My first post stuck in moderation?

Hi! I’m new here. Last night I made my first post, in the new Hadean Lands hint thread. It hasn’t been approved yet. That by itself isn’t cause for alarm, but now, even logged in, I can find no indication anywhere — that thread, my control panel, my post history — that I have a post waiting on moderation.

Did that post actually go through? It was pretty lengthy; it had a full dump of my progress.

If it did and I’m being impatient, I’m sorry; at least this post can act as a control for moderation times now.

I’m not sure if there’s any way to see unapproved posts except through the moderation queue. But it was submitted successfully, and has now been approved.

I’m wondering if there could be an auto-response from the Admin account to someone who made their first post, so they can be sure? Maybe also a trigger message from Admin once the post is approved? I’m assuming that notifications go to the person’s email address by default, so they will know.

It seems between this post and the Vancouver IF group post on facebook, people are genuinely confused about if their post is out there, and it’d be easy to forget. And so we may be losing new members that way, but there’s a simple way to remedy that.

By default, when a post is approved by a mod, phpBB does send the author an email to let them know it’s gone through. I don’t know about the other mods, but I always leave the “notify author” box checked when I approve a post.

Pre-moderation, I think the ideal situation would be for unmoderated posts to be visible to their authors with a note saying that they’re awaiting approval. I don’t know if there’s a phpBB mod that enables that, but we could look into it. I know a lot of new members do get confused and double-post, thinking their original post didn’t go through.

Oh, neat! I didn’t realize this. Very likely I remembered things wrong from when I signed up, but I think it’s entirely possible things have been updated :slight_smile:.

So thanks for clearing things up about my assumptions without bringing the smackdown. I was just guessing about what happened, and it’s good to read you all have ways (and are thinking of new ones) not to let new posters slip through.

Messages in the moderator queue should be made to time out eventually and post it anyways if nobody either accepts or rejects it in that time. The administrators will have to figure out what the time limit would be, possibly something in the range from four days up to four weeks.

I do think that Emerald’s suggestion look like good though too, that you should add a note to mention that you have written a message but it is awaiting approval, so that you can know that the message has been posted.