Reporting
Voat pushed a new reporting structure yesterday to help with content management, especially spam. Before yesterday we did not have an adequate way for users to report content and what we did have simply sent messages to smail as Spam reports.
Now Voat has a way for users to report content that violates different rules. Currently we are only exposing system rules, i.e. Spam, Dox, and Illegal content. We will shortly extend this to subverse moderators so they can add rules as well.
You can send reports by clicking the report button on submissions or comments.
Subverse moderators (Owners, Moderators, and Janitors) now have access to grouped user reports by clicking the user reports link in the mod tool box. You can choose to ignore reports which mark them as “reviewed” if they are not actionable.
Credit where credit is due:
Thanks to @Cynabuns spending countless hours researching, organizing, and filtering spam reports, Voat is now currently operating more spam free than at any point in our past. Voat really owes a lot to @Cynabuns and the many users who have helped by reporting spam for their thankless work in this area, so when you don’t see spam, think of these unsung heroes.
Blocked Users
Blocked user functionality has now been extended into comment sections. If you block a user, their comments will be collapsed.
Please note that currently when you block a user, all notifications and PMs are dropped entirely. We will shortly be adding code to allow the notifications from blocked users to reach your inbox but be marked as “read” so as to not allow harassing.
Canary Notice:
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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PuttItOut ago
This is a trickier thing for us to do actually because of the way caching works.
I can't promise anything in this area because we have a lot of more important work to do.
It's on the list of things to research.
bikergang_accountant ago
Unless people will be blocking 100+ users you could also store it client side. But I guess that's what AVE is for.
PuttItOut ago
As Voat moves more and more to the API we will rely less on UI specific features, so we have to always consider how to handle scenarios in regards to both access mechanisms. Apps, for example, would need these same capabilities available.
pembo210 ago
༼ つ ◕_◕༽つ gib the v1 thingy, i got a thing for it too <3
go1dfish ago
Going further if you ever want to move Voat away from MS tech lock-in this approach helps.
Once the front end is built as a JS app powered by the API it is no longer at all tied to anything MS specific and it's only entanglement is voat's public facing API.
That means once the UI is an API client all you have to do is replace the API out from under it with something purely open source. Easier said than done of course but at least your frontend won't give a damn about the backend at all.
I've been playing with loopback lately, it's an interesting framework for API/Backend development that might be suitable for replacing Voats backend down the line.
go1dfish ago
Adding further to my broad suggestion of how Voat ought to be structured:
Reddit is going to v4 their site when they switch to a JS front end but it's not inherent with the approach.
https://ceddit.com is essentially this front end pattern applied to Reddit (before they did it even) but while nearly exactly copying Reddit's DOM structure to a level where I can use their existing CSS and themes even.
It should be possible to rebuild the existing Voat UI as a pure JS React (or other framework, ceddit is Ember) app while maintaining the exact same DOM structure, appearance and UX.
From there having the UI as a JS app gives you huge flexibility for improvements and experimentation. If the UI is open sourced then it would be easy for AVE type projects to instead be contributions to the app proper. It would also make it possible for devs to contribute to the front end without having to dirty themselves with MS tech.
Another thing to point out is that ceddit is slow, but it's slow because API rate limit restrictions and because of the large volume of data the app has to fetch to uncensor Reddit.
Without those limitations it is very possible for this sort of approach to be faster than a traditional HTML generating server side web app. With clients requesting data piecemeal you can also get much more granular with your cacheing, and that cacheing would be just as relevant for alternate clients.
go1dfish ago
This is the way to go. Solid API and build the site as a JS React app.
Optionally set up server side rendering for SEO and compatibility.
Reddit seems to be planning to replace their front end with something similar but I expect them to Digg v4 the site in the process.
tl;dr make the site just another API app. Then apps can do anything the site can do and you only have one code path for everything.