Lead Thinking The Business of Software Development

Socialmod moderates Audi’s new site

Audi have launched a new site for the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Along with photos and videos, Audi are interacting with their community by embedding a moderated Twitter feed into their site.

Any tweet with the hash tag #audifos is put on a Socialmod queue and, once moderated, is displayed on Audi’s site.

Socialmod moderates BET.com Awards

Last weekend was the BET Awards which over 5.8 million people tuned into.

BET ran a coordinated website to the awards, which they updated throughout the ceremony. They also had a ‘Wall of Tweets‘, showing all the Twitter commentary mentioning their awards, and tweets from selected artists and celebrities.

Socialmod did the moderation for all the ‘tweets’, preventing any libelous or objectionable content appearing on their website.

At one stage the top 9 trending topics on Twitter all referred to the BET Awards, so we had many thousands of tweets to process. Their moderators were working throughout the awards to try and get people’s tweets displayed as soon as possible.

We received about 1.3 million hits during the awards, so we had to provision a few more servers. However, our server setup is elastic, which means we easily scaled with the extra demand.

Moderating vinspired’s Question Time

I thought I”d post this as a good example of using Socialmod to moderate Twitter Feeds.

On Thursday, vinspired had a conference called Generation Digital. Participants could tweet about the event, including the hash tag #gendig. These tweets were then moderated, and re-published on vinspired’s site.

Twitter is a great tool for conferences, allowing you to get feedback, even live during a session.

Socialmod lets you specify Twitter search terms, and will then automatically receive new Tweets:

These items can then be moderated like any other:

We then republish a ‘clean’ feed of moderated content, which you can put on your website:

We’ve listened – pricing changes

Well, it just a few days after the public launch of Socialmod and we’ve had a lot of signups.

We’ve also had a lot of feedback, which is always very useful because ultimately you don’t know what your customers want, unless they tell you.

Generally we were getting the message that the limits on the plans were too low, people needed to do more moderation.

With that in mind we’ve increased the moderation limit on all the plans, apart from the Basic one, and made all the ‘Automated’ plans (including Mechanical Turk) $10 less.

Adding moderation to your Rails site in 5 minutes

This short tutorial will show you how to integrate Socialmod into Rails in a matter of minutes. This time we’re focussing on text moderation – future tutorials will tackle image and video moderation.

The general process goes likes this:

• Comment (i.e. UGC text content) is created
• A POST request is sent to Socialmod, with the text to be moderated and the Comment’s id
• Moderator moderates text
• A POST request is sent from Socialmod to your designated callback url with the moderators verdict
• You then choose to hide/show that item depending on whether you’re doing pre/post moderation, and obviously the verdict.

Firstly, install the gem:

sudo gem install socialmod

Generate your Rails app, and add the gem to config/enviroment.rb;

config.gem "socialmod"

We need to configure the Socialmod library to use your api key.

config/initializers/socialmod.rb

Socialmod::Base.api_key = '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'

Now we’re going to generate the scaffolding for the Comment model, and install the state machine plugin:

script/generate scaffold comment body:text state:string
script/plugin install git://github.com/pluginaweek/state_machine.git
rake db:migrate

Now to implement the pending, passed and failed states on the Comment model:

app/model/comment.rb

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  state_machine :initial => :pending do
    event :passed do
      transition [:pending, :failed] => :passed
    end

    event :failed do
      transition [:pending, :passed] => :failed
    end

    state :pending, :passed, :failed
  end
  named_scope :passed, :conditions => {:state => "passed"}
end

And now we’re going to add the Socialmod specifics to the Comment model.
After the comment is created, the comment text is sent to Socialmod.

app/model/comment.rb

after_create :create_on_socialmod
def create_on_socialmod
  Socialmod::Item::Text.create(
    :data => body,
    :custom_id => id
  )
end

Now generate the callback controller. Below you can see we’re finding the comment, and passing or failing it based on the callback’s verdict.

You’ll also notice we’re skipping the verify_authenticity_token method. We don’t need XSS protection here (since we’re checking the signature of the callback – verifying its identity).

app/controllers/callback_controller.rb

class CallbackController < ApplicationController
  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token, :only => :index

  def index
    callback = Socialmod::Callback.new(params)
    unless callback.valid?
      return head(403)
    end

    comment = Comment.find(callback.custom_id)
    if callback.passed?
      comment.passed!
    else
      comment.failed!
    end
    head 200
  end
end

How does Socialmod know which callback url to use?
Well you need to specify it in the settings:

Unfortunately the callback aspect of it makes testing locally difficult – that’s something that should be tested in the staging environment.

And that’s really all there is to it. You can choose whether or not you want pre-moderation by showing/hiding comments in the pending state.
One nice touch you could add is to only show pending items to the users that created them, so they can get some instant feedback.

The next blog post will show you how to use images with Socialmod.

Hello World!

We’ve just released Socialmod, a moderation tool that Tim’s dubbed ‘the Basecamp of moderation‘.

User Generate Content (UGC) is such a large part of the internet, and, if it’s to be associated with a brand, it really needs to be moderated.

A lot of companies develop their own moderation systems in house – a classic case of reinventing the wheel. Socialmod was developed so companies don’t have to put the time and money into developing their own.

Socialmod accepts images, videos and text. Additionally it’s got Twitter integration and can publish a ‘clean feed’ – great for award ceremonies and news events (like the UK Budget).

There are two main ways you can use Socialmod:

• Use your own team (or a moderation company) to moderate your content
• Use Mechanical Turk – a crowd-sourcing service

Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and are appropriate for different situations.

As for this blog, I hope to mirror it, in some ways, after the  37 Signal’s Signal vs. Noise blog – but with more of an emphasis on the business and development side of things.

Some of the blog posts coming up are:

• Adding pre-moderation to a Rails site
• AWS Elastic Load Balancing tutorial
• US Companies for non-residents
• LLC’s and Articles of Organization
• Merchant Accounts

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