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As hopefully most moderators are aware, we've been working over the last few months to revamp the moderator flag dashboard. After running a small and then wide alpha, collecting and addressing plenty of feedback along the way, we're officially launching the new design mostly.

Mostly?

We like the new design, we think it makes more sense, will be easier to build on, and is just more pleasant. That said, today might not be the day for you to try a new moderating tool. You may be under a spam attack or cleaning up a bunch of nasty comments from someone's unfriendly bot and a sudden change could mess everything up. For the next few weeks, you will be able to use the old UI by deselecting the "Admin Dashboard Refresh" checkbox on your site's /users/preferences/current.

But please don't unless you have to, and please switch back when you have the bandwidth. The new dashboard is the shipped product, and the old one won't stick around forever - if something's blocking you from using it, we need to address that not ignore it!

What's new?

Old UI

enter image description here

New UI

enter image description here

As described in the alpha phase announcement post:

Beyond appearances, there have been some thoughtful reworks:

  • More / clearer context for flags (e.g., edited-after-flag indicator, post owner indicator).
  • Consistent location and ordering for actions on posts, flags, and comments (making muscle memory matter!)
  • Comment editing, move comments to chat works the same in the dashboard and on the question page.
  • The flag "waffle bar" stays better in sync with changes happening the page and vice versa. Same with actions taken inside embedded posts.
  • Responsive design for phones and tablets.
  • Previously undiscoverable UI components are now actual buttons.
  • "No further action" has been brought inline with the page.
  • Smaller quality-of-life improvements along the way.

There are some additional improvements over what shipped last month:

  • Less content shifting to minimize mouse movement when handling comment flags.
  • Less information overload.
  • Flagged answers are treated as the primary UI element rather than their parent question. (Less question information, links go to answer.)
  • Auto-flags don't have the long unneeded dismiss UI.
  • Previously viewed posts are less faded and should be easier to read without hovering over them.
  • Various bug fixes and design tweaks.

A special note for international site mods

I've reached out to the international team with the (mostly accurate) list of recently introduced strings that need to be translated for this feature. The strings and hashes are available in this Google sheet.

Next steps

At the end of July 2019, we will review feedback we receive and run additional rounds of interviews. After this, we expect to share an updated timeline on when the legacy UI will be decommissioned. If everything is relatively minor, we would aim to turn it off as early as early August.

Bugs and Feature Requests

Since we are officially out of alpha, all bugs and feature requests should be done in the form of questions tagged on MSE, not answers on this post. Feel free to post an answer here if you have specific concerns about the release process.

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    I like the look of it at first glance! I appreciated being able to view the whole post and comments within the flag queue without navigating away.
    – called2voyage
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 0:40
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    Just tried it today and the process of dealing with common flags was quite smooth and efficient! Will be keen to see how it handles the more complex scenarios. Good job for the transparency and keeping us all updated!
    – Michael Lai
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 2:55
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    Are you going to keep the strings google sheet updated? It's important for the international sites to get as soon as posible the updated/added strings in order to translate them
    – Pikoh
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 6:23
  • How can I convert an answer into a comment within the review pane? Now I need to open a new window to choose to convert it.
    – AliceD
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 11:35
  • 2
    @AliceD There's a convert to comment button right there.
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 12:08
  • @wizzwizz4 - must have overlooked it, thanks
    – AliceD
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 12:59
  • 5
    What's the deal w/ "Resolve automatically"? I just handled a "20 edits by user" flag presuming that would give me some choices, but instead it mysteriously did ________, poof. Presumably nothing (I think there are no choices to be made in that direction), but then my last presumption sans a meaningful interface or information about such was wrong. Trial and error land is not good for morale ;)
    – goldilocks
    Commented Jun 28, 2019 at 18:07
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    To be fair: That confusion was probably because it was the first flag I handled with the new interface; it makes more sense now. However, if you can manage to create a user interface, you should be able to document it properly for the user as well. The assumption that "it is intuitive, we don't need docs" from the creator can be true -- at least for the creator, if no one else.
    – goldilocks
    Commented Jun 29, 2019 at 13:26
  • Well, as a site moderator I've been working with the new system for some days now, and I'm not on the rah-rah wagon. I get for example "more than 20 comments" flag from Community and cannot resolve the issue without typing in whatever the quota of characters is (15 or so), and I usually wind up saying "true, more than 20 comments have been received" or similar because that's all I have to say. This is silly. The requirement to type in X number of characters to resolve flags is quite flawed.
    – Todd Trimble
    Commented Jul 10, 2019 at 2:02
  • @ToddTrimble That sounds strange. I never type anything in for those ones.
    – tchrist
    Commented Jul 10, 2019 at 6:27

6 Answers 6

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First off - I love that you're rethinking this. There's some great data being exposed, but I want to challenge you to have someone to take an axe to the layout - the headers and fluff at the top.

The process you list doesn't say anything about mobile, but comment if you want me to raise this as a new thread / FR instead of answering here.

Now to the request / complaint / call to add a mobile view, let's count pixels in the image below:

I'd say keep the black top bar and I love the 12 pixels high rainbow - please keep that.

Kill all 402 pixels of Ask Different banner - I know which site I'm on.

Better yet, put the site logo in the top next to my mod diamond if you're not seriously invested code wise or branding wise in keeping the SE logo to the right of the hamburger control icon.

Moderator tools and the two rows of items - I know I'm in the moderator tools - kill all that and put migrated into posts, please. Anything to get the tabs to one row and not wrapping.

Tons of white space and a "new banner" I'd love to see all of this go away on iPhone view.

  • 250 pixels for Moderator flags
  • 240 for NAA
  • 426 pixels for ignore the real time filter

None of the above are worth keeping IMO as they very efficitely bury the lede

The total image is 2436 pixels and the content I'm there to look over gets 694 pixels on screen (so 28% content and the rest is affordance, blank space navigation and chrome). What would this look like if you got 70% of the space showing content and 30% showing the portions I critically listed above as too prominent?

Again, super happy we're getting a look, but this interface is really poor for checking in on my pocket computer (iPhone) and handling some flags. Would be interesting to see how lean you can make this and how desktop view feels as well. I could see what's ideal on mobile really be inconvenient on desktop, but why not experiment a bit with a 180 in terms of content to header areas for a couple weeks?

enter image description here

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    Thanks for bringing this up. Mobile was considered in the sense of "make everything fit on the screen horizontally" and "don't show too many sidebar items above the flagged content" but not holistically towards maximizing content without scrolling. Several of the elements on the page are not under my direct control or were out of scope for this project but several parts are...
    – Brian Nickel
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 22:26
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    The big "no" is that we don't really have a mechanism for minimizing the site header right now and I think it would be a real stretch, because we need to come up with a solution that works for all the sites. Just doing without on mobile wouldn't be great because it is otherwise hard to distinguish the sites.
    – Brian Nickel
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 22:29
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    Reworking the header, from the padding above "Moderator Tools" down to "analytics" is something I could reasonably do, moving to the buttons plus "more" thing we do on question lists. We just didn't consider it because it's a reused component across all admin tabs. The blue banner is also going away in a couple weeks, once everyone has been reasonably introduced to the changes. I'm also fine to hide the secondary text after "Ignore time filters" when we get to a small viewport.
    – Brian Nickel
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 22:36
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    That said, I feel strongly about the table of contents appearing above the flags, since this gives you a snapshot of what's happening on the site and lets you quickly drill down into an area. If there were 30 active flags, you would want to handle them strategically and you don't want to have to swipe to the bottom of the page to do so. Cutting down whitespace in this cell is also tricky, since you need to make sure there's enough vertical space and spacing that fingers can tap the right thing.
    – Brian Nickel
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 22:40
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    Excellent comments. I know I asked for quite drastic changes. Cut what you can and hold fast on the parts that you have strong reasons @BrianNickel
    – bmike
    Commented Jul 1, 2019 at 22:42
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    The parts I can do will be shipping in the next build. "Moderator Tools" and the tab bar have been reduced to a single line, I dropped the description text on the checkbox, and I tightened the margins on the table of contents while increasing the hit radii. The blue banner will be going away soon, when we hard launch the dashboard.
    – Brian Nickel
    Commented Jul 29, 2019 at 20:43
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I don't see a way to leave custom feedback on comment flags, whether I delete the comment or decline the flag. I had an issue on my site where I wanted to respond more than just "helpful" and was unable to do that.

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    That was true before this redesign, too. We've never been able to provide feedback on comment flags as far as I know, and yes it's inconvenient sometimes.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jul 7, 2019 at 18:47
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    There seems to be no way to mark a comment flag as helpful at all. I can't remember if that was the case before. It's just Delete/Edit/Decline now. I feel bad because I just had to decline a helpful custom comment flag from a user.
    – called2voyage
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 17:40
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enter image description here

What's missing here, in this case, applying to a "not an answer" flag, is the ability to add a comment, typically "welcome to Money.SE, this is not an answer to the question above, please post as a new question."

Note: this is different from Mooseman's answer. I wish to leave the comment on the answer (not an answer) before hitting delete.

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2

For posts which are flagged with "too many comments," it would be nice to be able to expand the comment thread without expanding the entire post.

Justification:

After I've moved the comments on a post to chat (usually in response to this flag), I usually keep the post in the flag queue for a couple of days to watch for users who are trying to re-start the discussion in the comments. If I expand the question using the > button, I can tell from the

add a comment | show all 1 comments

line under the post that I don't need to look at it any more for now. But expanding the post moves everything on the screen and renders a bunch of things that I'm not interested in.

This particular use case might be better served by deferred flags (rejected in 2011, reconsidered in 2014), but I feel like there have been other moderation tasks where I've wished for a quicker way to skim the comments on post. For instance if the "add a comment" part of the comment information line were a visible and functioning item on an un-expanded post, that would also solve the issue raised by Joe Taxpayer in another response to this question.

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It would be nice if the bottom option bar went away when you open the helpful or decline windows. Your eye is naturally on the right side of the screen after clicking Decline... and it makes you naturally go towards the options that are not related to the decline options rather than the correct set of options on the left of the screen.

This might have to be limited to only happening when working with the last item for review or when there is only a single one, but making it so that the action buttons are more context aware and flow better would be helpful.

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I have tried to use the 'delete answer' option first time today, still had to hand delete (as I usually do) as it did not work.
I have no problems on the mobile but on the full screen laptop version I get the bottom bar across the answers, with several flags it covers most of the answers making it hard to see what is to be deleted. But then when I want to use it, after deleting the answer to mark the flags as useful, that option disappears and I have to go back to an other tab where I have the list still open.
Either do not put the bottom bar on the website version (preferred) or keep it till the mod clicks to close it, so it is useful.

(But to tell truth, I loved this version from the start and never went back to the old one from day one.)

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