SocialMod « Made by Many

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Here comes SocialMod
We’ve pushed the first ‘live’ release of Socialmod today. We think it has the potential to become the ‘Basecamp of moderation’.

SocialMod is a hosted moderation service that uses an API to receive items to be moderated (text, images, videos, tweets), processes them and then sends the verdict back to the client’s site.

It’s our first product and the brainchild of our young Rails rock-meister Alex Maccaw. Alex turned up one day at work with a fully functioning prototype and said he’d like our help in designing and selling it, as well as letting him spend some work time on it. Its his company (LeadThinking is the parent company he’s set up) and we’ve taken a small stake. He’s already signed up paying customers, and the service has been enriched through the feedback of several of the world’s leading moderation companies – thank you to Tempero, eModeration and Escalate and everyone who participated in the beta.

Socialmod’s solves a number of problems faced by site owners implementing social software and publishing user generated content.

Firstly, the service brings moderation within reach of ‘the little guy’: the local football club, local community sites, the lower end of market and small businesses. The overhead of creating your own moderation software, or of using a moderation service is often too high for people like this.

But Socialmod also offers moderation companies a number of benefits. Moderation software is – on the whole – pretty rubbish. There are lots of products, each with a different user interface to learn. With notable exceptions, they’re typically quite clunky and often buggy. Moderation companies have to learn how to use each and every system (there could be dozens in use by a single moderation team) and they waste time working round the clunks. Additionally, many moderation tools are bespoke applications that get the job done at launch but are difficult or expensive to upgrade as things change – and things change very rapidly these days as site-owners adopt more and more social functionality. And then there’s the need to integrate with an increasing number of external services – Twitter is the best example. Obviously, there is the scope for moderation companies to re-sell the application.

There are a number of neat features we think will be really useful:
- Twitter moderation (filter on replies/links/re-tweets)
- New profanity settings – option to star profanity rather than block it
- The option to embed moderation into your website using an iframe, so that trusted users can, for example, moderate in situ when signed in
- We’re using an Amazon load-balancer with auto scaling dependent on demand
- There are different plans for manual and automated moderation
- A full audit trail
- A referral and escalation system
- Language filters
- Spam filter
- A profanity filter
- Auto take down (if an item hasn’t been moderated within a specific timeframe – we’ve called this a ‘dead man’s handle’)
- Flag take down (support for reactive moderation)
- An analytics dashboard – a feature we’re planning to expand
- A usage CSV download
Fascinatingly, Alex has also set it up to work with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Service, allowing site-owners to crowd-source moderation.

Lots of releases in the pipeline and we’ll keep you updated with news. Another great design from Julia.

Related posts:
- TweetMod – Moderated Twitter Stream
- SocialMod – Moderation Service
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By Tim Malbon

27th May 09

3 comments

SocialMod
TweetMod – Moderated Twitter Stream

You probably saw the Skittles debacle a while back. They basically turned their entire home page into a Twitter search for the word ’skittles’.

What was quite an innovative idea opened Skittles up to quite some exploitation, people posted literally anything to get on their homepage, regardless of how gratuitous.

Kudos to Skittles for sticking with it – but although many brands want to utilize UGC, they can’t take that sort of risk risk.

That’s why we’ve made TweetMod – an extension to Socialmod (discussed previously).

You just need to specify a few Twitter search queries that you want to track and, instead of pulling the feed from Twitter, pull a moderated feed from us.

We’ve also emulated the Twitter API to some extent – so you can use the existing libraries out there for Twitter – just change the endpoint.

If you’re interested in participating in the beta, let us know. We’ll be launching shortly.

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By Alex MacCaw

9th April 09

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Made by Many
SocialMod
SocialMod – Moderation Service
Whether you’re building a new website, or want to manage your community more effectively – moderation is a common requirement.

Unfortunately computers haven’t got to the stage where they can recognize libelous/offensive images – so UGC often has to get passed in front of a human moderator to get an accurate verdict.

People often build moderation systems from scratch – even though it’s quite a generic problem. Today we’re officially announcing SocialMod – a comprehensive hosted moderation system that prevents you from reinventing the wheel.

The idea is simple; you send any images/videos and text to SocialMod using the API. Once they’ve been moderated, you get a verdict back.

For example, a user uploads an image to your website. Your site then automatically submits it to SocialMod and, once the image has been moderated, you can then display it publicly (if it passed moderation).

Or, if your traffic is even higher, you could just submit an item to SocialMod when it gets ‘flagged’ by your community. Have a look at my previous post on moderation types for more information.

So who actually does the moderation? Well, there are three choices:
- You or your team. You can add extra users to your account and they can perform the moderation.
- Your community. SocialMod can be embedded into your site and you can give trusted members of your community access.
- Us. If you choose one of the automated plans, we’ll do all the moderation.
There’s much more to SocialMod, such as spam & profanity filters, referral, audit trails, reports and Twitter integration. We’ll be blogging about some of these in the near future.

If you’re interested in participating in the beta, let us know. We’ll be launching shortly.

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By Alex MacCaw

8th April 09

3 comments

SocialMod

saas
SocialMod
Moderation types
Whenever companies want to publish user generated content (UGC) they need to look into moderation, which usually consists of the following three types:

Pre-moderation:

Some sites operate on the principle that every piece of UGC should be moderated before it’s displayed on the website. This is the approach Amazon takes for their reviews, for example, and what the BBC use for their message boards for children. It’s usually used for content that isn’t specifically community based, or content that’s potentially dangerous (from a legal perspective). Some message-boards, particular those that concern themselves with topical issues or celebrities, are prone to libel and can be a source of legal anxiety for the organisation that hosts them. Pre-moderation is probably a good idea in those cases. The drawback is the lack of instant gratification to the user (when they don’t see their content displayed immediately) and the negative impact that can have on your comunity.

Post-moderation:

One of the drawbacks of pre-moderation is that it can cut down on the conversations within online communities, especially if the content takes some time to moderate. One solution to this is moderate everything after it has gone ‘live’ – which means you can still have effective community conversations while keeping objectionable content at bay.
There is a legal issue in this method though, as the operator of the site assumes responsibility for any content that appears, even if that content is subsequently removed by moderation. It’s worth noting too that the less time that offending content appears online, the fewer people will see it – and that could impact on liability or reduce an award of damages.

Reactive-moderation:

This type of moderation is fairly passive, and relies on the users to flag objectionable content – for you to then review and, if appropriate, remove. The advantages of this approach is that it scales with your community and it’s easier to avoid liability for anything that is defamatory, infringing or otherwise unlawful as long as you provides a process for removing offending content expeditiously upon being made aware of it (generally considered to be 48 hours). The downside of this approach is that abusive content can appear in front of your users, and you’re relying on your community to tell you about it. This might not be acceptable to all organizations, particularly the highly brand conscious.

A recent court case in Italy may have grave consequences for reactive-moderation and the idea it’s a legal safe harbor. If the case is not defeated – the implications could be huge.

SocialMod:

We’ve been developing a moderation platform called SocialMod, which is in a private beta at the moment. We’ll be blogging about this subject more in the future.

Based on Everything in Moderation’s “Four Types of Moderation“.

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By Alex MacCaw

4th February 09

0 comments

SocialMod

moderation