Introducing Comment Locking and Categories for Reports

Big projects usually shift the conversation to external bug tracking platforms and therefore don’t want to end up having lots of comments on their OBS project. For this reason we are introducing comment locks. On top of this we enhanced the reporting feature by a set of categories to ease the submission.

Content Moderation is part of the beta program.

Our journey into content moderation began back in October 2023, initially addressing comment locks and report categories. Since then, we’ve expanded this feature to include canned responses and moderator decisions, facilitating smoother request reporting and the reporting of users from comments. Following that, we’ve honed in on optimizing canned responses and introducing various UI upgrades, Last time we focused on improving the communication and decision making. This time we improved the report notifications for moderators.

Comment Locks

There can be several reasons for not wanting comments on specific projects, packages or requests. A very common one is simply to shift the daily conversations to a dedicated place that is better suited for this purpose. Until now, the only option you had was to leave a friendly comment with a hint. From now on, you can simply lock the commenting functionality directly from the comment section. As a maintainer you still will be able to leave a comment. For everyone else it will be locked.

Locked comment section from the maintainer perspective:

Report Categories

The reasons for reporting a project, package, user or comment are often similar. Comments often fall under the category spam, packages might be submitted with a forbidden license, … To avoid that you have to repeat yourself, we introduced a set of categories from which you can simply select when submitting a report. For cases that are not obvious you can still explain yourself in more detail with an additional note in the reason field.

Comment history

Moderators didn’t have a way to check the original content of a comment after it got edited. Without the full picture it is hard to make a decision for a reported comment. Was the user really behaving inappropriately at some point in the comment section? With the newly added comment history, we can judge better from now on.

How To Give Us Feedback

There are two ways to reach us:

• On GitHub, by opening an issue and / or commenting on an already opened issue.
• On IRC, by talking directly to us. We are in the channel #opensuse-buildservice on Libera.Chat.

Please note that we favor GitHub to gather feedback as it allows us to easily keep track of the discussions.