Not planned Approval queue for users should have its own link

[AndyB]

Currently in XF2 the "Post" and "User" approvals are combined, this makes it very difficult to administer.

XF2


Please separate Post and Users content, like it is in XF1.

XF1


Thank you.

 

[Chris D]

There’s no longer a differential between the user approval queue and everything else. There are no plans to separate them again.

 

[Surendra.S]

I think @AndyB is right.

Facing lot of problems because this feature is removed from XF 2.0.

In the Approval Queue, there should have been a way to view pending content & pending users separately. (Some tab / link to view them separately)

If that is not possible, please at least add a link in ACP for approving Users Awaiting Approval.

If that is also not possible, please at least make the content queue to display newer pending content first.

@Chris D It will be immensely useful if you can reconsider your decision and do something about this problem. Its a major thing for medium/large forums where pending posts & users will always be 50+.

 

[Chris D]

You've still not really sufficiently explained why you have a moderation queue that contains more than 50 items. The whole point of having an approval queue is that at some point they should be approved or removed. I'd say that we have a forum which is certainly within the "medium" category you spoke of.

We have very strict spam checks here and many things trigger users waiting to be approved or posts that need to be reviewed. I don't think our queue has ever been higher than 20 because we action them.

The item that is first in your approval queue, when was it submitted? How many items do you have in total?

 

[Surendra.S]

You've still not really sufficiently explained why you have a moderation queue that contains more than 50 items. The whole point of having an approval queue is that at some point they should be approved or removed. I'd say that we have a forum which is certainly within the "medium" category you spoke of.

We have very strict spam checks here and many things trigger users waiting to be approved or posts that need to be reviewed. I don't think our queue has ever been higher than 20 because we action them.

The item that is first in your approval queue, when was it submitted? How many items do you have in total?

2000 pending posts ! Our Forum exists for last 10 years, so lot of posts unapproved for various reasons.

Also, we MANUALLY approve EVERY post & member in our forum for business reasons.

Sometimes we get 50+ posts, 50+ members for approval in a single day.

Sometimes, we keep posts pending and then email the poster for clarification. It will be in pending till they reply, and that sometimes may take several days (/ months in some cases). We cannot delete those posts because they are premium members and they may not be willing to resubmit content even if we ask them. So we keep the content in unapproved state.

 

[Chris D]

XF1 had the same limit of 50 too so presumably you’ve always had this problem where the most recent 1950 posts can’t actually be seen.

It is really a very unusual way to operate a site so it feels to me like you have quite a niche requirement when it comes to how you manage pending content.

What date is on the first unapproved post in the approval queue? And what date is on the last which you can actually see?

 

[Sim]

Right now on PropertyChat and ZooChat I am filtering new user registrations based on the originating country of the registration request. Anyone registering from a small list of pre-approved countries is automatically approved, and there is a small list of automatically rejected countries as well.

Anyone else registering gets held for moderation. I look for certain flags which indicate they may not be legitimate. For example, the country their registration IP address is from not matching the location they state. Sometimes this is the result of genuine users using anonymous proxies, but other times it is an indication of spammers.

For people I'm not sure about, my policy right now is to leave them in the moderation queue for up to 30 days - if they contact me asking when their account will be approved, I generally automatically approve it. This also allows me to re-check their IP address a few days after they've registered to see if there are any spam source reports against them from other sites.

If I'm leaning towards approving them, I'll check after a few days whether they have accessed the site at any point since the initial registration. If they have - I'll approve them straight away. If they haven't ever accessed the site again, after 30 days I reject their account.

It's a rather manual process and lead more by instinct than anything else (and spammers do still slip through occasionally), but it's working quite well for us right now. At this point in time, I have 29 users in the approval queue on PropertyChat while ZooChat has only 1.

While I'm still running XF1.5, this hasn't been an issue - but I did note with concern the merged approval queue in XF2.0 and had thought I would need to address this because of the extended period that users end up in the queue.

However, this is certainly an edge case and I suspect I would be better off with some custom development (which I haven't looked into yet) or perhaps just changing my approach.

I did think that perhaps I could add a new user_state along the lines of "pending_approval" which allows me to separate out those list of users who I'm not yet sure about into a new UI. I haven't yet investigated the ramifications of doing that.

 

[Surendra.S]

XF1 had the same limit of 50 too so presumably you’ve always had this problem where the most recent 1950 posts can’t actually be seen.

It is really a very unusual way to operate a site so it feels to me like you have quite a niche requirement when it comes to how you manage pending content.

What date is on the first unapproved post in the approval queue? And what date is on the last which you can actually see?

@Chris D

Our issue is not about pending posts. We approve/unapprove them by directly going to forum sections.

I mean, we do not use Approval Queue for that.

Our issue is about new members awaiting approval. We may sometimes keep new members also in pending state if we are not very sure if they are legitimate or not ! We wait till their further action (emailing us asking for approval, message to admin or logging in again to our forum showing their interest etc). So some members may be in queue even after 2 months until we are sure of what to do to their membership.

In this way of manual approval, we eliminated 99% of spam at our forum.

As member approval was separate link (in XF 1.5), we had no problem in doing so.

But now, we can't see Members Awaiting Approval at all - as content & members approval is merged into one link, and because of lot of unapproved posts in our queue.

All that we request is a separate link somewhere (or) a way to separate pending members from posts (just like XF 1.5 that was perfect). Whether the link is provided in Approval Queue or Admin Panel does not matter.

(or) at least provide pagination in Approval Queue so that we can navigate and find all pending posts/members.

 

[New Joe]

AndyB to the rescue;
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/approval-queue-menu.6669/

 

[Surendra.S]

AndyB to the rescue;
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/approval-queue-menu.6669/

Though I really appreciate the effort by AndyB, I sincerely request that this feature to be done by XF official team.
It may look very small feature to ignore from XF 1.5 to XF 2.0, but its very important one.
Can't wait for the next XF update to have this.

 

[Ozzy47]

Can't wait for the next XF update to have this.

Seriously doubtful that it will happen, you are better off using the addon and being happy.

 

[Bimble]

I'd like to see the user approval queue back in the ACP. Our moderators don't manage user accounts or approvals, it's done by admins in the ACP, and mixing it with posts adds unnecessary clutter to what was previously two very distinct processes and operations that were easily carried out by the groups of people who needed to attend to them.

 

[Chris D]

Being able to see and approve users who are awaiting approval is a distinct permission. If you have moderators who are not responsible for that, you can just not give them the permission.

XF 2.1 has features so you can filter the approval queue by content type, therefore you're able to exclude users from the list if you wish.

 

[AndyB]

XF 2.1 has features so you can filter the approval queue by content type

Hi Chris,

The filters function works well in certain situations, however I think in this situation it's cumbersome. The filters function requires us to click four times in order to see a list of just new users awaiting approval.

 

[Sim]

I think the point is that this is now an extensible facility meaning that addon developers can add custom content types into the approval queue.

It makes more sense to do it the way the XF devs have designed it for 2.1 when you consider the alternative of having 3+ approval queues when custom content is added. It can get cumbersome fairly quickly.

 

[Bimble]

I'd simply like to see the User approval queue put back in the ACP (where us admins do all of our user account management). I don't see a problem with the front-end queue, but ADD the user approval queue back into the ACP as well. Please.

 

[upnet]

Combining the post approval queue with the moderated users looks like it will throw a wrench in our process as well.