Disqus 2012 and Moderation Panel updated, set the text for mod badges and more

Today Disqus has pushed out an update to the moderation panel that includes a few updates, and I'm sure that you all will like it. Mind you, these updates are if you are running Disqus 2012, the latest version of Disqus, on your website.


Moderator Badges
If you didn't know, Disqus 2012 displayed site moderators in a "MOD" badge. The badge was originally green, but the background is now a grayish color that blends in a lot more with the Disqus 2012 color scheme. Tons of people on the Disqus blog added the idea to change the text in the moderator badge, and that feature has finally been added.

To change the text of the moderator badges, go to the settings tab of the admin panel, and the mod text box should be right under the Disqus 2012 area.

By default, the text is "Mod". As you can see, I changed my text to "Site Moderator". You can change it to what you want, but keep in mind my notes below.

 There is some limitations of this however. Naturally there is going to be a character limit, as if there wasn't the mod badge text would be so long that the embed wouldn't work properly. Big in length of course. As of this post, the max character length is 15. You can space out words. I'm not sure if special characters are supported, but from my looks I would think they are. If you do try, let me know of your results in the comments. If you try to modify the amount of characters accepted via a web inspector, it won't work. You'll get an error :P

When you are done making the settings change, your results should look like this:

Guest Commenting, inherited settings, etc  

Disqus has explained before that many settings that were set by the classic Disqus embeds are inherited when you switched on Disqus 2012. To change those settings, you had to switch off Disqus 2012, change the setting, and then switch it back on. More setting options have been added back to the moderation panel, allowing you to change the settings with Disqus 2012 still enabled. Guest commenting is now its own dedicated setting, and you can now have more flexibility with pre moderation. You can now choose to not pre moderate comments, pre moderator all comments, or now you can choose to pre moderate comments from users without verified emails. This is useful if you get lots of spam from registered Disqus accounts. If spammers still spam you, then that means at least the email address was real, or real when the email was verified. Additional spam protection for the folks who need it or want it.

Flagged comments is now a section of the admin dashboard, and you can now change those settings from the panel without changing the state of Disqus 2012 on your site. You can choose the amount of flags it takes before a comment is automatically removed from the embed, and whether to email a moderator when a post is flagged or not. You can see this as well as the other sections in this area below.

Issues
Despite the new changes within the moderation panel, the issue of default avatars on websites is still not functional. For my experience, trying to select an avatar has no effect. When you click "save changes", the avatar is still checked as default. Hope the Disqus team fixes this as soon as possible.