There’s a fine line between freedom of speech and censorship.
Invision Community always aims to empower community leaders with options to encourage an open dialogue within a community, while including barriers for members who choose to ignore the guidelines.
Invision Community’s latest release, 4.6.11, includes a simple but powerful new feature to help you shape your community’s tone.
It’s called Block Submission.
Block submission stops a member’s message from being posted if it includes any word(s) added to your Word Filters list with the “Block Submission” option enabled.
Word Filters, a previously existing feature, allows community owners to prohibit profanity in the community. If a member types a word included on the banned words list, the platform will automatically either...
- Replace the word with something else you set
- Hold the post for moderation
- Or, with our new Block Submission feature, notify the member they must amend their post.
Located: ACP -> System -> Settings -> Posting -> Word Filters -> Add Word Filter
Here is an example:
I added the word “hate” to the Word Filters list in the Admin Control Panel and selected the Block Submission option.
Now, when a member tries to post the word hate, a message pops up indicating it wasn’t published and why.
QuoteUnfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
hate
The member must modify their comment in order for the post to go live. In this scenario, that would look like taking out the word hate.
Feel free to change the default warning message (the text located in the orange message bar above) to something better suited for your community - it's located in the Languages settings in your ACP.
Why did we create Block Submission?
This feature not only helps automatically moderate content, but more importantly, it sets a precedent to members regarding what is (and isn’t) accepted.
Gently notifying members that their comment doesn’t align with your community’s guidelines helps maintain the existing culture you’ve worked hard on cultivating, as well as your initiative to keep the language and sentiment positive.
Interested in trying our block submission feature out? Please upgrade to 4.6.11!
If you don’t have an Invision Community license yet, please reach out to me and I’ll help get you started.
Thoughts on our latest feature? Sound off in the comments (just make sure it passes our new vibe check 😉).
