We don't want messages to sit waiting for a moderator to approve them, but we don't want to turn off moderation entirely. What we would like to be able to do is to simply have messages start off with a status of being ok, but still have a list of all new messages queued up for a moderator to review at their convenience. If they then find the message to be unacceptable, they can then mark it as unapproved sometime later.

Basically, we don't want users frustrated and threads die off because messages are held up for long periods of time waiting for a moderator to approve them. Especially since over 99.9% of posts are fine. However, we still want moderators to stay on top of what is being posted in their areas within the forum, so we want them to review all the posts. We just don't expect these volunteers to be living on the forum and approving posts every few minutes.

Messages have Report button. If something offences users they report it. Really it's not a problem at all.

YAF has built-in filter by post dates, when I was imlementing database paging I kept in mind the possiblility to filter posts by date/time, it's just not implemented on UI level but all required db logic already in place.

The only issue is not bad posts, however. More important actually is trying to get the moderators to respond or forward on topics that are interesting/warrant more attention.

And nothing beats having a checklist of non-reviewed messages that a moderator has to explicitly approve or unapprove to get it out of their queue. Also, knowing which of the many moderators has reviewed the messages is helpful. Additionally, being able to see what has not been reviewed by anyone is essential.

Bottom line, many people keep telling us that there are all these different ways to try and make up for the fact that this functionality doesn't exist in YAF - and none of them are practical in our environment nor are they at all effective when it comes to dealing with needing to make sure we keep good track of the what is being done or not being done by our moderators. It seems all these alternative options assume that every moderator is going to be diligent and 100% reliable on a regular and ongoing basis, and will keep themselves organized.

So basically you want a List of all new posts on the moderate Tab where the moderator can Flag the Message As reviewed.

So as solution, we already have the ms topics page which lists all the unread topics since the last visit. The only problem which currently isnt implemented is a proper solution that flags the message as read or unread. This is basically the same feature you want, but this would help all users.

Maybe that would work. There is a small difference between "read" and "approved", but maybe it's not too bad.

Again, I'm a little hesitant regarding different approaches, since the "assumed innocent" moderated forum works perfectly. It has a nice explicit queue of to-dos ready, it allows multiple moderators to review their assigned areas, and we can track who approves/rejects what and when they did it.

We've been using our customized versions of YAF with this functionality for about 5 years now.

If I was familiar with YAF best practices for creating a setting for this, I'd add it that way and submit it as a feature myself. However, I've just gone through the code and hard-coded the "assumed innocence" change so far.