Last Week This Week

Damn bladder, I just got to actual work today (at 3:23 PM) and now I have to pee … again.  I can blaim this on two things: Panera having caffeine-free Diet Pepsi and my addiction to it.  Anyway, last week suffered due to the upcoming and now-past half-marathon.

Page (categorize) and segment (show/hide) moderation forms.

Basic moderation tools are in place, however, so I’m moving on to authorship.  I must note, that I did not put any alerts in place for unmoderated content.  This means that only if a moderator finds your content will they see it needs to be moderated.  This decision was made while my mind was fuddled on Friday with thoughts of running for 13.1 miles, but the week is gone and so I’m moving on.

Authorship means retaining control of the pages you start and the content therein.  Contributors may add content, but only the author has the ability to edit and redirect.  The latter is a feature which won’t be in this release for authors who are self-hosting their content (the Forust page redirects to their own site/domain).  Authors are niche operators of the page they started, giving them raised privileges.

First point: authors are page moderators, not site moderators.  They can not move pages around on the site (rename, link, categorize, delete), but they can effect segments within the page.  They also have a unique ability to edit segment text prior to moderation or comments being added.  Let’s explore that first.

Rather than giving a time limit, a new segment’s text may be edited before it is commented on.  Also, if a site moderator gives the segment a thumbs up (”v’ == ‘1′) then the text cannot be edited either.  This allows a page author to build the content from multiple segments and get it “pristine” before advertising its existence.  They can do this for any segment on the page, even ones added by other users.  Thus if you want control, you must start your own page.  If you want to keep a page author from editing a segment you added, just add a comment to it.

Why prevent edits?  Simple: context.  If you comment on a block of text and then that text is changed, the context of the comment is lost.  There is also the possibility of malicious authors submitting good text and then changing it to bad text after a site moderator has approved it.  Neither situation is desirable.

Alright, the other (and much more simple) thing an author can do is choose whether a segment is visible or not.  This is the exact same form displayed to site moderators.  Anonymous visitors will get the visibility of a segment based on the author or site moderator; whichever is latest (time-based).

Note on visibility: it’s currently set as a CSS class on the segment <div>.  This means that hidden segments are not actually hidden since there’s no stylesheet.  Thus another task this week is a bit of jQuery magic to make these invisible unless the user asks to see them.  It doesn’t help against spam (e.g. SE’s will still index), but protects the user.  I’ll get to the spam issue in that stage.

Lastly, authors must be able to “lock” their pages once they get them the way they want.  This also prevents comments, unfortunately, but that’s a problem for later.  The lock functionality is already there, so this is a simple matter.