On our announcement for our updates to review queue workflows, we got a ton of feedback on the Community user being the one posting comments for users. Here's a quick summary of some of the major points:
It's not clear to many users that Community is a bot that they can't reply to
Mods cannot delete comments from the Community user, and other users can't flag those comments, so they're just ... stuck there
Some reviewers don't mind having their name associated with their feedback
Community comments are showing up in the moderator dashboard
Relatedly, we got a good amount of feedback on the items in the Share Feedback action itself:
Some of the text in the feedback available is too code-specific, even in feedback that was meant to be more general
Users can't submit their own feedback through the Share Feedback option
After discussing these issues as a team, we came up with a solution that we believe resolves most of the issues with how we've implemented feedback sharing.
Here's our plan to resolve these issues:
The Community user will receive a "bot" badge, similar to how I have a "staff" badge and mods have a "mod" badge. This will show up next to the name.
Reviewers will have the option to submit their feedback as either the Community user or as themselves.
Reviewers will be able to create their own custom feedback through the Share Feedback modal. This custom feedback can only be shared as the reviewer themself, not the Community user.
Users who try to respond to the Community bot's posts will be informed, additionally, that they are replying to an unmonitored bot account (exact wording TBD).
Mods will be able to delete Community bot comments, and other users will be able to flag the comments as "No longer needed."
We're revisiting the text of some of the feedback strings to try to make it as general as possible.
We're specifically not addressing these issues right now:
Creating blanket community-specific feedback options - this is a fairly large undertaking that we're not flat-out declining, we just don't have the resources to get to it right now.
Creating a specific "Review" bot - like the item above, this is a big undertaking, and as most of the issues can be resolved by adding a "bot" tag to Community, we're going with that solution instead.
Reviewers can't undo feedback that they've sent in error - This will be able to be handled by flagging the comment as "no longer needed," so we're not going to create a specific way to undo feedback.
The Community bot is only anonymous through obscurity (can be determined by looking at the post timeline) - We're willing to address this in the future if it seems like revenge downvoting is becoming a problem in this context, but we think that it's obscured enough right now that folks having their posts reviewed in these queues won't typically go searching for this information.
We wanted to create this as a separate meta post so that we can get any other feedback you might have on this solution. We're working on mockups for the designs now, and will be working on the fixes soon. If there are any cases or issues we haven't thought about regarding this solution, let us know! We'll be able to incorporate feedback into our fixes.
Please keep your feedback in this post to these specific issues - we are still monitoring the original release post and working on the other more standalone issues there. Note that we're planning on addressing the Custodian badge issue from First Posts in a separate meta post that will follow shortly.
And, as always, thank you all so much for your candid and thorough feedback. We genuinely want to make review queues as useful and easy to use as we possibly can, and we wouldn't be able to do that without your help.
