Moderation by Email Primer Tutorial

Moderation by Email Primer Tutorial

The term “moderation” is associated with blogs and Content Management Systems and social media as a means by which uploaded content can be vetted, or not, during a “moderation phase” for a posting of some sort.

This can involve, in our eyes, quite a few options, none of which would not involve a server-side solution of some sort. We’ll think on this further (maybe Ajax?!), but some of the ideas for moderation would be …

• no moderation … even this needs a server side language, in our eyes, because you will be changing a server side webpage for all users
• email (or sms or voicemail or any direct communication method) moderation … ask for an admin user of the website to change things after having emailed them … this is the one we show today … and please feel free to try your own entries
• moderate via a (web server) database with posting statuses such as “Awaiting Moderation”, “Published”, “To Be Deleted”
• moderate via a system of (web server) files with posting statuses such as “Awaiting Moderation”, “Published”, “To Be Deleted”
• only moderate to either of the four above after having gone through a CAPTCHA test that the user is not a robot

So today we pose the idea that the “Things That We Have in Common” far outweigh the things that divide us, and present some ideas here. We offer, and encourage you to email us your ideas on the topic, and we’ll moderate them within 24 hours. The mechanism, today, is via you, the user, sending us here, at RJM Programming, an email.

This brings up the topic of web user roles. In this scenario, where we don’t ask anything of you, except an email address, presumably, you can be thought of as a …

• “guest” user … though in strict terms the word “guest” usually implies that there is a user registration involved … which we do not do here today … but to read a bit about this you could read PHP Membership Website Primer Tutorial … as distinct from …
• the emailee of the “guest” user will be an “admin” user … one who can offer the means to moderate the uploaded data, and, as approved, write that data to a place where it will be picked up and included in the contents of the webpage(s) involved … hence the term “Content Management System”

… and so, in the scenario of “no moderation” “guest” users circumvent the moderation part of the “admin” user role and, in some automated (programming) way, with a language like PHP and a database like MySql, be able to get their uploaded content straight onto the webpage(s) of interest. So, sometimes you see “no moderation” but a CAPTCHA (robot) check, as the scenario of use.

Of interest, too, is the nature of the uploaded data. Is it “just text” or “can it contain images” or “can it contain videos” etcetera. Today, we are just allowing text.

Here is the downloadable PHP code you could call moderation.php with its live run.

If this was interesting you may be interested in this too.