Feature Request - more standard moderator tools

Hi Anna,
I haven't got much real world experience with Loomio yet, so may I ask how topics get doubled-up? Is it one user submitting the form twice? Or several users starting different threads with different contexts and title on the same subject?

Merging threads sound tricky: I wonder if adding up comments that were not submitted in the same thread/context or even polls with a slightly different context would really help the group to move forward.

In the first case, I guess duplicate detection would be the best solution (not allowing the duplicate thread to be created in the first place). If the problem is users starting new threads on the same subject, maybe pointing to a search field and advising users to check if there's not already a thread covering their subject would prevent the issue and make it easier for coordinators to delete duplicates before the second one gets reactions...

Yes Julien - several users starting different threads with similarish contexts but different titles.

A search field might do the job

Thinking about it a bit more, I would add "Please use search to make sure this topic is not already covered in another thread!" after the "A thread is where everyone can discuss a topic and make decisions together." help text on the new thread form.

And if that's not enough, add a "Mark as duplicate of..." choice in the thread contextual menu, allowing any member of the group to indicate of which thread it is a duplicate (autocomplete on title?). This would notify author and coordinators, display the link to the original discussion in the duplicate context and freeze comments or decisions on this thread, until a coordinator or the author deletes it, edits it to unmarks it as duplicate.

This could help coordinators to notice duplicates and avoid comments being posted in the duplicate.

Closing / archiving threads has been getting a lot of attention recently for us, and I imagine we will develop it soon. I think merging threads is quite high-developer-complexity / low-user-value; really the best case for many of these situations is to archive a 'duplicate' thread soon after it's posted and reference the more active thread.

Discourse has a feature where they suggest similar thread titles to the one you're typing... it's my opinion that it does not work very well at a) finding similar content or b) stopping people from posting what they want to post, and adds some decent complexity to what should be a very easy thing.

Anyway, my wish list for moderation tools, in approximate order we'd consider putting them into the app:

• Archiving discussions
• Periodic or realtime reports on usage (Number of threads started, comments made, users joined, etc over period(s) of time to give indication of how my group is doing.)
• Flag a thread / comment for coordinator consideration
• Split a thread into a new thread (this will be much easier after we have a nested comment structure, coming soon)
• User suspensions / banning (users lose posting privileges for some portion of time, but remain in the group)

After a few weeks of real-world use, I feel that "moving individual posts into the correct thread if misposted" or splitting discussions could be very useful whenever a member ends up posting a comment that takes the discussion out of its manageable scope but should have opened a new discussion. The first discussions in a group tend to be very general and sometimes, the thread focuses on an interesting detail and maybe it would help engagement and further discussion if coordinators could move comments (or threads of comments) to a new discussion.

Do you have this problem in your groups? How do you work around it?

This is something I'm really interested in supporting this year. Thanks for the comment.

Before @zblace 's proposal, here's a user story of what I'm thinking about:
1. A coordinator (facilitator) in group A notices that comment #22 in discussion ZxhcqojW contains interesting ideas, but that they are not directly linked with discussion ZxhcqojW
2. Instead of deleting and ask the comment author to post in a new discussion, the coordinator uses the "Move to another discussion" option in the comment dropdown menu
3. A modal with a select labelled "Move to" offering a "a new discussion" thread and last active discussions (maybe with a way to filter them?)
4. The coordinator chooses the "a new discussion" option (if he had chose an existing discussion, validating the modal would have added the comment to any existing comments). He then chooses a title and if the comment should be used as context or types another context, then submits the modal.
5. The initial comment does no longer appear, and is replaced with a "a comment has been moved to this thread" message. This allows any member to follow up the discussion there, and to still use links from email notifications. If there were nested comments to the moved comment, they have been moved to and are either children of the comment or first comments if the original comment has been used as context.

This leaves out the cases where a new discussion should be created in a subgroup or where only part of the comment should be moved to a new discussion (duplication and edit to keep first part in original discussion and last part in a new discussion?). And maybe the same process could also be applied to fix missed threaded comments and keep threads tidy?

If you think of simpler ways of dealing with this, please share!

YES - indeed this is frequent problem and introducing some kind of branching and/or re-directing would be awesome. On the other hand I would prefer this is done separatly from the main LOOMIO project as platform and resolved somehow on the level of emails/lists.

Interesting! Could you talk more about how a solved situation might work?

I could sketch and write a proposal but I am busy chasing few deadlines and can only promise coherence in late February - early March.

@robertguthrie also threading fails when I answered you (post above) from email - it went into a main post as reply...

Thanks for that. It's unclear to me what the correct behaviour is, should reply from email append to the end of the discussion, or always be a reply to a specific comment?

A specific problem that has come up for us is a thread where we share meeting minutes so they are accessible for all, despite a context saying "please don't comment in the thread but start a post about a specific minutes with link", invariably the thread gets cluttered with people discussing the minutes. It takes away from being able to quickly search through the minutes in time order for some point you wanted to revisit.

Hi Anna, that sounds tricky! My interpretation of that is that there is a need for a discussion thread per minutes document. Maybe you should create a subgroup for minutes, then post a new thread after each meeting?

A thread for each meeting sounds like the way to go to me; then the context is always really accessible (and searchable) even if there is a bunch of discussion going on below.

It also seems to me like this might be a use case for locked threads, which in my head would allow only coordinators to post in them.

Also, if you do continue with the one thread approach, now that we have nested replies, people can comment and the comments will stay grouped with the minutes they are referring to

Fair points both. I like the locked approach but every member of our coop has coordinator privileges and people are already complaining about the number of subgroups we have. It's not a big stress, just a little wistful moderator dream