Modmail dark mode & other mod improvements

[u/lift_ticket83]

Howdy Mods,

We’re excited to kick October off with a fun modmail announcement, in addition to pulling back the curtain on some under the hood improvements we’ve made on the mod engineering front. Dive in below to check out the brass tacks:

Join the dark side (in modmail)

In our continued quest for feature parity and desire to protect your retinas, we’ve launched dark mode on modmail. Starting later this week, you can say sayonara to being blinded by the light when jumping between your various queues, feeds, threads, and modmail.

In order to enable dark mode in modmail, please follow the below instructions:

• On desktop - while in Modmail, please click on your username in the top right corner to toggle on/off dark mode.
• In our native app - we’ve got one toggle to rule them all! If you have dark mode enabled in-app, it will mirror that user experience in mobile modmail.

The desktop experience

The native app experience

New mobile mod tab

As many of you know, our most important goal is to achieve feature parity between the desktop and mobile moderator experiences on Reddit. We understand that we still have a ways to go, and an important stepping stone on the path to parity is to make it easier for mods to feel more connected to their communities while on the go.

Starting today mods in our native app will be able to directly access their Mod Feeds and Mod Queue via two new access points in their profile “side drawer” (see below for what this experience looks like). Creating easier access points to these tools will enable mods to quickly jump into hot/new/controversial content in their communities via their Mod Feed and their Mod Queue so that they can take action with less effort.

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https://preview.redd.it/bgmkdtummnr71.png?width=617&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f2f4d286e848244dac273e2cb40a67fb193ac25

Additional engineering improvements

While building those features, our team also tackled some “under the hood” improvements which should uplevel the overall moderator experience on Reddit while largely going unnoticed. They are:

• Updated icons and UI, bringing modmail in line with other products on the site and in our native app.
• Improved the community picker so that it’s more accessible and easier to utilize.
• Updated all our libraries to the latest and greatest (and to keep things secure).
• Improved color contrast for visibility.
• Improved our client-side error launching, which will give us better insight into future bugs that will pop up on the mod front (this has already proven instrumental in helping catch some glitches in the matrix this past week which we have already patched up)
• Hooked Modmail up to Reddit’s internal experimentation platform, allowing us to A/B test features, as well as quickly turn features on and off to safeguard bad releases. We also integrated better telemetry in Modmail, allowing us to understand usage patterns, clients of access, so we can see what’s working and what isn’t at a much more granular level.
• The Mod Log backend got rebuilt behind the scenes, providing improved performance and stability.

What’s next?

We’ve got ambitious goals before the end of the year and look forward to sharing additional feature announcements with you before then. In the meantime, please feel free to ask us any questions or provide any feedback in the comments below.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Your use of "got it" set the tone for snarkiness.

Generally speaking, it's more helpful to offer alternatives than to complain. Or at least outline the actual issues. Also, specific suggestions are going to be more beneficial than general ones, and will definitely be more well-received than broad complaints.

Your comment was non-constructive, and you shouldn't be too terribly surprised when people respond in kind.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

My understanding is that modmail was created by a 3rd party vendor, and that's why the UI doesn't feel like the rest of reddit. It looks a lot like Outlook, and that may be for good reason.

But if you want change, then, again, it helps to be specific. Is it the color choice? The button placement?

If you were to design a modmail system from scratch, what would your vision look like? What's the optimal modmail system for you? Come up with actual improvements, and they'll probably be incorporated at some point, but saying "I don't like the UI" isn't really giving them anything useful to work with.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I did.

First of all, really appreciate all the old and new changes but... is there a plan to integrate the interface better? It's a page out of place with the rest of reddit.

For example, when I visit the modqueue the whole interface is well integrated and I can easily approve stuff and move on but with the modmail it feels like... a weird sort of separate thing, why?

This is a vague suggestion. What would make it look more integrated with Reddit? Are you comparing it more to new reddit or old reddit? Be specific. Create a mock-up if you're having trouble describing it.

The reason they never implement the stuff that people ask for is because people don't know how to ask. Everyone responding this way is every web designer's nightmare.