User blog:Antonio R. Castro/Everything You Need to Know About Reported Notifications

Hello hello!

It has been a long time since we redesigned the on-site notifications and merged the Fandom and Gamepedia notifications. Since then, we have been delivering on our promises made last year at Community Connect, one of which was to bring more, much needed and requested moderation tools to Discussions. To that end, we released the highly requested post history feature earlier this year, but we knew more needed to be done to help facilitate the moderation of our wikis.

It's been tested and teased for months now, but we're excited to finally release our reported post notifications to all wikis that have at least one social feature enabled, whether it's Discussions, Message Walls, or Article Comments!

How does it work?
Every administrator and Thread Moderator will be automatically opted into this feature -who opted out during the test phase will have to enable it again-. To be sure, though, if you hold one of these positions on a wiki, you should check your preferences, tab, section  , and check if the option for receiving notifications when someone reports a post or reply in Discussions, Message Wall, or Comments has been enabled. Just to let you know, this is a per-wiki setting, not global, so you can decide for each wiki you moderate whether or not you wish to receive notifications for reported posts.

Once enabled, reporting a post in Discussions, Message Wall, or Article Comments will trigger an on-site notification for all the thread moderators and admins similar to this one:



There will only be one notification per wiki, even when the community has reported multiple posts. A counter will indicate how many messages were reported instead. When clicking the message, you will be directed to, the dashboard where all the reports are listed and organized under Posts, Messages, or Comments.

When the counter in the message goes to 0 because all the reports have been handled, the message disappears from your notifications list, and it will only reappear if any other post is reported. If you want to clear your notifications without handling the reports, you have the option to mark the notification as read. In this case, the message does remain visible as a reminder to do it later and will become active again if you receive a new report, increasing the counter again.

How did we arrive here?
It has been quite a challenging journey, which we could not have completed successfully without the help of eleven highly social wiki communities who gave constructive feedback on the product.

Our idea was simple: we wanted to present moderators with a single notification, encapsulating the accurate number of reported posts for a specific wiki. However, this proved more challenging than expected due to our platform supporting various thread types between Message Walls, Articles, and Discussions, with each one having its own specific structure, and then again, more differences depending on whether you're viewing your notifications from Discussions, the mobile version of Discussions, the wiki itself or the mobile version of the wiki. These differences made testing time-consuming because the report notification functionality had to be checked for each one. Our testers also immediately flagged that reports were sometimes sent multiple times or not at all. That was clearly not good.

Based on the feedback we received from our testing communities, we knew we had to build something better, so we quite literally went back to the drawing board and started all over again with the same goal in mind: to provide a helpful tool to moderators to increase the response time on handling reported posts, as only 8% of the reports got handled within seven days.

After reworking the entire system to present a proper version 2 and receiving the approval of our initial eleven communities, we extended the test first to 10% of our top 6,000 wikis and, after fixing some last bugs, extended the test again to 25% of the top 6,000 wikis. This elaborate way of testing served as a proper stress test and enabled us to gather proper data about the feature's effect. And what an effect it had! If you have been keeping up with our Technical Updates, you already know this, but for those who haven't, we saw that 34% more reports were actioned within seven days due to notifications, and there was a 32% decrease in the time it took to take action! With such positive results, we are excited to roll this feature out to all our wikis!

A great combination of improvements
Last year, we set out to improve our moderation on Discussions. At the end of 2022, we delivered the Discussions AbuseFilter. At the beginning of this year, we released post history. Through the course of the year, we reworked the availability of the Discussion Moderation tools from within the Discussions profile. And now, toward the end of the year, we get to release the Reported Post Notifications to you. You can review all the moderation options available to you on the Admin and Moderator Tools in Discussions help page.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback during this process, for helping us reach this point, and for trusting us and continuing to use our platform. We appreciate your support and confidence.

Stay tuned for more updates, and see you on the wikis!

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