How To Add Moderation Features To Your BuddyPress Community Website

How safe your community website is? Although a social network website offers a smart solution to connect people in one place who share common passion and interest. But, did you ever think about whether their personal data is safe from unauthorized users? If not, you’re offering hackers a chance to come and attack your community website.

Moderating your community website can help you prevent your site from being attacked by spammers or hackers.

Let’s understand in-depth on how to moderate your community website.

Need To Moderate Community Website?

Trust is an important aspect that you shouldn’t overlook. If there is no trust, you can’t succeed in your business. A community website is successful until your members feel safe and trust that their personal information is not being accessed by any unauthorized members.

In a community that has a strict moderation policy:

The members engage actively with the brand.
As an admin, you can easily segregate all the relevant and irrelevant information within your community website.
It encourages your community members to share only such information that is relevant for others.

Moderating BuddyPress Community Website

If you are running your own social network using BuddyPress, you need to make sure your community is safe & secure and clean. If there is any spam content on your website, your community members will not feel safe and you’ll lose your business with them.
Therefore, you should take required actions to moderate your BuddyPress community and safeguard your user’s personal data.

Secure Your Private Community Website By Adding Privacy Features

What BuddyPress Components You Need To Moderate On Your WordPress Social Network

1. Activity Streams:

Through activity streams, members can post status updates that will be displayed on their newsfeed section. This component allows to showcase:

Global activity stream
Personal activity stream
Group activity streams
Threaded comments
Favorites
And, many more.

2. Members:

By default, the pages on your BuddyPress powered community website along with community member’s profile page get indexed in Google’s database. Then, it results in the Google Search Results as well as to all logged-out members
Hence, you need to take strict action to secure your member’s data being stolen by spammers.

3. Group Activities:

This component includes Group Members, Group Directory, Group Activity, and Group Invites. Therefore, it requires proper moderation to keep it safe from spammers.

4. Private Messages:

BuddyPress members can send friend requests to each other just like you do on Facebook. They can send private messages to each other within your BuddyPress social network website. Hence, you need to safeguard this component.

5. Comments:

This BuddyPress component allows users to leave comments on each others’ activity updates. All users can add comments, reply to comments, and also mark activities as favorite if they like. You need to make sure no one will comment on any post spam comments.

How To Moderate A BuddyPress Social Network Website?

The following two major approaches worth your attention that help you in moderating your BuddyPress community website.

1. Assign Role Of Moderators To Your Community Members

A simple solution to monitor your social networking site closely is to assign the role of community moderators to some of your community members. They’ll keep an eye on every post, comment, and groups to ensure there is no inappropriate content on your site.

As community moderators, they can:

Flag posts, activities, messages, group discussions, comments as inappropriate.
Review the flagged items to perform appropriate actions like deleting spammed posts or comments.
Manage, track, and impose a ban on users within the community
Create moderation rules to review and approve content from specific community members
Assign moderator role to group owners.
Set up an automatic moderation limit.

2. Flag Content As Inappropriate

With this approach, you can allow your community members to report or flag content if they find it inappropriate for the community. Your community members will be able to report or flag posts, comments, group discussions, and private messages.

Moreover, if you want, you may also set automatic moderation on your BuddyPress community website.

Introducing BuddyPress Moderation Pro: A WordPress BuddyPress Moderation Plugin

With the main aim to keep your WordPress community website spam-free and clean, you should take a look at BuddyPress Moderation Pro. It offers a wide range of features to prevent your community from unauthorized users or spammers.

This plugin combines both the approaches that we have discussed above for community moderation, i.e.,
You can:

Give your members role of community moderators to take actions against any inappropriate content sitewide
Your community members will be able to flag content as inappropriate.

Let’s discuss all its features one by one:

1. Choose What BuddyPress Components You Want To Be Flagged

As an admin, it’s up to you what type of component you want to allow to the flag by your community members. Think of what’s relevant to make your BuddyPress site spam-free and select the required components accordingly.

2. Automatic Moderation

You can enable/disable automatic moderation on your BuddyPress community wherein you can set a certain number of limitations for the content to be flagged. Once the limit is crossed, that particular content will automatically go under moderation.

3. Hide Mode:

As an admin, you can decide to hide flagged content only for specific members or for all. This feature allows you to set hide mode for Reports and for All members.
If you select Reporters Tab, only reporters will not be able to see the flagged content.
If you select All Members Tab, the flagged content will get hidden from all community members. All these changes will get applied to only newly flagged content.

4. Send email notification to admin:

This feature allows community admin to get an email notification as and when someone flags the content as inappropriate. This ensures better control and fast moderation in the community.

5. Restrictions For Reported Member And Group

This feature allows imposing a restriction on your community members and groups. The selected restrictions will be applicable to the flagged member or the flagged group according to the hidden mode selected.

Restrictions For Reported Members Include: