This is a request for comments! Would this help you improve your moderator workflow? Anything I am missing or getting wrong?
Currently, if a new user signs up and is flagged by Akismet as a spammer, the only options available to the moderator handling the flag are No and Delete User.
It’s not uncommon for us to hear from customers that they are uncomfortable with immediately deleting the user, or that they can’t do it for legal reasons. They’d rather silence the user to give themselves some time to investigate and also to give the user a chance to make a case for themselves that they are not spammers but deserving of membership in the community. Doing this is awkward, because it means answering No and then going to the admin user list to find and silence the user.
So the suggestion is to add a Silence user option here. There is already robust functionaltiy available around silencing users and making sure they are well informed about why they are silenced and for how long. The user silencing fields would be prefilled. Akismet would not yet be trained that this user is spam.
Later, moderators can unsilence users or delete the users. If they delete them, then they should have the option to train akismet at this point that they are spam. I am not sure if this is currently the case, even if the Delete and block this email and IP address is chosen. It seems to make sense that it would be.
So in summary, the moderator workflow could be:
spammer is flagged by akismet
moderator reviews flagged user and decides what to do
not spammer → user allowed to join site, akismet not trained
delete spammer → akismet trained immediately
silence spammer → akismet is not trained (yet)
after suitable wait, moderator deletes silenced spammer
Delete only → akismet not trained
Delete and block → akismet is trained
Moderators could also just let the silenced users pile up - there is no particular harm in having them in the database because they are silenced.
The todo would be:
Silence option added when reviewing users flagged by akismet as spam
when selected, the silencing modal is prefilled with “Forever” timeframe and silence reason “Other → User spam”
when submitted, user is silenced and receives silencing email
staff action is logged to the database
Related todos I think would be:
limit access to user profiles of silenced users
review how the Delete and block this email and IP address feature works and if it doesn’t exist add Akismet training when user is deleted in this case
Discuss this on our forum.