Offer options to admin the site via bulk actions

[RichardTaylor]

This is a ticket for a general shift in strategy enabling sites to be administered by small teams of people even as they grow.

eg. Consider sections, perhaps on /admin/ showing requests reported as personal correspondence, vexatious, etc. with each request presented with titles and snippets. An administrator could scan down the list, uncheck any reports which don't look reasonable, before clicking "make all selected threads requester_only" which would then notify all users and those who made reports.

This would remove the need to deal with each request thread individually.

Integrating this with an email based support workflow might be tricky, it might be better as part of "Bring user support and takedown requests within the system #419 "

Related bulk admin action tickets :

• Select all button for checkboxes on list of annotations on user-admin page #3324
• Select all button for checkboxes on list of incoming messages at least on holding pen #5432
• Hide all requests from a user and ban them from the admin interface #3580

[RichardTaylor]

Today as an administrator the ability to add the same annotation to all, or a set of, a users' requests would have been useful.

The case in question was a username change, so the need for the annotations would have been removed if the feature "Username change without changing history" had been in place

[RichardTaylor]

An example of a case where bulk actions might help is identifying and banning spam user accounts.

We might want "select all" and "ban selected for spamming" buttons on user search; and to enable those features to be used to be used a view of the search results which included the profile text would be useful.

/admin/users?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=http&sort_order=created_at_desc&commit=Search#

[RichardTaylor]

I just moved all requests from one body to another (we had a duplicate body). A bulk admin action would have been useful here.

[RichardTaylor]

Specific example: #61

[RichardTaylor]

We had a case on WhatDoTheyKnow where a change had been made to some ~1000 requests. Had the ability to add annotations in bulk been available annotations on each request might have been posted.

In this case the ability to annotation all a user's requests would have been required.

[RichardTaylor]

I find myself wanting to add an "in the news" link to a set of some ~30 requests. I can easily identify the set of requests on a user admin page but adding the links will involve a lot of clicking and copying and pasting.

Related https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/1878 Enable a user to add an annotation to all, or a set of, their requests #1878

[RichardTaylor]

The ability to add tags in bulk to a set of requests would make it easier to link to a set of requests via one link. (Add ability to cite multiple requests via one link #5875 )

We have a feature for tagging bodies in response to a search on the body admin page, but not anything analogous for requests.

[garethrees]

Just noting this gist as a nice pattern for implementation https://gist.github.com/dhh/981520.

[RichardTaylor]

Are there opportunities to classify in bulk - perhaps with some automation assistance?

eg. show a page with the of the latest correspondence on say 50 unclassified requests where the words "not held" appear in the latest message, and have checkboxes to approve, or not, the classification of them all as "not held".

[RichardTaylor]

We've had two cases on WhatDoTheyKnow today where bulk admin tools for categories might have been useful. Perhaps a csv upload for category headings, or some other system for making edits/additions in bulk.

• https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/1334
• https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/1333

I suspect preparing spreadsheets/csv files for importing by developers might be the best approach for now in respect of these kinds of cases.