ocPortal Tutorial: Censorship and control of a community site

Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts

Depending on your site policies (for a good discussion of this, see the "Legal and social responsibilities" tutorial), you are likely to require some tools to help you maintain the policy. Some of these tools actively enforce your policy, some of them allow you to 'moderate' to maintain your own policy, and some of them provide punishment for users that abuse policy (such that they may be removed from causing further harm, or made an example of such that other users do not 'follow suit').

Table of contents

ocPortal Tutorial: Censorship and control of a community site

Tools that actively enforce your policy

Working with the word filter

{!DOC_WORDFILTER}
The word filter makes no attempt to try and detect when users try to "cheat it", as this would be a futile struggle: if users abuse the filter, then they are almost certainly knowingly so, and thus setting themselves up for punishment.

Tools for moderation

Using the points system for punishment

ocPortal, by default, will not allow most forms of non-trusted content to appear live on the website without validation by the staff. When a user that is not in a trusted user-group posts content, then they will have no choice but to have it posted as non-validated, and an e-mail will be dispatched to the staff. The staff can then choose what to do with the content.
There is also a page where staff can see all unvalidated content, in case something slips through their fingers. They can then choose to edit the content to make it valid, as they would as if they were reading a validation e-mail.
By default, the forum, the chat rooms, and CEDI, are the main exceptions where validation is not required. This is because these are community orientated areas of the website, where instant posting is desirable.

Note

The word 'unvalidated' is used a lot in ocPortal. It is not a real English word, but it helps us convey that an entry is not publicly visible and awaiting staff validation. Unvalidated does not mean 'invalidated' (which means that something has been explicitly marked as bad).

Naturally, privileged users may edit and delete any content on the system; by default, these privileged users are those in the staff user-groups. It is possible to configure ocPortal so that users may moderate their own content, as well as for staff to do so: by default (at the time of writing), no non-staff user-groups are granted this permission.

Tools for punishment

Making a warning

A warning as displayed on the Personal Zone of a member

There are a number of ways to punish members who do not follow site policy, including:

Banning the member
Warning the member
Charging points to the member, or giving the member a negative gift
Reducing a member in rank

As all these methods work on members, but not users in general (i.e. not guest users), you may wish to consider making it a requirement for all users to join in order to participate on the website. In other words, you may wish to remove permission for guests to make submissions.

Banning

Banning a member

There are many methods for banning an ocPortal user:

banning member submission. This is useful if you only want to ban a member from making submissions, and not the whole site; it is done from the Action Logs module. This feature is also useful if you are not using OCF , and want to ban a member in ocPortal, but not in the forum.
banning an IP address, or IP address range. {!DOC_IPBAN}
banning a member via editing their member-profile. This is perhaps the most useful method of banning. Note that there is no way to prevent a user re-joining with a new username, however.
banning a member via changing their usergroup to one with virtually no privileges. This is useful if you want to reduce access in a highly customised fashion.

The Action Log

{!DOC_ACTION_LOG}

Recent actions performed

This section shows the recent actions performed by you and your staff. Virtually every action that is done by your staff is logged here.

Username is the name of the member who performed this action
IP Address is the IP address of the member who performed this action.
Date and Time is the date and time when the action occurred. You may click this date to view further details on the submission as well as do (un)banning related to it.
Action is the name of the action they performed.
First Parameter is one of the parameters of that action - which will differ from action to action.
Second Parameter is one of the parameters of that action - which will differ from action to action.

There are also "sort by" and "show per page" options at the bottom of this section to help you refine which recent actions you see.

Post history

If you are using OCF, then you may make use of the 'post history' feature. This feature was designed for the situation where a member has edit and delete permission over their own posts, and abuses it such to hide evidence of their own misdeeds. For staff, a 'history' button is provided with to any edited post, and a 'history' button with any topic with post-deletion history. The interface under these buttons allows viewing of old versions, and restoration of what was deleted, as well as the ability for staff to eternally erase posts from the history record.

Concepts

Post history: Stored text of posts from before editing and deleting
Validation: The process of checking submitted content is suitable for display upon indexes of the website