Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5275700-20160317230104

Hello Marvel Database!

I wanted to check in about the Discussions feature with a few updates. The feature still in its early stages and it's been great to see the app users engaging there in different ways.

As of Thursday last week, there's now an option for users to "report" a specific post or reply to be reviewed by admins/moderators. You can see this in the web version of Discussions right now, and the app users will get this in the version 2.1 update that was just released for Android and will be out for iOS any day now. More details can be found on the help page that was also just published last week.

With the 2.1 update, app users will also get the option to view all posts by a user in one handy list, which has been an option on the web version for a little while now. This is great for many reasons, but it may also cut down on repeat posts since the users there will be more able to follow up on (and even discover) older conversations.

Also for moderation, today we released (for web) the option to lock conversations and to stop users from posting further replies (i.e. to close a Discussion thread).

Other things that are an upcoming focus for us are more customizable (and visible) guidelines for participants, and more structure to the whole feature, allowing for filtered views.

Some of you may also see that we're testing out modules on the article pages that link to Discussions. This is only a test, so don't be concerned that a particular placement you see is the "final" version. The module also pulls from the 'Trending' view and so will be the same across all pages, but the real version of it will be informed by relationships between specific articles and discussions that you'll be able to establish as we do more development.

Moderation
We're very excited about the features I noted above, and hope that the ability to "outsource" moderation a little bit will make the jobs of the admins/mods easier. But I'd like to pause and ask about moderation and this community.

No one's really picked up the reins on that yet. I wanted to ask if any of the admins have been peeking in? We (Wikia Staff) have and it's actually pleasantly surprising. There's lots of activity and certainly lots of chatty conversation, but almost never anything that warrants deletion on sight. I suppose this speaks well of both the app users (who are still the primary posters) and Marvel fans in general.

However, with Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse on the horizon, and with increased web traffic from some of the testing, there might be more need for moderation soon.

Any volunteers? If you're a non-admin, speak up and the admins here can review your request. If there's no takers, I may propose one or more good users from the app for consideration.

I know that some of you may have concerns about the quality of conversation found there. "Vs" threads and other things. But the best way to foster substantive discussions is to lead by example! Ultimately this area will be yours to do with as you see fit, and we'll be adding tools and options to make that easier.

Questions? Let me know! 