontally scroll to see the whole page, thats just a simple layout change though.
• When voting NO, let the voter provide a reason why or provide several canned responses (factually incorrect, poor capitalisation, poor spacing/punctuation, violates style guide rule #/n/, other (describe...))
• A tie vote should pass

This will make it easier for people to determine the right vote.

Encourage people to vote

When people put moderations into the system, they should also vote on moderations from other users. Some possible ways to do this are:

• Place more links on the site encouraging people to vote.

This should hopefully create more of a balance between voting and moderating.

Allow moderators to communicate with one another

• The discussions between anarachyintheuk and scarfboy and thefnshow20 are a good example of this. I suspect that neither scarfboy nor thefnshow20 are bad moderators, they may just not be aware of all the issues. Having moderators be able to communicate with other moderators to educate themselves/others sounds like its sorely needed.
• Subscribe to artist feature is also needed, and we may want to work towards a subscribe to genre (or some subgroup) feature...

This should allow people to communicate about the finer details of the style guidelines and the overall theory on moderating.