Slightly later than planned (due mostly to the holiday season and people's lives away from SN being hectic) the next bunch of updates for the site is ready to go. It's a bumper crop!
We have some further changes to the moderation system. As before, this is certainly not the end of changes in this area, rather another step along the road of improvement. We will be watching how the changes affect moderation usage with a view to further improvements.
There's also a number of more general improvements and bug fixes.
All being well these changes should go live around 03:00 26th January UTC. So no need for alarm if there's some minor site disruption at that point. Changes went live at approximately 22:00 31st January UTC.
As always, feedback will be welcome once this deployed.
A major thanks to TheMightyBuzzard for the bulk of the work, paulej72 for sanity checking and martyb for testing/QA.
More details after the break....
Admin Note: it looks like we found a late breaking bug that is a blocker for this update. Spam mods are not showing up to the admins with the proper unmodding options. We will update when we find the issue. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next day or so.
General Changes
An honourable mention...
New functionality that didn't quite make it into the final cut for this update, but is available for testing on our dev environment.
As always, feedback will be welcome once this deployed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @10:04AM
I'm thinking an admin could send you a message that appears alongside your other notifications (replies and moderations to your comments). With a special alert that you received "admin mail" that goes away once you visit the notifications page.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 26 2015, @02:27PM
Yeah, we probably should implement this for admins at the very least. I know they'd appreciate it and all the downside arguments don't apply.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday February 01 2015, @10:29AM
Full user-to-user messaging wouldn't be bad either. It is a common feature in most places.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 01 2015, @01:43PM
Yeah, I'm personally in favor of it but there wasn't a decision reached to even put it out to the community for their feelings on the matter yet. Look for a story doing that probably March or April. I'm not going to be coding most of Febuary on account of packing and house hunting and moving and unpacking and March isn't really enough time to get feedback, get it implemented, and have it spend enough time on dev for testing.
Side Note: We solicit feedback on proposals via story because polls are either open to AC and therefore gaming or they disenfranchise a large section of our users. The email voting thing like for the name was pretty bloody confusing and had the same disadvantages. With a story it's also possible to tell a "meh" no vote from a "I should kill you where you stand" no vote and weigh them accordingly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.