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Here's something that's happened to me more than once as a moderator: I have a user who's had some problematic behavior, like rudeness or vandalism, and I want to get a "whole-user" view of recent activity -- since a mod message, or to put some new flags into perspective, for example. Information I want to see in this case includes:

  • recent posts, including deleted ones (and when and how they got deleted -- mod, community, self)
  • recent comments, again including deleted ones
  • flags raised against the user and how they were resolved
  • deletion and undeletion events
  • edits
  • mod messages

I can see all of that now, but I have to look in a lot of places (which I won't enumerate here in this public post). If I want to put it in time order (because that can matter sometimes), I have to keep external notes. What I'd really like is something like the post timeline, but for users -- a view I can request that will show me everything. (It's ok to make me specify a time period.) Failing that, at least including deleted posts and deleted comments in the moderator view of the "all actions" tab would help a lot.

This sort of problem doesn't come up every day (at least on my sites), but when it does come up, mods have to do a lot of digging and collation. Can we make this easier?

Related questions: Moderators should be able to see deleted posts in the Activity tab on a user's profile, Allow moderators to see delete/undelete activity on users' profiles, Provide way for moderators to monitor specific users, Add a moderator ability to watch troublemakers.

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    One could write a user script to do this, but it would involve a whole lot of requests to a whole lot of pages.
    – Undo
    Jun 16, 2014 at 1:22
  • I was sort of thinking that, @undo, but I have too many projects at the moment. :) Have you thought of doing something like that?
    – jmort253
    Jun 16, 2014 at 1:41
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    That sounds like a pretty complicated user script (having to integrate/sort several streams of data), but if somebody makes it I'll happily use it! Yes it'll pound the servers some when used, but it wouldn't be always-on or anything like that, only on request, so with luck it could be a good citizen, so to speak.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jun 16, 2014 at 1:43
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    @jmort253 In theory, maybe kinda sorta. It'd be fun, but I have lots of other fun projects atm.
    – Undo
    Jun 16, 2014 at 1:53
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    That sounds like a fun thing to do, but I have too many projects at the mome... wait; did someone already say that? That said, a view like this would be awesome.
    – Andrew Barber
    Jun 16, 2014 at 18:03
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    One thing that would be nice on top of that: "Was the user already contacted (and suspended?) on another site?":. I would already be happy with a number like _1/8 current suspensions on other SE-sites. This would help greatly with users just switching sites and repeating their questions elsewhere.
    – kaiser
    Jun 19, 2014 at 0:23

1 Answer 1

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We're shortly kicking off some work on moderator tooling, and I think it makes very good sense to have a mod 'activity' tab that consolidates:

  • All posts in the given timeframe, with score or (deleted by: thing)
  • All comments, contemporaneously, including deleted and deleted by:
  • (by a logging click-through) the ability to see all IPs the user has been seen from in the given timeframe (if you've ever had to chase a proxy-loving troll off a site, well ..)
  • Any mod messages sent to the user, contemporaneously
  • Flags, also contemporaneously
  • Probably a few things I'm forgetting

What you get is pretty much an all-in-one timeline with the ability to look at a larger or smaller sampling, limited to something sensible (say 30 days or so).

This not only makes sense for mods, it makes sense for the folks handling user support requests since it's easier to walk through history in the context of everything else that happens.

No promises on a delivery date yet, we're optimizing a whole lot of things from the dashboard down, but this definitely makes sense to have and isn't all that hard to do.

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    Wow we were just talking about this!
    – enderland
    Apr 27, 2015 at 20:30
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    For something like this it would probably be really nice to have an easy way to filter the timeline. Selecting everything but comments e.g., or selecting only comments, or any other combination.
    – Mad Scientist
    Apr 27, 2015 at 20:31
  • Dare I ask.. How soon is shortly? :p
    – ɥʇǝS
    Apr 27, 2015 at 20:40
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    Come on, @ɥʇǝS -- shortly is six to eight weeks, and that's just to kick off the work. "No promises on a delivery date". That said, this would be really useful, and the sooner the better. It would even be OK for it to go live and bits to be added later.
    – Andrew Leach
    Apr 27, 2015 at 21:10
  • Including comment flags (not just post flags) in this view would be really helpful.
    – Monica Cellio
    May 4, 2015 at 0:52
  • Aside from deletion/undeletion events this has been done for a while now (thanks!). Feel free to change the status tag from planned to completed. (Meanwhile, I'm about to ask a related question about surfacing chat flags on this dashboard.)
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 16, 2018 at 18:43
  • @MonicaCellio And then, ugh, we have to make all of that responsive. But yeah, this phase is definitely completed, thanks for the ping!
    – Tim Post
    Dec 17, 2018 at 14:22
  • And, as a reward for helping us with this page :-), here's the enhancement request I alluded to. And ouch, I hadn't considered the responsiveness challenge for that page -- that'll take some work, but the target audience doesn't require perfection or beauty either; we just need it to be good enough to work at all. Most of us can't moderate on phones at all now; that's your baseline. Also, once you make the profile activity tab responsive, I suspect you can apply similar principles to this page.
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 17, 2018 at 15:07

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