When doing moderation work it’s really helpful to put a user’s flagged content into the greater context of their overall iNat content, since other violations may not be flagged. In general it’s fairly straightforward to search through someone’s IDs and observations but not their comments, so we’ve added a “Comments” option to the Admin Tools menu on a user’s profile, which curators can access.
Selecting it will take you to a paginated list of the user’s comments in reverse chronological order so you can look through them. It’s pretty similar to the User’s Identifications page (eg https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications/tiwane). If you mouseover a comment you’ll see an option to flag it.
Hopefully this will make it easier to place flagged comments in context and determine if the user has a history of unflagged Community Guidelines violations or not.
We did remove the “See flags on [user]'s content” option in the Admin Tools menu since Moderation History basically covers it. I know some folks do still use that, though, so let me know if you’re finding that you really miss it.
this is neat! i hope it doesn’t become grounds for a bunch of drama as the pool of curators is so large, but overall i think it will be really useful. I peeked at Ken-Ichis and was tempted to make a comment on his moderator history but did not :D
Does this only bring up standalone comments? Because it seems like comments that are attached to IDs do not show up. Would be great if all comments showed up but this is still very useful nonetheless
I see. They essentially serve the same purpose as a standalone comment tho (to provide further information/substantiation) so i don’t see why they shouldn’t be treated the same way
I know, and it bothers me, but I don’t think there are plans to change the way they are treated any time soon. Mainly what annoys me is that since I have confirming IDs turned off, any useful information contained in an ID-comment slips by and I never know it’s there. Even a non-confirming ID sometimes gets past me, since they seem less “important” than comments, though I have learned to check them all anyway. When I add IDs to others’ observations, I try to remember to make the comment separately so it doesn’t hide in the guise of an ID.
It shouldn’t be extremely difficult to code that, from a logistical standpoint. Just add a check while searching the user’s identifications (however they have that set up) to see if an identification has a comment attached. If yes, include that in the comments page. I don’t know exactly how this would be done as I haven’t looked at the source code, but in theory it could.
I think someone trying to count Gerald’s comments did something like that, since we were considering ID-comments to be “comments” for count purposes. It worked all right, except that whatever code they were using read ID-comments and automatically-attached messages (like “user_x disagrees this is species x”) the same way. Most likely those two types of information are embedded in the identification similarly, so it would be hard to make a code that could discern them. However, I personally don’t know much coding, so I can’t be sure.
