Posting moderation (Features)

by ralphdn, Sunday, April 27, 2008, 16:12 (5805 days ago)

I hope someone's listening, and since I'm a newbie here I hope I'm not violating some regulation.

I feel that posting moderation is a very important feature which I haven't found in mlf. Posting moderation is an option which results in all postings being queued for inspection by a moderator or admin before they are displayed in the forum.

I have had a couple of forums which I had to close because of nagging - people who made it their life purpose to destroy my forum with destructive, abusive postings which could not be blocked via software, and which had to be removed immediately due to their content. Such postings contain abusive content, or for example often contained usernames and passwords for other membership homepages, links to p0rnographic photos, etc.

I was able to re-open the forums when the forum provider made the posting moderation option available. This option virtually shuts the door to the naggers.

I have installed mlf and I love it, I live in terror of having to close it if posting moderation is not made available!

All the best,
Ralph
ralphdn

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Posting moderation

by Silan, Sunday, April 27, 2008, 16:57 (5805 days ago) @ ralphdn

Yes, I am also with you.
It is really a very important feature.

I hope somebody is hearing us.

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Posting moderation

by Uli, Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 11:59 (5802 days ago) @ Silan

Hi,

I didn´t hear you, reading works as well... ;-)

What about using the contact-form for unregistered guests to write their messages?

OK, the admin/mods have to create a user-account manually and copy/paste the postings to the forum.
But, after a specified number of accepted contributions you send the password to the user.

Otherwise you would have to create new functions and extend your database, i suppose.

Uli

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Posting moderation

by ralphdn, Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 12:13 (5802 days ago) @ Uli

Something like this is possible, of course; however, my experience with other forums in the past has been that the board virtually dies when something like this is done. Several boards which I administered in the past which were completely open and were tremendously active died overnight as soon as restrictions were put in place which required anything other than typing something and pressing enter.

If I may mention the name "parsimony," they implemented posting moderation in the middle of a situation which was causing their forums to be closed by aggressive people with just that in mind, smearing text, profanities, p0rnographic photos and things like user passwords etc. into the forums. Us mods and admins had to sleep with one ear towards the sms or email which said that something had been posted, so we could jump out of bed and check and remove the posting immediately if necessary. And just at the point where an important forum of mine was about to have to be closed, the posting moderation feature was offered as an option, and overnight the door was slammed shut on the type of naggers who smear boards full of destructive shit.

People want and need to be able to just write something spontaneously, and that's what a really active forum lives from. And the only true solution to the problem IMHO is posting moderation, which involves no complicaton for the writere and near immediate presentation of the posting, most forum users are familiar with it and accept this.

I am (was, I'm now 66) a professional programmer and I can't imagine that the option would be so terribly extensive: a flag field on the database and only flagged postings (those released by the admin or mod) are displayed, along with some code of course.

mlf is tremendous, and I know that it's not in place for me to be demanding, and I don't want to be, in any sense. I just hope that a feature like this is up high on the mlf development priority list!

Thanks for the fact that this great, simple forum exists and is available for dummies like me!

All the best,
Ralph
ralphdn

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