Hide offtopic posts

Wadera

On every discussion there is always few offtopic posts. Removing them is not respectful for users, standard moderation where we need to move sometimes few posts not one after another is not convenient and require a lot of work.

I would love to see extension such will allow mods to simply "hide" offtopic posts, but all users should need able to display them again if they interested.

Kind off like currently delete posts which are still available to view by admins.

clarkwinkelmann

Good idea! GitHub has that feature, and it collapses multiple off-topic posts into one with an option to expand them back. I believe they also do this automatically if multiple posts have the same content in a row.

My concern as a developer is that any solution that "collapses" multiple posts leads to issues in the pagination system. If the pagination is left unchanged, and you have many tens of hidden posts in a row, the user might scroll down and have the impression that nothing loads when in fact it's loading collapsed posts. And if we ignore the collapsed posts from the pagination, we need a different way to load the information that there is something collapsed there.

Justoverclock

This is a great feauture! Hope to see an extension like this

clarkwinkelmann

I have created a proof of concept during my last live stream. It's not on Packagist at this time, but I might add some additional features during the next live stream and then I'll publish it.

If someone wants to give it a try locally the code is available on GitHub https://github.com/clarkwinkelmann/flarum-ext-collapsible-posts

There will probably be conflicts with some of the community extensions due to the hack required to skip the collapsed posts during page load (any extension that calls $discussion->posts()->whereVisibleTo($actor) will be unable to access the collapsed posts, which might or might not be the desired effect).

Wadera

clarkwinkelmann you are doing great job!

If you are interrested how it looks like, then you can check it here or here. Extension should be released any day soon!

But we need to remember that he's doing it for free after work, so if you like this idea - you can support him here: https://www.paypal.me/clarkwinkelmann (I've already did it).

I would love to add one small thing: Let's add small text: Why I seeing this?! next to "Load more" button with a link. We can describe there a forum rules and reasons why users may expect to thier posts being collapsed.

When we get it working, stable and released next steps which I would love to see will be stats on user profile page, example:

105 posts in total, 23 colapsed (18 offtops, 5 NSFW)

But when I think about it, most likely it would work better if supported by separate extension for stats, so we can also displays different stats like: number of likes given, number of likes received, number of posts written under different tags etc.

Greenreader9 Could the plugin collapse a post if it is flagged by a reputable member of the community

I really love idea of "self moderation community"!

Greenreader9

I love this! Can't wait to see the final product clarkwinkelmann

Wadera

That's lovely news. Thank you!

Greenreader9

This also kind of goes with this other topic (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/1300-community-moderated-spam-control), where posts can be collapsed but not hidden, but then removed a mod or admin once one is online.

Could the plugin collapse a post if it is flagged by a reputable member of the community, and than add it to the "flags" panel for mods and admins?
Amazing work!

clarkwinkelmann

Thanks for the donations! Sorry I was not able to reply earlier, but I saw your messages from Paypal.

I have now released a first public version https://discuss.flarum.org/d/29483-collapsible-posts It's still very experimental so let me know if you notice any issue when using the extension.

Wadera I implemented your suggestion for a custom explanation message.

However the other suggestions are a bit complicated. Custom comment statistics are definitely possible but we would have to decide exactly what is desired because there are a lot of possibilities, and it could conflict if another extension wanted to change how the default discussion/post count is counted.

The self-moderation would be nice but I have no idea how to implement this properly. This would probably be best as a dedicated extension to handle meta-moderation (ability to report/observe abuse, ability to exclude some users from auto-moderation, ability to protect moderators against community attacks, etc.) and then having the ability for some extensions to integrate into the self-moderation.

Wadera

clarkwinkelmann However the other suggestions are a bit complicated. Custom comment statistics are definitely possible but we would have to decide exactly what is desired because there are a lot of possibilities, and it could conflict if another extension wanted to change how the default discussion/post count is counted.

Agree. That's just something which comes to me when thinking about some of my users where I expect that more than half of thier posts will be hidden. Like I mentioned:

Wadera when I think about it, most likely it would work better if supported by separate extension for stats

The same thing about self-moderation. Dedicated, separate extensions will be more flexible. I will let you know if I found any issues in main topic: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/29483-collapsible-posts

I think this disussion can be closed!