Complex Objects: Filtering Forum Posts
- By Brian Pontarelli
- Technology, Online Community
- October 1, 2013
Imagine you’re building a community forum for your online property that allows users to submit posts with a title, a body, images and video. Child safety is important to your brand, so you want to disallow forum posts that contain objectionable user generated content in any part of the post.
Chat filters and moderation software, typically deployed to prevent unwanted content in forum posts, require the client’s application to send each individual piece of content for moderators to determine if it should be posted, rejected, edited or resubmitted. It’s easy to see how tedious a process this can be when having to review all aspects of the blog submission. The CleanSpeak profanity filter and moderation software has a feature that addresses these submissions as one complex object making it faster and easier for moderators to evaluate and take action on user generated content.
Complex Objects Solution
- All parts of the forum post will be submitted as a single complex object to be filtered
- Clients will receive a single response (the response contains information about each individual piece of user generated content)
- There is no need for multiple filter and moderation responses
- Moderation time is reduced while response time is increased
A community manager sometimes needs to see the context of a discussion to determine if specific actions need to be taken. This can be tiresome with hundreds or thousands of forum posts to review. The complex objects solution groups this data together and presents it to the community manager all at once making context moderation simpler.
Forum Post Example:
Title: “What I want to do.”
Body: “Cut off John Doe's
Image: 2 Basketballs
Each individual piece of the post can be viewed as acceptable, but when grouped together the content is seen as threatening and should not be allowed. Filtered individually, a moderator might not understand the context and allow this content to be posted to the website. The complex objects solution is an invaluable tool which saves the community manager time and can help enhance the user experience for all members of the community.
Further Reading: