Content Moderation

There are 3 types of records that can be created by visitors of your site:

• User accounts – registering on the site creates a user with a profile that can be edited
• Submissions – content submitted for ranking, covered here
• Comments on submissions and posts – feedback and responses

All three of these types can be moderated, changed, or removed in some way by a user with the correct permissions (typically a site admin).

Moderating User Accounts

User accounts are created by site visitors that want to create and interact with content on the site. This is done using the pop-up login/register form or the core WordPress form, depending on the “Use front-end login” on the options page.

Once a user account has been created, that user can do all of the actions allowed on the Users and Permissions tab on the Appearance > Rank It WP Options page for the “New User Role” set on the Settings > General page. You can change what default users can do by changing these two settings.

There are a number of ways to set this up and control users on your site:

• You can set the default role to “Subscriber” and only allow, say, voting. When users have been active on the site, they can be manually upgraded to the next role.
• You can set the default role to “Contributor” and allow all actions; if the user abuses these privileges, they can be downgraded.

If a user is causing issues or spamming the site, instead of using roles, they can be blocked completely:

1. Go to Users in wp-admin and find the offender
2. Click on their name to view their profile
3. Copy their user name and/or email address
4. Go to Settings > Discussion in wp-admin
5. In the “Comment Blacklist” field, paste each of the items copied on a new line
6. Scroll down and click Save Changes

This will prevent future logins, comments, and submissions on the site.

Moderating Submissions

Submissions that are created on the site are held for moderation automatically. You can bypass this for admins and editors on the options page.

Moderating submissions is simple and only requires a single click to publish:

1. Click Submissions in wp-admin
2. Submissions that need moderation will have a grey background and a red “Pending” tag
3. To publish a submission, just hover over the row and click the Publish link
4. To delete a submission, hover over the row and click Trash
5. If you’d like to see the details of the submission, click the submission title and review. To publish, click the blue Publish button on the top right

Moderating Comments

Comment moderation is built into WordPress and works the same as any other install. While this theme has spam controls built in, we recommend a 3rd party spam service, like Akismet, to help out.

A few things to note:

• All comments are located at Comments in wp-admin. Here you can approve, trash, or mark as spam any comments received on posts or submissions
• Settings controlling how and when comments appear are located at Settings > Discussion. You can disable comments, auto-publish on certain conditions, and more.
• Comments can be turned off on individual submissions