Changelog: Updated Mod Tooling

Over the past few months, we've been working especially hard on improving our community moderation tools. These upgrades have largely been driven through sessions with our existing community mods, many of whom generously offered their time to participate in feedback sessions with @lisasy! Having talked directly with these mods, we’re excited to show off some of the new changes based on their feedback.

As a first note, this post is most relevant to our amazing community moderators. These are trusted members of the DEV Community who have heightened privileges to help us keep the platform safe and constructive. More information about our community mod program is available here.

Before this change, finding and using the community mod actions wasn’t all that intuitive. You had to click the small “MODERATE POST” button alongside the article title. Now, moderators will have a more seamless experience, as they can open up the actions panel directly while reading a post:

DEV community moderators are able to::

• Slightly boost the visibility of a post with the thumbsup reaction
• Slightly lower the visibility of a post with the thumbsdown reaction
• Flag rule-breaking users and content directly to DEV Staff
• Adjust the tag(s) of the post (if they're a tag moderator)
• Add an experience level to the post (to help with feed relevancy)

Most of these actions were already available to moderators, but the whole experience should now be a whole lot more seamless. The thumbsup and thumbsdown rating adjustments are relatively gentle — no single positive or negative reaction will determine a post’s ultimate success. It’s simply a way for trusted users to help ensure that high-quality content on DEV has a better chance at being visible across the platform, while reducing the likelihood that low-quality content ends up in the feed.

One important thing to note is that this change will not rollout site-wide all at once. So, if you're a moderator, you might not see the button for all posts.

Personally, I'm excited to continue working with the mods, and to build tools that make their life easier. They do an amazing job, and it’s largely thankless work. They help ensure that DEV remains an inclusive and positive space, and I really want to make sure they have a great experience as they help support all of us.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Happy coding!

Big shout out to my teammates @msarit, @jacobherrington, and @lisasy for working on this together!