In this post, I'll show how we could improve the moderation process by following four axes : similarity check, ease of login, spam handling and avoiding moderation competition.
Utopian.io is a great initiative from @elear that aims to reward any valuable contribution made to an ongoing opensource project. I insist on the word valuable, since once Steemians saw the value of such a project, spammers tried to get their part of the cake. For this, a team of moderators was put at work (including myself) in order to check that the following guidelines were respected.
The system already works really well but I think it could get better and here is why:

Similarity check

No suspense, I'm starting with my main recommendation.
Among all the guidelines, there is one that is particularly hard to verify:

Depending on the opensource project, this can really be hard to check. For this to be accurate, the moderators would have to read all the posts, even those moderated by their colleagues. For now (and the project just started recently), there are contributions accepted under utopian-io github project every hour or so.

Reading all of these to check for similarity is unfeasible, therefore, I would strongly recommend adding a quick searchbar for looking for similarities:

The searchbar could be under the post (only in the Review section) and would allow moderators to enter one or more keywords after reading the post. It would then return a popup showing the closest results (by number of matches), and taking in consideration the current repository, tags and category.

This would improve greatly the filtering of non unique contributions.

Ease of login

I don't know if this part will be relevant to many people but some of us have more than one Steemit account. Since, I am working on my browser extension SteemPlus, I also happen to have a @steem-plus account, that I will use to post updates via Utopian.
However, I prefer to moderate through my main account @stoodkev. This being said, the problem is that when I logout from one of my accounts and click Login again, I will be directly logged in via SteemConnect, without the chance to change which account I want to use.

I believe this is not of first importance but could be easily fixed.

Handling spammers

Never thought my Latin lessons would be useful someday but if there is one thing I remember, that would be the ancients quotes like that one:

Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum (Seneca)

It means that to make errors is human, but to persevere in it is diabolic. I wouldn't go that far to say that spammers are diabolic but in order to save time, I think it is important to establish a kind of progressive block applied to the user. Moderators can hide the spammy posts this way: , utopian should take it into account and for example:

• First time a post from the user is 'Hidden forever' : Its human to make error right?
• Second time : Prevent user from posting for 24 hours.
• Third time: Prevent user from posting for 72 hours.
  So on.

Avoid useless rivalry between moderators

Since we moderators have an incentive for moderating, I think it is vital to avoid excessive competition between us as it could reflect on our work. Although I believe that we are all responsible Steemians, no one wants to spend ten minutes of her/his time reviewing a post, just to see that someone else accepted it beforehand. This could result on moderators working too fast and failing to find redundancies for example.

For this, I would recommend to install a lock on reviewed post that could be implemented that way.

Basically, that would reserve the exclusivity of reviewing the pending contribution to the said moderator for a predefined time, let's say 15 or 30 minutes, after what the post will be available for other moderators to review.

Hope this helps! I'm very excited to be part of the moderators of this project!

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Open Source Contribution posted via https://utopian.io

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