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Users can have (moderator-applied) annotations and CM escalations. When they do, it's important for moderators to be able to see them. There are two different use cases, and the info is available in each:

  • When looking at a specific user -- annotations and CM escalations are linked directly from the user page.

  • When looking at site activity as a whole; the users tab on the "mod" menu shows recent annotations and escalations (also other stuff). This view is especially helpful on sites with more moderators where we don't discuss every situation in chat, or with situations involving many users.

Both of these cases break down when users have been deleted, but the need for the information doesn't always go away with deletion. Thus this two-part request:

  1. On the deleted-user stub, can we have links to the account's annotations and CM escalations? This has been requested before, though I didn't find the request here. (Maybe we discussed it elsewhere.)

  2. On the mod->users page, could we show these items even if there is no longer an associated user? This helps me find that CM ping that I remember because it was fairly recent, but it's long-enough ago that I no longer have its notification. If the page structure makes this difficult, even having a section (or link) for links to all annotations and escalations, most-recent first, would still be helpful.

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    If I could add one thing to this feature request: upon recreation of a new account using the same credentials as a deleted account, annotations from the previous account should be re-attached to the recreated account. Too many abusive users have used self-requested account deletion and immediate recreation to hide histories of abuse. Additionally, newly created accounts can be automatically suspended if the previous account was suspended, and it would be really nice to have the context of why the previous account was suspended.
    – Brad Larson
    Dec 6, 2018 at 17:23
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    @BradLarson yes, good point! Relatedly, recreated accounts should have links to the stubs of their deleted ancestors (which, combined with this FR, would at least give us indirect access, if moving them is hard for some reason). The links would be useful for other things too, starting with "how many times has this person done this?" but also some of the other info in those stubs can be useful for current investigations (she says vaguely, aware that we're talking in public).
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 6, 2018 at 17:29
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    "... when users have been deleted, but the need for the information doesn't always go away with deletion. Thus this two-part request: 1. On the deleted-user stub, can we have links to the account's annotations and CM escalations? This has been requested before, though I didn't find the request here. (Maybe we discussed it elsewhere.) 2. On the mod->users page, could we show these items even if there is no longer an associated user?" - see: meta.stackexchange.com/a/314661/282094
    – Rob
    Dec 6, 2018 at 17:31

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A while back (wow! it's been two years already?!?) me and Shog started working on something that addresses most of this, 'cause of this other post. We spec'd out a whole thing, and divided it into smaller steps, since we knew resources were scarce and there was at least one step that was time critical — and we got that bit implemented!

Basically, all user profiles have an underlying network account, visible to CMs and devs, that ties all site profiles together and that is persistent even if you delete one or several of these site profiles — and so what we did was make it so whenever a user gets an annotation or CM escalation, it propagates to that "back-end" account. I mentioned this was time sensitive, though: that's because once a profile is deleted, all the annotations go with it, so we wanted to make sure we captured everything that still existed as soon as possible. So we also backfilled all accounts with all existing annotations. Which means annotations aren't lost if a profile is deleted any more!

The next spec'd steps are to have these propagated back into new profiles upon recreation, and to find a way to share some annotations across sites — these requested are already queued and just need some dev-time.

The bits about making sure annotations are still visible on stubs even if no new profiles are recreated was something we'd planned on spec'ing, but never did so because the bits we did spec haven't been implemented yet.

On showing annotations in admin/users: we hadn't thought about that, but I'm interested in getting your thoughts on how you use that page. (I wasn't able to find it but) Shog also tells me there's a feature request somewhere in Meta about making content on that page searchable, which would probably also help in the use cases you mention?

Update:

In May 2019, we implemented the bit about showing annotations on profile stubs.

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    Where you say "annotations" do you also mean CM pings? (Are those a type of annotation, internally?) Those can be where the detailed analyses are recorded, so definitely want those too. Searchable -- or maybe filterable, like "show me all 'abusive to others' annotations" -- would help when an issue is intermittent; on one of my sites we have a troll who pops up every month or two, for the last year and a half or so, and we end up searching our mod room for the history when needed but that means manual maintenance. I'm happy to chat with you about how I use that page.
    – Monica Cellio
    Dec 6, 2018 at 20:26
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    Yes on annotations including CM escalations — I'll edit that into the answer.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Dec 7, 2018 at 9:21
  • Current use case #1: a user (from a cluster) with a detailed CM escalation (unresolved) and another annotation saying "do not delete". Many of this account's siblings have been no-longer-welcomed, but if we do that we lose access to the CM escalation, hence that annotation. Current use case #2: many new accounts come in auto-suspended because they're re-creations, but we've no way to see the history to know who they were/what they did. At least if the annotations were on the mod list we could match them up, though it'd be even better if new accounts were annotated w/links to their ancestors.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jul 26, 2019 at 22:14
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    Your second use case there is covered by my third paragraph above, right? If so, it's still on our list of things to do! :) As for your #1: you want to keep track of the annotation even if the user doesn't re-appear, because you wanna be sure that if the user does re-appear they're tracked?
    – JNat StaffMod
    Jul 31, 2019 at 16:41
  • JNat, #2 is covered by your third paragraph, yes. #1 is a case where there are a bunch of accounts involved, but info (or a CM ping) needs to be associated with one account, and if that account gets deleted we lose all that info. Sometimes we have a path to the user from other annotations or from links in our chat room, for example, and I'd like to be able to get to the annotations at the end of that path even if the account has since been deleted.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jul 31, 2019 at 17:05

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