ShowTable of Contents
Introduction
Moderation is a component in IBM® Connections 4.0 that allows moderators and Community owners to better control what is displayed in certain applications. Moderators can review Blogs, Forums, and Files content before it is posted to Connections, and manage content after it is added to IBM Connections.
This ability can be important in applications open to the general public, if an organization is sensitive to undesirable content being posted. The Moderation application has many characteristics and provides many functionalities; for example, it:
- Has two interfaces, Global moderation for global moderators and Community moderation for community owners.
- Supports two types of moderation, content approval (Pre-moderation) and content flagging (Post-moderation).
- Interacts with the Blogs, Files, Forums, Communities applications in Connections
- Allows flexible configuration
Also in IBM Connections 4.0, a feature has been added that allows Community owners to enable/disable moderation of his/her own communities.
All these factors can make the Moderation application difficult to adopt, use, and configure. The goal of this document is to provide a detailed introduction to Moderation configurations, to help you better understand and use it.
Figure 1 shows the workflow of content Moderation.
Figure 1. Moderation workflow
Understanding Moderation concepts
Moderated content
The content to be moderated includes:
- Standalone and Community blog entries and comments
- Standalone and Community forums posts (topics and replies)
- Community files content and comments (including Media Gallery)
Global Moderation
The Global Moderation interface:
- Allows for a systematic review of all content (for supported applications) yet to be reviewed and managed by designated Global Moderators.
- Is visible only to users who have been assigned the J2EE Global-Moderator role for the Moderation component.
- Is accessed via the Moderation link in the application menu bar.
- Allows Moderation to be enabled for one, two, or all three types of content (Files, Blogs, and Forums).
Community Moderation
The Community Moderation interface:
- Allows Community owners to review and manage moderated content of their own communities.
- Is accessed via the Moderation link in the Community navigation panel.
- Can also be accessed by Global Moderators who have the highest moderation privilege
- Lets Community owners enable/disable moderation they own, if the Connections administrator enables the feature in the configuration file.
Community moderation can be enabled for one, two, or all three types of content (Files, Blogs, and Forums).
Configuring Moderation
Users can configure properties for moderation in one configuration file, “contentreview-config.xml”. This section describes how to configure the properties and what result they have in the Moderation application. Because Forums has the most properties, and Blogs and Files have only a sub-set of Forums properties with the same structure, we use Forums as an example in this section (see listing 1).
Listing 1. Forums properties in contentreview-config.xml
First, let's discuss the two properties in contentreview-config.xml that have been added in IBM Connections 4.0, “forceForAllCommunities” and “enabledByCreation.” For details on other properties, refer to the
Connections 4.0 product documentation.
forceForAllCommunities. Set this property to “true” to require Moderation for Communities. The moderation options are greyed out, and the Community owner is not allowed to change them on the Community form. By default this attribute is set to "false". This property is only for Community moderation.
When forceForAllCommunities=true, the moderation options on Community forms display as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2. Moderation options when forceForAllCommunities is set to true
When forceForAllCommunities=false, the moderation options on Community forms display as shown in figure 3.
Figure 3. Moderation options when forceForAllCommunities is set to false
enabledByCreation. This setting determines whether the Moderation check boxes in the Start Community form should be checked when a user clicks “Start a Community”. It is applicable only when forceForAllCommunities is set to “false”. This property is only for Community moderation.
Moderation logic
As mentioned above, the Moderation feature allows Community owners to enable or disable Moderation of Communities they own from the Community UI.
Note, however, that this ability is under the restriction of the Global Moderation configuration (via “contentApproval” and “ownerModerate”), which is configured in the system by the Connections administrator and invisible to Connections users.
Also, the Global Moderation is configured in three applications separately in a configuration file as shown above in listing 1, all of which make the Moderation configuration metrics complicated. This section provides a detailed explanation for Moderation logic.
For different configuration metrics, it will answer these questions:
- Will the owner's content be moderated (pre-moderation)?
- Will the author's content be moderated (pre-moderation)?
- Can published content be flagged as inappropriate (post-moderation)?
- Can the Community owner enable/disable moderation of the Communities he owns?
- Can the Community owner moderate the content of Communities he owns?
- Can the Global Moderator moderate the content?
Relationship among several properties
- ownerModerate of one service works only when contentApproval is true for this service.
- ForceForAllCommunities works only for those services in which ownerModerate is set to true.
- When moderation is enabled (contentApproval = true) and ownerModerate is true for service, the service name will display on the Moderation options on the Community form, when Community owners create or edit their communities.
Community owners can only enable/disable moderation of services that appear in the Moderation options; that is, if the service name is not listed on Moderation options, the owner cannot manage the moderated content of the service in his community. At this time, whether the content of such service is moderated is determined by the contentApproval setting of this service in contentReview-config.xml.
So there may be some confusion for users. For example, Connections administrator sets Blogs with the following two kinds of setting in contentreview-config.xml:
- contentApproval=false, contentFlagging=false
- contentApproval=true & ownerModerate = false, contentFlagging=true & ownerModerate=false
The moderation options on the Community form are both the same as shown in figure 4.
Figure 4. Moderation options on Community form
However, the meanings of the above two settings are different, in that:
- Standalone and community blogs entries and comments are NOT moderated at all, and published Blogs content cannot be flagged either.
- Standalone and community Blogs entries and comments are both moderated. Published content can be flagged too, but only Global Moderators can review the moderated content from the Global Moderation UI. Community owners cannot review the moderated content of Blogs to do actions to them.
Community Instance Level Moderation is disabled
Under two situations, moderation options on the Community form are hidden, and Community owners have no control of moderation of three services in their Communities. This also applies to the combination of the two situations for three services; for example, contentApproval=false for Blogs, and contentApproval=true & ownerModeate=false for Files and Forums.
(1) Global Moderation is disabled for all of three applications. When the properties of contentreview-config.xml are set as shown in listing 2, the Moderation feature is disabled.
Listing 2. Property settings when Moderation feature is disabled
With such settings, the six questions listed at the beginning of this section are answered as shown in table 1.
Table 1. Moderation results with settings of contentApproval(contentFlagging)=false
| Owner content is moderated? | Author content is moderated? | Published content can be flagged as inappropriate | Community owner can enable/disable moderation of community? | Community owner can moderate the content of community? | Global moderator can moderate the content? |
contentApproval(contentFlagging)=false | No | No | No | No | No | No |
(2) Global moderation is enabled but owner moderation is disabled for all three applications. When the properties of contentreview-config.xml are set as shown in listing 3, Global Moderation is enabled, but Owner Moderation is disabled for all three applications.
Listing 3. Property settings when Global Moderation is enabled but owner moderation is disabled
With such settings, the six questions listed at the beginning of this section are answered as shown in table 2.
Table 2. Moderation results for settings of contentApproval(contentFlagging)=true & ownerModerate=false
| Owner content is moderated? | Author content is moderated? | Published content can be flagged as inappropriate | Community owner can enable/disable moderation of community? | Community owner can moderate the content of community? | Global moderator can moderate the content? |
contentApproval(contentFlagging)=true
ownerModerate =false | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Community Instance Level Moderation is enabled
For the two situations described in Section 4.2, the moderation options are invisible to community owners and are unchangeable. In this section, we introduce other situations, in which community owners can change the moderation configuration of their own communities.
Listing 4 shows the contentApproval and ownerModeate properties settings for Blogs, Files, and Forums in contentreview-config.xml. We use the Blogs application as an example for determining what moderation results are obtained for the different settings of Blogs properties.
Listing 4. Property setting of Blogs, Files, and Forums in contentreview-config.xml
Because we must avoid the situations in Section 4.2 (all the settings of the three services properties are false, etc.), we assume that all properties of Files and Forums are set to “TRUE” for every setting of Blogs. The moderation results are listed in table 3.
Table 3. Moderation results for different property settings of Blogs
Service - BLOGS |
ContentApproval (contentFlagging) | TRUE | TRUE | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | FALSE |
ownerModerate | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | FALSE | True/False | true/false |
forceForAllCommunities | TRUE | FALSE | TRUE | FALSE | TRUE | FALSE |
Moderation Options of community | N/A | TRUE | FALSE | N/A | TRUE | FALSE | N/A | true/false |
Community Blogs: |
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Owner content is moderated? | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Author content is moderated? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Published content can be flagged as inappropriate | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Community owner can enable/disable service moderation of community? | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
Community owner can moderate the service content of community? | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No |
Global moderator can moderate the service content? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Standalone Blogs: |
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Owner content is moderated? | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Author content is moderated? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Published content can be flagged as inappropriate | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Global moderator can moderate the service content? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Conclusion
You should now be familiar with the Connections 4.0 Moderation feature and how to configure it, and with the meanings of the different properties in the configuration file and how to set them to achieve your desired results.
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Resources
Participate in the IBM Connections Forum:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcforum.nsf
Refer to the developerWorks Connections product page:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/connections/
Refer to the IBM Connections 4.0 Reviewer’s Guide:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/ibmconnectionsrg4/index.html
About the authors
Rong Rong Wang is a Staff Software Engineer based at IBM's Beijing, China, Lab. She currently works as the Team Lead for the Functional Verification Test team for the Connections Moderation feature and also works on testing Metrics in IBM Connections. She can be contacted at
rrwang@cn.ibm.com.
Wan Rong Liu is a Staff Software Engineer based at IBM's Beijing, China, Lab. He has roughly six years of experience in large-scale software development, the past two years of which his focus has been on working on IBM Connections Moderation and Metrics features. You can reach Wan Rong at
wrliu@cn.ibm.com.