Support questions & Communication methods.
Many frequently occurring questions can be answered by a good help system that allows users to ask a question and they are then taken to possible answers. The current FAQ is searchable, but try searching for 'How do I post an attachment?'. If users can't find what they need, they will contact the staff for support. The 'Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.' page in the FAQ does not direct users to any help options. No similar results. No direction to who to contact where or how.
vbulletin users generate a massive amount of support requests, but there is no way to handle these requests in a streamlined or logical way.
Support questions come in scattered across PM, VM, email, contact form and forum. Sometime trough all of these options and to several staff members. Support questions are in no way linked from member accounts nor is there much history of communication. If you have a mass of active members, then memory will often fail when it comes to former communication.
There is no way for staff to see a list of all open support questions, or the status of these issues. No one knows who's doing what. Many tasks and responsibilities go lost because of this and much lands on the shoulders of one or a few people.
Similarly, there is no way for staff to see which of their moderation or administration tasks are open. More about that later.
There needs to be a support system that centralizes support questions and integrates with the contact form and email.
There is no way to alert staff when they are off site. Urgent matters can be left unattended. A busy site will send many email reports per day, so one more report by email doesnt warn staff either.
A desktop application to alert moderators of issues and open tasks would focus attention where and when its needed. Such application could alert about open support issues, reports and moderated content. While not an absolute necessity it would be a good improvement.
Reports & infractions
The way reports and infractions work cause a lot of work, because there is no logical work flow and UX. Currently reports can lead to the following actions that staff needs to take:
- Post reports, VM reports, blog reports, PM reports need to be reviewed.
- Content needs to be deleted/edited/moved.
- Warnings or explanations need to be posted in threads
- Infractions/Infractions need to be given.
- Feedback needs to go to the reporter.
- Reports need to be classifying as solved somehow.
- A conversation with the infracted member may follow.
- User notes need to be posted on profile.
- Staff needs to made aware of / discuss troublesome or important members.
Aside from the 'delete as spam' function, the above actions are not integrated at all.
Reports can be automatically posted to a staff zone forum or emailed. Moderators can not see in vbulletins front end how many open reports are assigned to them. They should be confronted with this information somehow, so that its clear what reports they need to solve.
These reports should get a status, so everyone can see what's going on.
Multiple reports by ranking members (user groups) should send a post to the moderation queue.
I suggested the following improvements here:
an overhaul and integration of the report system, infraction system, user note system:
- The post report screen should have a drop down with reasons for the post report. These could correspond with those set in the infraction system.
- Moderators should get a notice the number of open post reports they have. The post reports they need to process should be visible somewhere.
- When assessing the problem, moderators should have the option to post a user note, which would be visible in the staff zone as a threaded content. But accessible on user profile and in the thread.
- Moderators should also have the option to warn or infract, while the reason is pre-set with the reason the reporting member selected. Moderators should have the option to select another infraction reason.
- Infractions should have canned texts (like promised by Jelsoft many moons ago)
- If members receive multiple infractions within a short period or if ranking members get severe infraction, this should create an alert to the staff.
- Reporting members should get a status report about their report.
- Private Messages reports should have infraction functions.
There is no way to post a thread notice, so a warning in a post can quickly get buried and needs to be repeated several times.
There is no way to flag posts as problematic, except by posting a link in the staff zone.
Moderated content & moderation
Staff needs to approve all moderated content. Yet we need to look up if there is any moderated content in their userCP. There should be a notification in the front end, as soon as any moderated content enters the system.
There is no way of knowing what content has been read by staff and what content has not. This allows problematic content to stay under the radar, while other content may be reviewed by 10 moderators.
There should be a post or thread note function that allows staff to add comments to posts, only for staff to see.
Member tracking
User Notes are only accessible on user profiles. They are mostly forgotten and not used, because no one will see the user note, unless it is specifically looked up. Instead many boards use one or more staff discussion threads to post notes about members. Its extremely hard to track the behaviour of members on a busy site.
There should be a wall of user notes, with functionality for staff to post to the wall. Optimally there should be a positive and a negative wall. Such walls should be accessible in a staff zone.
