I am confused about this one. As an admin, I can "hide" inappropriate feedback, and "unhide" it upon review. When I looked at the dashboard, I noted several "hidden" comments, but I could not tell why they were hidden. Were those ones hidden as some kind of test? I did not see offensive comments or usernames involved and, in fact, only one of them seemed to have a comment at all, most of them just had an emoticon. Might be necessary to have a comment field (either generally visible like log entries, or visible to other admins) simply so that the reason for hiding is quickly apparent. Risker 04:49, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
Topic on Talk:Feedback Dashboard/Phase 1
Brandon or Howie should really comment here, but my feeling is that the purpose of the show/hide feature is only to handle abusive comments. If admins are hiding comments that are merely blank or devoid of lots of content then that's not good. Since the tool is also supposed to be an aggregate measurement of the mood of newbies, not just a tool for substantial comments, it's okay if there are messages without a lot of meat to them.
Hrm. So, the design I made did not include such things as a "reason" for hiding the comment.
During the implementation, Andrew included this (possibly because he's, you know, crazy smart). However, he was asked to remove the feature because it felt like an extra degree of difficulty (I actually didn't see this version; I was on vacation, so I wasn't able to comment).
I'm thinking, based on your comments, that this may be useful and we should probably re-investigate the issue at hand. I'll talk with Howie on Monday about it.
I feel like the reason entry is what admins are used to seeing. It makes me a little uncomfortable to hide comments without providing a reason that is logged.
Most if not all log actions have a log reason. MediaWiki almost presumes there always is a log reason (much like the edit summary). It's not required to be non-empty but support for it is throughout the core framework. Adding it should be simple and is probably the reason Andrew included it originally, to match other log actions in MediaWiki.
Especially when hiding things, being able to provide a reason is useful.
As another follow up on this... it may be appropriate to have a "flag this feedback" button for non-sysops where the hide button would be, along with a filter for flagged feedback if you're a sysop.