I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Ideas :
- Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it.
- Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation.
- Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting.
- Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two).
- Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community.
- Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.
Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.
I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.
I'm not against any of that.
What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It's a nice-to-have.
Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.
As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.
Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.
Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)
Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven't shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.
Well I'm thinking in terms of how to 'shore up' the fediverse, so to speak - to make it able to cope with potential future growth. I do think all of the examples in my OP that I've given are pretty general and one or more of them would be implemented by most communities the moment they were able to do so.