[Bioc-devel] Moderating "answers" into comments on other answers/comments on the support site?

[Dan Tenenbaum]

Hi Ryan,

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ryan C. Thompson" <rct at thompsonclan.org>
> To: bioc-devel at r-project.org
> Sent: Thursday, October 8, 2015 1:09:06 PM
> Subject: [Bioc-devel] Moderating "answers" into comments on other answers/comments on the support site?
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On support.bioconductor.org, we've seen a lot of instances of people
> using the answer box when they should be adding a comment on an
> existing
> answer. I don't necessarily blame uses, since the "Add your answer"
> text
> box is far more obvious than the "add comment" button on an existing
> answer. However, as far as I can tell, it's impossible to use the
> moderator tools to convert an answer into a comment on another answer
> or
> comment, so when I see this happen, I just have to leave it as is,
> since
> converting the answer to a comment on the question would just make
> things even more confusing and out-of-order. So, given that this is
> probably the most common moderation action  that I would want to do,
> could this feature be added to the moderator tools?
> 
> Also, I will note that this problem happens almost exclusively on
> whichever answer is listed last, i.e. the answer with the "add your
> answer" text box immediately below it in the position that one would
> look for a "reply" text box. For answers that are higher up, useres
> almost always find the "Add comment" button since they are not
> distracted by an existing text box. So I think we could greatly
> reduce
> instances of this issue by putting a much clearer visual separation
> between the last answer and the "add your answer box", and maybe
> doing
> like StackOverflow does and popping up an "are you sure you want to
> answer your own question" dialog when a user tries to write in the
> answer box for their own question.
> 

I've forwarded your email to the author of the software that the support site is based on. Ideally he will want to add the features and can do it. Otherwise we can look at doing it, but we prefer to keep the drift between his version an our version to a minimum.

> Thanks,
> 
> -Ryan
> 
> P.S. I hope bioc-devel is the right place to ask about how to do
> moderation on the support site.
> 


It's ok. Some of you may be wondering where the moderator functionality is and the answer is that moderation privileges are only granted to a select few. 
There are several FAQs about moderation at the bottom of https://support.bioconductor.org/info/faq/ . 

Dan


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