Moderation and Abuse Workflow

Purpose of the service

The abuse service promotes good citizenship, community engagement, and participation. In release 9.0, Reported abuse, moderated content, and spammy content all feed into this system.  Content that may be considered as spam will only occur within APAN Groups that are PUBLIC-facing.

In the abuse workflow, abuse is moderated, flagged, appealed, reviewed, hidden, and/or removed. The abuse service handles reports on all kinds of content - application content (blog, forum, media gallery, wiki); comments, and status messages.

Community members who are responsible for questionable content are emailed that their content is being considered abusive and can appeal the finding in the email. The appeal board is notified of an appeal by email and, in turn, upholds or overturns findings. If the finding is upheld, the content can be hidden. If the user contributes too much abusive content, the content and the user can be completely removed from the site.

An appeal board member, or a role having the  site or group Review Abuse permission, can review abusive content by clicking Abuse Management to display the content as well as information about it and about the reporter. 

In the abuse workflow:

Registered users can flag content, including in email subscriptions, as abusive; anonymous users cannot flag content for abuse.

  • If there are enough abuse points, the content can be hidden from search, other content lists, etc. Exception: Wiki pages are not immediately hidden from the site when in an abusive state.
  • A post author whose content is considered abusive can explain in an appeal form why a report should be overturned and the content should be upheld. When the author submits the form, the appeal board receives email notification of the appeal.
  • If the abusive author does not appeal the finding, they will receive another email notification for appeal four days after the initial report.
  • Group owners or moderators (who have the site or group Review Abuse permission) can manage abuse reports before they hit the appeal process.
  • The appeal board can view the abusive content and appeals in the Abuse Management queue accessible from the Group - Links widget or the Administration panel of Management.
  • When the appeal board makes a decision to sustain/overturn the abuse report, the content poster is notified by email of the decision.
  • If content is flagged as abusive but the report overturned, moderators are notified that it has gone through the appeal process. However, the content can be re-reported. 
  • In 9.0, if a user has abusive content and that user is deleted, his/her content can be reassigned or completely removed as well. If it is reassigned, the receiving user does not inherit the deleted user's abuse reporter or abuse creator score. 
  • For assistance in reassigning content, a Group Owner will need to call the APAN Help Desk and will be asked to send an email with the request from their registered APAN email address.

Content

Content that can be hidden includes:

  • Blog posts
  • Forum threads/replies
  • Media gallery posts
  • Wiki pages
  • Ideas
  • Events