Looking for ways to prevent users from contributing tasteless content.

Question

Hello. For my upcoming social network site, I would like to stop participants from contributing tasteless content (text, pictures, videos, audio). I am devising a mechanism of moderation but I believe soon the amount of content being contributed will outgrow my teams capacity to proof-read. I am looking for ways to automatically handle this.

I understand that one cannot fully achieve this automatically but there must be ways to minimize it. Further, for textual content I would have to build a stop-words database that would evolve gradually but is there one already available with decent amount of words?

I hope there is a comprehensive solution for this problem domain.

Concluding: People, thanks a lot for your contribution. I know we cannot have a straight-forward solution to this challenge but I guess if I compile all the advises given I'll arrive at a manageable solution.

Answer 1

One way I solved it on a project was to create a "subscriptions" barrier i.e. users can post content as long as they pay and subscribe.

Of course it helped that I was the main business decision maker for that project as well. :)

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A reputation system like we have here on StackOverflow also helps. Where the community actively votes down inappropriate content.

Answer 2

check out open source web forums. they sometimes have a stop words list. But don't expect miracles.

Answer 3

Censored words this post has a list of to-be-censored words , which you can use, it is a txt file, with variations too !

Php Censoring Tutorial this is supposed to be a PHP word censoring tutorial, which might be helpful :)

Here's an even bigger list but has alot of redundant entries.

But as James Black pointed out in his comment , Unicode makes it semi impossible to catch all possible variations of such words, so adding a feature where users can report offending posts would be a good boost( and that would reduce the amount of posts that needs to be reviewed)

Answer 4

Make it to read the text out to the poster before it's accepted as comment.

Answer 5

You can update your user agreement to specify what you allow and what you don't (unseen rules aren't rules at all). You can also to force your users to become member for at least x time before posting any content (SO does it with comments).

Another option is to make harder to your users to post content. If you have a two click engine to post, it's easy to say something, even if you don't have anything to say; If you make your user to dig deeper (I know, I know, legitimate users don't like this neither) you'll get more valuable content, just because your user cares about it.

If you don't own, I recommend book "Design for Community", by Derek Powazek. It's a bit old (2002) but worth your time.

Answer 6

You can't really stop this, despite unsavory words, there are ways to say quite offensive things without resorting to using the words. My suggestion is to have a trusted user based moderation. When you try to censor something people will just find a way around it if there is no punishment for doing so.