Tuesday, January 27, 2009

User assisted administration with AspNetDating

Here's a question that we get a lot: "How to ensure we have a clean site without spending all day moderating it?". And it's a good question! Here's what we've done with AspNetDating to make sure your site is as clean as possible with minimal effors from your side:

  1. User assisted face control. If you're running a highly targeted site (e.g. Fitness singles or LA Blondes) you will have a hard time filtering all the users who are not fit for your site. The user assisted face control feature solves this problem for you by letting your users decide if a candidate is a good fit for the site. Here's how it works - a new user registers to your site, fills in a profile and upload some photos; when that is done the profile is put on hold until the existing users approve or reject it. Each of the existing users will see an "Approve profile" link where they can see all new candidates and give their opinion. Eventually a decision is made based on the majority of the votes. There is a complex algorithm that looks for patterns and removes the option from users who reject everyone (haters), users who approve everyone and users who are simply against everyone else. It is a good practice to enable the voting only for users above certain level so you know that they have spent some time on your site and they know what to do.
  2. User assisted photo approval. Same process as above but with photos. Users can approve/reject photos and a decision is made based on the majority of the votes. If the results are close to 50/50 then the photo is marked for manual approval by administrator. Users who are often making wrong choices will soon have the option disabled for them and users who are helping the most can participate in the "Top Moderators" chart. The chart is a good way to motivate the users to assist you and you can throw a bonus for the top moderator for extra motivation.
  3. Report abuse. AspNetDating allows your users to report abusive photos, profiles and messages. The site administrators and/or moderators can review those reports from the backend and take the appropriate action (ignore, delete abusive content, delete user, warn).
  4. Auto approval based on user level. If a user has been on your site for a while then they probably know the rules by know and the chance of inappropriate content is very low. If your site maximum user level is 20 then usually you can safely enable auto-approval for all levels above 10.
  5. Auto approval based on billing plan. Paid users usually don't make mistakes and risk losing their profile. It is a good idea to moderate the free users and enable auto approval for the paid ones.
  6. Automatic spam check. The feature tracks users who send multiple similar messages and puts their account on hold until verified by administrator or moderator.
  7. Bad words list. The regular expressions support makes this feature very flexible.
  8. Desktop administration tool. The standard Windows interface is usually quite faster than the Web one. AspNetDating provides a Windows application for easy photo and profile approval.

It's the attention to the detail that brings our dating and community software AspNetDating above all other on the market.

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