Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suite 4.0.
Part 1: Setting up moderators
Part 2: Approval Queue
Part 3: Reports
Part 4: Effective Moderation
Part 5: Warnings
Multi-moderation
It's really important that moderators can quickly take action against undesirable content without spending too much time or effort. If your community is the victim of a spam attack, or perhaps even just an over-enthusiastic poster, you want to be able to hide, lock, move, merge and delete content quickly.
Throughout the entire suite, whenever you content (be that topics in IP.Board, files in IP.Downloads or even comments on a particular file in IP.Downloads or anything else you can think of), as a moderator, when you move your mouse over it, you will see a checkbox, and at the top of the list, you have controls to quickly select particular items:
As you can see, in addition to checking individual items or all items, quick options are available for me to select all hidden, unapproved, pinned, locked or featured items, or even the items that I personally have read or not read.
After selecting one or more items, you will see a menu appear at the bottom:
This menu is incredibly smart. It automatically shows you options available based on the type of item you're looking at and the specific items you've selected. For example, here in IP.Downloads I see the options (from left-to-right): feature, pin, hide, lock move and delete (if you hover over any of the buttons a tooltip will show you what it is). If, I'm in IP.Board instead, I see a slightly different bar:
Here, I have two new options: merge and Saved Actions (the new name for the IP.Board "Multimod" feature which allows you to define specific actions to do multiple moderator actions quickly).
Also, it takes into consideration the specific items I've selected - if I select items which are not currently hidden, there is the "hide" button - if I select items which are currently hidden, there is the "unhide" button - and if I select a mix of both, I see both buttons.
After clicking a button, the action is performed on all items and I'm taken back to the screen.
Here's a short video demonstration of this in action:
Quick editing
Editing posts and comments is something moderators do on a daily basis. We already have quick reply (where when making a post or comment, it appears using AJAX without a page reload) and now in 4.0, we have quick edit too.
When you click edit, the post/comment immediately changes into an editor:
And when you click save, the editor disappears and is replaced by the new content.
Here's a short video demonstration of this in action:
