Over the past few months, we've been working especially hard on improving our community moderation tools. These upgrades have largely been driven through sessions with our existing community mods, many of whom generously offered their time to participate in feedback sessions with @lisasy! Having talked directly with these mods, we’re excited to show off some of the new changes based on their feedback.
As a first note, this post is most relevant to our amazing community moderators. These are trusted members of the DEV Community who have heightened privileges to help us keep the platform safe and constructive. More information about our community mod program is available here.
Before this change, finding and using the community mod actions wasn’t all that intuitive. You had to click the small “MODERATE POST” button alongside the article title. Now, moderators will have a more seamless experience, as they can open up the actions panel directly while reading a post:
DEV community moderators are able to::
- Slightly boost the visibility of a post with the thumbsup reaction
- Slightly lower the visibility of a post with the thumbsdown reaction
- Flag rule-breaking users and content directly to DEV Staff
- Adjust the tag(s) of the post (if they're a tag moderator)
- Add an experience level to the post (to help with feed relevancy)
Most of these actions were already available to moderators, but the whole experience should now be a whole lot more seamless. The thumbsup and thumbsdown rating adjustments are relatively gentle — no single positive or negative reaction will determine a post’s ultimate success. It’s simply a way for trusted users to help ensure that high-quality content on DEV has a better chance at being visible across the platform, while reducing the likelihood that low-quality content ends up in the feed.
One important thing to note is that this change will not rollout site-wide all at once. So, if you're a moderator, you might not see the button for all posts.
Personally, I'm excited to continue working with the mods, and to build tools that make their life easier. They do an amazing job, and it’s largely thankless work. They help ensure that DEV remains an inclusive and positive space, and I really want to make sure they have a great experience as they help support all of us.
As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Happy coding!
Big shout out to my teammates @msarit, @jacobherrington, and @lisasy for working on this together!
Top comments (17)
This was an absolute BLAST to work on!
Looking forward to hearing back from our awesome mods about their experience with the new tooling! 💃🏾 🤩 🎉
Great changes!! they will ease the UX of mods a lot.
Nice update~
Continuous improvement FTW~
I rated this post as high quality. Good work team!
Hyyyype !
That tool's UI looks super awesome 😃. I wanna learn how to build something that cool 😁!
This is awesome, thanks a lot!
It's even better than I imagined it at first and I really love the animation when the panel blends in 👍
It's also great on mobile. Having it already loaded is a lot better than having to wait until the mod page was loaded when the connection is bad.
This is soooooo good! Thank you!
Great work on this team. As a moderator myself, this will come in handy. 🔥
Okay, so I know that this is just a small, small thing about this awesome feature, but the way the panel pops out onto the page when you click the icon in the corner is smooth as butter. 🧈
I have to follow up and say that I think this improved UX is a big upgrade all around. ❤️
Just saw ben's tweet, the new changes look great ⭐ ✨
One thing I've spotted. We can moderate our own posts, giving them a thumbs up/down. I appreciate you said rating adjustments are gentle, but should a flag be added so we can't moderate our own posts?
Thank you for reporting this Natalie! We shall look into it 👍
This is amazing! Great work to the team ❤️
I always love new updates 😍