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Comments on Implement a way to sort posts by recent comments, to make it easier to moderate them
Parent
Implement a way to sort posts by recent comments, to make it easier to moderate them
Rationale
Today I flagged an answer that was clearly spam. Then I decided to check the spammer's profile to see if there were more. And indeed, I found a comment that was also spam.
One detail that surprised me is that the comment was made 2 months ago, and nobody noticed. It was made in a question posted 9 months ago, therefore I guess the OP and all other users involved in the comment thread didn't access the site during this period. That would explain why nobody flagged the comment.
But another detail is that posts aren't bumped to the first page when there are new comments.
Currently when you sort posts by activity, it considers only edits and new answers. Checking today, if we sort the main page by Activity, the post that had the spam comment is in the third page, and the most recent activity shown is "edited 8mo ago" (which confirms that it doesn't consider comments as an "activity").
My request
Is there a way to check for posts that had a recent activity in the comments? If there is (I just couldn't find it), then this request can be closed. But if there isn't, can it be implemented?
If we consider that any comment on the post is also an "activity", that post would have been bumped, and maybe the spam could have been caught when it was posted. I just caught it today because the spammer posted a spam-answer 10 hours ago in another question, which was bumped to the first page, and I decided to check in their profile if there was more spam.
Had the spammer decided to keep only that comment and hadn't posted anything else (or posted only comments in old questions), it'd probably remain unnoticed for an even longer time.
Can we have a way to sort by recent comments, so cases like this can be detected more easily? It could be in the current "sort by Activity" (change it to also include comments) or a new sort type (e.g. "recent comments"). Or is that such a rare event that it's not worth the effort?
One could argue that, since the posts aren't bumped, the spam won't be seen by many people. But IMO it's still spam and it must be removed, regardless of how many people it can reach.
I originally posted this in Software Development Meta and was suggested to also post here.
Post
As you noted, comments don't count as "activity" on posts for purposes of bumping. Moderators have access to a list of the most recent comments, and I'd like to explore opening that up as an alternative to what you're asking for. Granted, you'd be seeing comments without their immediate context -- it's a list of comments, and you would have to follow links to see the posts and other comments. I think spam and blatant rudeness is usually visible without that context.
If we made this list of recent comments more visible, how visible should it be? (Who should see it?) On the one hand, everything on that page is public already; this is about making it easier to find, not about revealing secrets. On the other hand, it'd be one more thing that draws people away from the main activity of the community, and UX people often counsel against distractions.
In an answer to Deleted post hidden from everyone in the question list I suggested expanding a "moderation tools" section in the sidebar column to add the "recent deletions" link for people who can see deleted posts. I mentioned there that this could evolve to also show flags to curators. I wasn't thinking about comments at the time, but it seems like that could fit in here too. If we took this approach, the existing mod/admin-only widget would expand to look something like this:
The heading is changed from "Moderator Tools" to just "Tools", with (now) four links that can appear depending on your abilities:
- Recent Comments (new, per this proposal)
- Recent Deletions (shown to those with the Curate ability, per the linked proposal)
- Moderator Tools (existing link shown to moderators)
- Admin Tools (existing link shown to administrators)
In the future there could be another curator link for flags, or maybe at that point we would spin off a "curator tools" page like we have for mod tools and admin tools. (There are currently 9 mod tools and 13 admin tools, which is why there are separate pages.)
Would something like this help? Would it cause other problems? If we did this, who should see the "Recent Comments" link -- anyone who can flag, or something more limited? At what point in the user journey do we want to start inviting people to do this kind of reviewing?
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