Forum Posts Approval

leecasey

Hi, why is there an approval process for replying to forum posts? Does this go after achieving a certain amount of points or something? 

S1mon

I have to assume it's to avoid spam and dick pics from unknown new people. The people who monitor these forums are doing it part time as far as I can tell (they have major roles at Onshape doing other things). In the past couple years there have been an explosion of new users. It makes it harder for them to keep up and deal with all the issues of a public forum.

On the plus side, there is little to no spam or abuse that I see, and I'm on here a lot. Once you've been on here for a length of time or number of successful posts (not sure what the algorithm is) there doesn't seem to be an approval process anymore.

NeilCooke

@S1mon is 100% correct. 

nick_papageorge_dayjob

My dayjob account (this one) posts immediately. My personal hobby account, that I think I have 3 or 4 posts on total, seems to take a day to get approved. Both accounts are about 2 years old. So I guess its number of posts? It does seem annoying, but there really is no spam here, so that's nice.

leecasey

Thanks for the clarification guys. It was just a little frustrating to give feedback on a post I made after you commented Simon and more suggestions were coming in but I understand the reasons behind it. 👍

fst

A suggestion (not sure whether the underlaying forum software would support that): Please consider to show the to-be-approved posting to the person who wrote it already - like a normal posting, just invisible to the others and with a "to be approved" message (so the poster knows that this is still in the approval pipeline and not shadowbanned ). That way we can still edit these postings while waiting for approval.
Currently one sees the last text one wrote in the comment section below, where we can also edit it. But I guess every click on "post comment" just creates a new posting and according to my experience the moderators usually just take the first posting of a sequence that looks like double/triple/etc. posts. So all further edits get lost. And I guess the double postings are tedious for the mods to wade through...

And perhaps the number of posts until one doesn't need approval could be reduced? It can take days until a posting is released, so this forum is currenly not really helpful for immediate questions until you are unlocked.

T3rm1

I agree. It's not very new user friendly right now. It's also weird that a comment is saved as a draft and appears again in the comment box of the same topic it was already posted to.

outstanding

Glad that @leecasey brought this up - agreeing with him, @ferdinand_strixner @T3rm1 (all the new comers like me). 

My adding to the thread: it would be nice to know the algorithm. Now I don't think it's mentioned anywhere, and frankly I took the draft remaining after post as a (permanent) bug of the forum software, not a feature affecting newbies.