Board Security Moderation Feature

[kzweyr]

Please add a feature that will allow the forum administrators to require boards to certain posts be reviewed before they can be posted.  This will be particularly helpful for guest friendly boards that may attracted unwanted postings.

[Ryan Roos]

This has been discussed in other threads here on this board and has been rejected each time.

We give you plenty of options for allowing who can post and where they can post. That being said we have found that if you prevent a person's content from being posted when they post it you lose the person. I'll try to explain that using an example.

Imagine that you are searching the web for an answer to a question you have about dragons. And you happen to come across a dragon RP forum (like your own). You look around and it seems like a nice forum. You go to post your question. You type up your big post and maybe throw in a compliment or two about the forum and you click post. Suddenly a message pops up telling you you'll need to wait up to 48 hours for your post to be reviewed before it will be posted for anyone else to see. Would you stick around that nice forum, or would you leave and never come back?

We've found the latter. People don't want to wait for their content to be reviewed first. Forums already rely on the fact that time passes and messages are still present and waiting to be read by others. If you remove that then it defeats the purpose of the forum. Inattentive staff only add to the problem. If a post is made it needs to sit and wait for a response. That can already take days sometimes. Adding another day or two to the front of that wait makes posting useless. You might as well disable guest posting at that point.

Sorry but this won't be a feature. It isn't conducive to growing communities (and in turn growing our company). You have dozens of options for permissions if you are concerned about guest behavior.

Thank you.

[kzweyr]

The particular post in question that caused me to start looking for this option was an ad to an explicit 18+ rated site. We're just trying to make sure that things like that don't get posted.  Yes, the ad was removed immediately upon recognition by the admin, but what would have happened if we hadn't been able to remove it immediately and it had been reported by someone else.  It's posts like that that detract not only from the quality and integrity of the site, but also risk actions from further up being taken.  No, we don't want to risk losing people, but surely we have a right to have some sort of security measure in place to keep things like that from happening. 

[Ryan Roos]

Mar 25, 2013 16:46:22 GMT -8 kzweyr said:

The particular post in question that caused me to start looking for this option was an ad to an explicit 18+ rated site. We're just trying to make sure that things like that don't get posted.  Yes, the ad was removed immediately upon recognition by the admin, but what would have happened if we hadn't been able to remove it immediately and it had been reported by someone else.  It's posts like that that detract not only from the quality and integrity of the site, but also risk actions from further up being taken.  No, we don't want to risk losing people, but surely we have a right to have some sort of security measure in place to keep things like that from happening. 

Had your forum been reported for a guest posting adult content a single time you would have receive, at most, a warning and an open line of communication with us (ProBoards). That's the worst case scenario. And it sounds like even if it had been reported, your admin acted quickly and would have had it gone before we saw the report. So I think you would be in the clear in any case like that. That being said, if you are concerned, you have options you can use to prevent random people from posting to the board. If you open a theme park to the public and don't charge any admission or post guards you can't be surprised when you get the random criminal in your park. Your forum is the same way. If you choose not to restrict access in any way then you're going to get random posts like that. It sounds like you at least have good moderation on your forum, so it shouldn't be an issue. We understand what you are saying when it comes to your concerns. Just please understand what we are saying when we explain why we can't delay posting.

Thank you.