What Would a Great Forum Moderator Toolbar Look Like?

Moderating the MSDN Forums can be tough work.  There are posts to be edited, questions to be moved, trouble users to deal with, and of course, questions to be answered.  Internally, we've been using an application called "Answerme" to help ease the burden of this moderation.  Answerme's essentially a webpage that allows us to add little pieces of metadata to the forums.  Outside of just the stuff that is exposed on the live forum site, we track extra metadata about the forums, such as what product team owns what forum, or what the internal customer support status of an individual question is.  Most importantly, Answerme allows us to assign questions to each other and soon, to collaboratively tag questions and search on those tags.  Yea, we joined the tagging bandwagon.  And, finally, to give credit where credit's due, Answerme was written as a pet project by Josh, and was meant to last for about six months.  Nearly a year and a half later, Answerme's still here, and won't be going anywhere for awhile...  :)

Now, Answerme's a great tool, but it has a key shortcoming--it's a tool that only works inside Microsoft.  This means that our community moderators--the real lifeblood of the forums community--are left out in the cold, with only the forum site itself as a tool.

I am going to be working on an IE toolbar for moderators of the Microsoft Forums that will allow moderators to have the same style of functionality that is available through Answerme internally--advanced search on the forums, question assignment, and community tagging.  I'd also like to add on some nifty features like forum thread bookmarking.  I'm planning on making this a project on CodePlex, and develop the entire project, specs and prototype to 1.0 release, with the help of the community moderators.

What would you like to see as part of a moderator toolbar?

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  July 19, 2006
  Dear Joe,
  
  Your project sounds very exciting, and our Institute is seeking similar tools for our online students.  Perhaps we can be involved with conceptualizations for academic purposes.
  
  American TESOL Institute
• Anonymous
  July 20, 2006
  Code buttons would be handy too :-)
• Anonymous
  July 20, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  July 25, 2006
  I don't think I would use a toolbar that much but want the functionality on the pages instead. Todays browsers are so complete that I have not feelt any use to have extra toolbars installed. Any feature a toolbar can do must be able to do via the webpage.
  
  The features I miss most is more advanced searches. Finding stale posts, for active forums these can be a few pages of browsing. To be able to do it in a subset of forums would also be interesting.
  
  Default functions/messages for otp and deletion of posts and allow multiple of those posts. Moderators are usually not posting dupes.
  
  For us moderators to have a specific contact for certain forums would be great. It is not always to be able to get the most proper contact point for some issues.
• Anonymous
  July 25, 2006
  Andreas, it's unlikely we'd see all of this type of functionality anytime soon in the Forums software.  This software is shared amongst several communities; some not even development related.  Much of what moderators do or want to do in MSDN Forums would not apply to the other communities and waiting for changes to the Forums software to get some sort of impact analysis and regression testing should not include holding breath.
• Anonymous
  July 25, 2006
  Mike, I agree canned messages would be ideal--it was an assumption of some of my suggestions.
  One change in the Forums software would be required through: for moderators to have the ability to duplicate post.  Having a canned message would be pointless if you can only post it once :-)
• Anonymous
  August 04, 2006
  Peter,  I am changing my mind. For the forums I would probably want a toolbar. There still need to be support for it but to be able to focus on what is important added functionality through a toolbar is probably most helpful.
  
  I would like a MSDN forum toolbar. Now I just need to get the IE team to implement a feature to only load/display addins/toolbars for specific sites. :)
• Anonymous
  August 04, 2006
  Too bad the IE team doesn't have a starter kit for writing managed add-ins for IE.... :)
• Anonymous
  August 09, 2006
  Well, it looks like I really am going to move forward on creating the moderators toolset that I first...
• Anonymous
  October 16, 2006
  A couple of months ago I created a small tool that utilized some of the cool meta tag searching capabilities