Our current process of documenting status and role changes of user accounts is opening an issue in Webmasters queue. This creates public record and is great. However, when trying to find out when/why something happened after the fact, it is not so easy. Searching through the queue can be time consuming, usernames can change, sometimes an issue has only url to the person's profile page and search fails when you are trying to find them, etc.
We need an easier way to see such important changes right on the user profile.

Over at #2446853: Add an admin-only user notes field we've introduced a new field on user profiles. Admin-only 'Notes' field, which is a simple text area. It is not displayed on the profile page right now, and can only be viewed on top of the user edit page.

Let's start using it for a bit to see if it's helpful and what further changes we might wanna make.

I suggest we start with documenting there:

  • advanced roles granted to a user (content moderator and up)
  • blocking of a user account in unusual cases (we don't need to do this for obvious spammers being blocked every day, only when there is a potential of questions later)

Proposed format for notes:
DD.MM.YY Something something happened [link to issue if any] - username

Example: https://www.drupal.org/user/2360770/edit

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Since this is a simple text area and we aren't creating revisions like on book pages, we should be careful not to overwrite each other.

In the future we might make this process a little bit easier and also accessible to non-admin roles (such as webmaster) by adding automation like:

  • automatically add a note when user is blocked (so there is no need to go on user/edit form)
  • when 'block' link is clicked on the user profile, display a small popup with text field to add a reason for block (default to 'spam' :) ), whatever entered into the field gets included into automated note generated above.

Comments

lizzjoy’s picture

I'm ++ on the automation ideas above. Those would be most helpful.

dddave’s picture

Yeah, automation would be snazzy.

gobinathm’s picture

@lizzjoy / @dddave, should this be moved to infrastructure queue ?

avpaderno’s picture

@gobinathm The part about using the new field is for webmasters / user administrators; the part about automatically adding a note is not for the infrastructure queue.
For the automation part, it would be better to open a new issue for the Drupal.org customizations project. It would also be preferable if the user who open this feature request is willing to work on the code.

avpaderno’s picture

Status: Active » Fixed

I am setting this issue as the user profile field has been added. For the automation part, that is code to add to the custom modules used for Drupal.org.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.