In the past few weeks, you may have noticed some minor changes to the moderation panel. We’ve made several updates that speed up moderation. The moderation panel is one of the most heavily used pages and it plays an important role in the Disqus ecosystem –– when moderators can work quickly and effectively, they can build awesome communities.
So what's under the hood? Our team rewrote the mod-panel to use the React framework, which lays the groundwork for us to further enhance the moderation panel in the future. Here are some recent notable improvements:
Flexible date-range filter
We’ve added a new date-range selector that helps you quickly filter down comments to a specific range of time. We also threw in some commonly used presets for quickly filtering down to the past day, week, month, etc.
For a growing and thriving site, the amount of comments that pour in every day can be staggering. Search is your best friend when you need to moderate with speed and precision. In addition to existing search filters like username, email address, IP address, and keyword, you now have access to a whole other dimension... time!
Were you playing hooky last Friday and need to catch up on some moderation? Need to see what your audience was discussing during #Brexit, because you totally missed the drama? Or do you want to time travel back to the early weeks of your website's launch to identify your veteran commenters?
The date filter now makes this possible. By default, the filter is set to "Past month" to speed up your searches and to keep your eyes on timely comments from your community. Bump this range to "All time" if you really need to scour deeper into your archives.
Visual tweaks
Old vs. new styles in the comment sidebar
For the discerning eye, we’ve made some minor changes to some of the UI styles which we like to describe as simply more “pleasant”.
We received feedback from some of the most active publishers and moderators on the Internet and they reminded us that the little things really do matter. It's our goal to design tools that put the focus back on your community, not strain your eyes.
Autocomplete for ban reasons
When you ban a user, you can include a quick blurb in a “Reason” field to record exactly why the offending user is getting the trusty ol’ ban hammer. Upon popular request, we tweaked this field so that it now “remembers” what you’ve typed previously, making it easier to ban with consistency. Some moderators like this because it allows them to add more structure to their ban list by inputting the same 5-6 reasons they've used in the past.
If you want to use this Easter egg of a feature, make sure autofill is enabled in your browser.
We’re excited for future updates that will inevitably rise from this foundational upgrade. We want to hear your thoughts!
- What big changes would you like to see in the moderation panel?
- Have you started using the date range picker? If so, is searching for comments easier?