[Imc-uk-useability] Hiding things ideas

[Maria Ng (News From Nowhere Bookshop)]

V much like new comments display!   (btw Should we notify imc-uk-features if promoting a comment & give reasons?Opposite of hiding things!)

A thought on 328181 'Site update to display of comments' and its comments.  A couple of commenters wanted to see reasons for why particular things are hidden, and I'm inclined to agree with them. 

Had a couple of ideas. I have NO idea of the doability of these ideas:

Suggestion:
Build into the process of hiding a comment/feature a new field for person doing the hiding to enter reasons for hiding. The text in this field would then appear in the actual feature page - in a 'Why was this article hidden?' box (which should also include a link to the Editorial Guidelines).  Just the same sort of terse message as gets posted to imc-uk-features - no need to be more elaborate.  (There should probably also be a field for name of admin person who did the hiding, but this should not appear on the public site).  

Related time-saving suggestion: 
Automate the process of notifying imc-uk-features of hiddens.  When something is hidden, have the server generate an email to imc-uk-features which would include: article title & ref, reason for hiding (entered as in above suggestion), name of person who did hiding. Possibly also list regions/topics to which the article is currently attached.  Also url of the article in question, to make it easy to go and look at it.  (Similarly for hiding comments - comment ref & title plus also article ref, title,url etc)

(Or could just be a mailto: link addressed to imc-uk-features which opens up a message window with above info already in body of message, so admin person just has to send it.  )

Why? 
Transparency.  Reasonable for ordinary readers to feel a bit antsy about articles/comments being hidden, (not just original authors of hidden things) - i.e. Indymedia supposed to be open/diy/non-hierarchical news publishing, yet unseen people hide things and don't say why on the site itself.  

(While features list archive is public, there doesn't seem to be any search facility, so very very time-consuming for someone to actually go in there and find out why a particular article was hidden.  Even if there was a search facility, many readers might not realise that they'd have to search by the article reference number, or even recognise where to find it in the url)

Also, would probably be educational for readers/contributors to see editorial guidelines in practice.  (I bet lots of  people never ever look at the editorial guidelines before posting).  E.g. people who repost corporate news, or post non-news - they might then think 'uh? those indymedia people say my article is non-news???!!' and might have a think and work out why.

Maria (imc liverpool)


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