Update current groups moderation policy to: Give groups in moderation with some activity a warning before they get deleted

The exact policy is somewhat up for debate. There's what happens now and there's what could happen: http://groups.drupal.org/node/70433 but the "what could happen" that's laid needs someone passionate about it to work on it.

The about page (linked from the footer on every page) links to the current group submission guidelines which (roughly) are also at the top of the group add page.

So, re-titling to match the remaining bit of work to do. I'm +1 on the idea, though I think many group proposers will feel that their group is different from existing groups.

Moderation is hard. This year I've popped on every now and then and made a pass through the proposed groups. What I've run across:

* Several are spam, to promote a product or a company.

* Half or more are vague, really head-scratchingly vague. With no clear taxonomy or other way to categorize groups (which has virtues, I agree), it's often difficult to evaluate.

* A good many at any time are duplicates of existing regions or topics. There's a lot of Not Invented By Me in groups proposals.

* Seems like 20% or so are proposed in a moment of enthusiasm or half-baked thinking and are never followed up. Questions from moderators go ignored. I have been allowing a month of no reply before denying.

* Many groups are Closed groups when they really should be open. http://groups.drupal.org/node/174154 is where I raised this concern.

* Nearly all of the groups proposals reflect total ignorance of the proposal guidelines. http://groups.drupal.org/node/add/og should at least link to the guidelines, as the form instructions seem to not be enough. Would linking to guidelines help? Maybe for some.

* Moderatr module is clunky. My moderation process takes 3-4 tabs -- the aggregate list (with the postage-stamp-sized message forms), a tab for the exchanges (which each take clicks to read), a tab for the existing groups search.... And because g.d.o is usually so slow, there's a lot of click-and-wait. To go through 40-50 submissions, it takes anywhere from 1-3 hours.

The net result is that due to policies, general ignorance of such policies, poor submission quality, and technical constraints, the groups creation process is gummed up.

And all that is a preamble to my response to the restated, narrower topic of this issue per #1 above: Seeing whether there's any significant activity would take more tabs, more time, would it not be better to just leave intra-group posting disabled until a group is approved? Not sure of og6 offers this nuance in permissioning for group creators/moderators, but allowing people to get ahead of themselves by running a group ostensibly still in moderation sets them up for greater disappointment if rejected, and thus is poor UX anyway.

I think blocking posts in a group until it's approved is an OK idea *if* we want to stay with that model.

If we want to head toward the stack exchange model (which a lot of folks want, and I'm inclined to go with that) then I think we should allow immediate creation of posts into group. There is a message at the top of moderated groups that says something like "this group is in moderation, people will not be able to see it." We can easily improve that to say "This group is in moderation. It may get deleted if it doesn't match the guidelines."

Re the moderation UI: I think we can improve that so it includes count of members & count of posts. It's a form after all and we can hook_form_alter.

Also, thanks very much, Laura, for your work on moderation!
And thanks, Heather for raising these ideas.

I like a more open approach, especially if we have a neat way to merge groups, because duplication is the tricky issue, at least from the tools I can see. Spammy and otherwise inappropriate groups are easier to deal with using existing tools.

Moving this over to the g.d.o queue.

Our moderation process has changed a good deal since this issue was created, and the current process gives most groups at least 7 days notice before anything is deleted:

https://www.drupal.org/node/2346927

Thanks for that link. I wasn't aware the process had changed so that's good to know.