This week’s stage is about giving more control to general visitors, anonymous included. Any user is thus able to “Approve” or “Delete” any segment which can be seen as voting up or down. Unless this person is the author or a moderator, other users will not see the results of these actions, but they are saved. Back in the planning stage I was going to save this data in a local cookie, but now all of it is being kept in S3. All of it. And I won’t be displaying any raw numbers or using it in a much-meaningful way now, but I intend to (down the road) use it for democratic moderation along the lines of Digg, HN, etc.
So the work this week is minimal: open the “moderate” operation to all users and potentially rename it to something like “visibility” since it’s all about setting the ‘v’ (visibility) leaf value. Interpreting the ‘v’ leaf needs to be a bit more advanced, taking into account the current user, author, and moderator values. I’d like to expand the XHTML rendering to omit hidden segments entirely and have them loaded by jQuery if the user clicks a button to show them.
I may spend extra time improving comment functionality. Specifically an author or moderator must have the ability to approve/delete them. Comments have very little information to them since each one is an individual leaf in a leaf list (leaflet?), whereas segments can have multiple leaves. I think democratic moderation of comments is the only way to go. If you don’t want others hiding your comments, then you can author your own page; easy as that. Anyway, saving moderation data on comments will most likely be in the form of a single leaf for that user on that particular segment which indicates which comments they approved/deleted.
If a user deletes their own comment then it is set to blank in order to completely “retract” it.
For new pages, users should be able to suggest a title. This is the title that is used for them and potentially displayed for moderators as a drop-down when performing the mod.categorize operation.
Finally, I’m debating the allowance of external links in the “link” operation which is currently only available to moderators. If users can add external links, I can see it being mightily abused and difficult to keep relevant or moderated, democratically or not. The functionality would be extremely helpful for FanSiter, however.
