Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Website
Description of need: Currently curators are able to hide photos, IDs, and comments, but only staff can unhide them, this prevents curators from fixing their own mistakes, the other day I was trying to hide a photo, and as I typed in the reason for hiding (“human target of insulting ID”) I misspelled human by one letter, and my spellchecker tried to change it to “hymen”, had I not caught this the publicly visible reason for hiding would have been “hymen target of insulting ID”, and I would have been unable to edit this. Also I just now misclicked and hid a comment calling someone out for a joke ID instead of hiding the joke ID, but I am unable to unhide this comment or even edit the note about why I hid it (it’s labeled as a joke ID right now)
Feature request details: Allow curators to unhide anything they hid, so that a curator can correct their own mistake. It is not necessary to allow a curator to undo another curator’s hiding, I just want curators to be able to correct their own mistakes
I’m not necessarily opposed to this, but I think this would need to have a public edit history to be very transparent. As I understand it, hiding is not intended to be used too frequently, so requiring staff review for unhiding is something of a security/anti-abuse measure. If curators can unhide/edit hiding that they do, it increases the possibility that this feature could be abused, used for trolling, or similar. I don’t think that most curators would do this, but there are a lot of curators on iNat, and abuse would likely be infrequent but is an important risk that needs to be mitigated. So the convenience of fixing infrequent mistakes does tradeoff with potential for abuse unless the system has transparency or some types of checks/balance.
I could see having an edit history so that a curator cannot deny that they ever hid a comment they hid, this is a good idea
So long as there is an edit history so someone cannot falsely deny that they hid a comment in the past, I see no way the ability to unhide what one hid enables abuse?
I’m not aware of any rule or guideline that says hiding should be used infrequently, as I understand it hiding is meant to be used for specific types of rule-breaking content, and should be used as frequently or infrequently as such content is encountered
One platform I know does not allow routinely editing or deleting one’s replies to forum threads, because the policy is to own your words. There is, however, an exception, recognizing that people do make typos sometimes: you can edit a post if you do so within a few minutes after posting it, and have not made any other posts since. Would a functionality similar to that work in this use case?
Right now only staff can unhide content, and that action is saved in the moderation history of the user whose content was hidden. Unhiding also requires one to type in a reason. It’s like the Unsuspend functionality. So there’s a record that other curators and staff can look at.
I’ve made a Github issue for this. I think it’s OK to let curators unhide content they have hidden and we’ll see how it goes.