July 5
Hi all!
Trying to do shorter, more frequent updates atm, fits better into my current ADHD-dictated schedule xD Still kind of recovering from the chaotic 'appointments all over the place' state of last month, but I've made some progress.
UI/UX wireframes
I made some more wireframes in Figma for Deserted Chateau's moderation pages, to see how it affects my workflow. I think it's useful; if nothing else, it should help me to overcome the weird brain fog I get when trying to lay out pages I haven't started yet.
Reports & Moderation pages
As you can see, the frontend for these is still very much a WIP; I've been focused on getting the backend elements done first, with the frontend there more just to test some things.
Initially, I had reports done in a simple message kind of structure, but I quickly realised that wasn't efficient - if an artwork got 100 reports it'd mean 100 entries for a moderator to go through and resolve, when really there should only need to be one.
As such, I've restructured reports into "report groups" internally, where unresolved reports of a given item are grouped together as one "report group". For example, suppose an artwork is reported by ten users, who each give ten different messages in the "report reason" text area, and who choose three different report categories.
In the backend for moderators, this will show up as one report group for that artwork, with the list of unique reasons and a scrollable text box containing some of the report messages (the first 25 or so, with more being loadable if needed). This should allow moderation to be much more efficient, as it both reduces moderator load and prevents moderators from having to close a load of reports for the same item.
I had to refactor a lot of the database tables and PHP forms to make that work, but it's done now. Next is implementing the report group details and sanctions pages, which is a lot of AJAX forms and Javascript to take care of.
Artwork comments
I'm still undecided on whether to enable this, but I've been thinking more about it lately. Even if I choose not to enable them, it's probably wise to implement them so that it's not needed later if I change my mind.
That said, I still want to have lots of controls on it - e.g. ensuring only users who've properly filled out their profile can comment, perhaps an age limit where only users 1 or more months old who have done more than sit idle for a month can comment, etc etc. The aim is to minimise spam and offensive comments, both to reduce the moderation workload and because Deserted Chateau really isn't meant to be about lots of social interaction.
Actually implementing comments shouldn't be too difficult from a conceptual standpoint; I'll draw up a list of 'safeguards' for minimising bad comments, and I'll need to plan out the appearance of 'reply comments' if they are going to be a thing.
