The moderation package is intended to allow for more user participation in the journalistic aspects of a bitweaver website, ranging from simple user feedback on the quality of a news article to collaborative journalism.

''The basics''
The core functionality of the moderation package consists of the ability for users to give feedback on the quality of content on a bitweaver website. This is the fundamental function upon which all other functions of the moderation package are based. There are three decisions we will have to make regarding the implantation of this functionality:
#The types of content we allow to be rated. Primary candidates are articles, comments, wikis, blogs and media files (e.g. images or sound files), but I imagine other types of content might qualify as well (e.g. users). This decision also largely depends on the technical feasibility.
#The available methods of rating content. There currently appear to be three primary methods of rating content. The most common method is that of simply giving content a rating on a scale of 0-5, often represented by stars. Another method is that of the simple up/down vote, as employed by [http://digg.com|digg]. Finally, a method particularly popular for rating comments is the [http://www.slashdot.org|Slashdot] rating system. The different methods have their strong and weak points, and often websites employ different methods for different types of content (e.g. articles vs comments). We will have to decide which method(s) of rating content we provide and whether we allow administrators choose between different rating methods for different types of content.
#The final point of concern is which factors we allow to influence the rating of content and how they influence this rating. In case of rating a media file, e.g. a photograph, I can imagine that merely taking the average of all user ratings will suffice. Other types of content however, might benefit from having other factors influence the rating as well. For instance, in case of user submitted news articles (e.g. [http://www.digg.com|digg]), factors like time, frequency of votes, amount of votes etc would have to be considered as well. I therefore propose we do not hard-code the formula that determines the rating of content. A better approach, in my opinion, would be to list the possible factors that can be perceived to influence the rating of content for every content type and then allow the administrators to weigh these factors. We could provide default settings per content type as a starting point.
''Automated Article Approval''
Based on the aforementioned core functionality, a plethora of very interesting possible additional functionality arises. I will discuss those functions I believe will provide the most additional value for bitweaver, but I would really enjoy others suggesting different functionality that they might regard as even more important for bitweaver.

The first thing I would like to suggest is to utilize user feedback to support the approval process of user submitted news articles. While the currently employed centralized approval model works well for certain types of websites, other types of websites might want to employ a more decentralized, user-centric approach to news articles. I would therefore suggest to expand the current functionality with two additional ''optional'' news article approval systems based on user feedback (although technical and time constraints could very well force us to add only one): semi-automatic approval and fully automatic approval.
The core of both systems consists of the so called "news-room", which is a page where user submitted news articles are listed for anyone to view and rate (example: [http://www.digg.com/diggall|digg newsroom]). The actual rating of an article is not only determined by the average of the user rating feedback, but also (if deemed necessary) by the frequency of the feedback, the amount of feedback and the age of the article. Once an article reaches a certain (administrator defined) threshold rating, it is marked for display on the main news page. At this point the difference between the two systems becomes apparent: in case of the fully automatic approval system, the article will automatically be moved to the front page without require any actions by the administrator. However, in case of the semi-automatic approval, the final choice approval of the article lies with the site administrator/moderator.

''Automated Moderation''
Another example of what might be very useful, is the ability to automatically moderate content based on ratings. This would be very useful in fighting spam and other types of unwanted user input on a bitweaver website. We could offer two levels of automation: semi-automatic and fully automatic moderation.
In case of semi-automatic moderation, content (e.g. comments) hat receive a low rating a certain number of times, cause the website administrator to be notified (e.g. by email). A seperate page, similar to that utilized by the current articles approval page, could be used to list all content that requires attention from the administrator along with easy delete controls.
Fully automatic moderation would automatically hide content that receives a low rating a certain number of times, and notify the administrator afterwards. The administrator would then have ability to undo the moderation of the content utilizing a similar approach as with semi-automatic moderation.

''Filter''

''Moderator''

''Advanced Functionality''
A list of functionality that might be interested to implement long-term.
* Wiki news articles.
* Granting additional influence to users based on their merit.
….


‘’Work in progress!’’
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