Post History

Moderation queues for questions and answers

There currently seems to be no concept of "queues" for questions or answers. I also looked at the old discourse forum, and it seems like different kinds of queues are causally mentioned, for different purposes, but their actual implementation has not really been discussed. 

It's not entirely clear whether they are simply not implemented yet (and I can imagine that this is challenging and probably not strictly necessary to get started, and thus, had low priority), or whether there is an intention behind that - maybe to foster a different way of participation or self-moderation (?)

We have also seen on other sites that such queues may cause difficulties: When 100 questions are added to some queue per day, then 10 people might work them off. But when there are 1000 questions, these 10 people might say "That's too much. Why me? Why bother?", and the queue will never be drained. 

But I think that queues can serve several important purposes. 

First of all, they offer the possibility to ***systematically* review content**. Preferably, the implementation should already allow filtering queues by tags, support configurable actions that may be applied to the entries, maybe have some sort of "dispatching mechanism" to split queues among multiple reviewers, and maybe also support things like a priorization. 

<sup>(Yes, too many wishes, I know - these are rather "features that might be useful for certain tasks in the future", and should be kept in mind when planning the implementation).</sup>

Another important purpose could be: **Finding a consensus**. This is something that cannot be handled with voting. I'm thinking about things like "Should this question be migrated to another site?": It's not ideal when a single person decides that, even with a high trust level. But when 4 out of 5 persons vote for a migration (maybe also taking the trust level into account), this can offer some resilience against wrong decisions.

More generally and abstractly: Queues can help to distribute workload and decisions over the community, and I think that this can be really helpful for many different kinds of tasks.

<sub>(An aside: There already is the concept of "suggested edits", which was implemented in https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/pull/85 , but the general concept of queues goes a bit beyond that)</sub>