Doc516: Page and Comment Moderation

Title: Page and Comment Moderation

The Traction TeamPage moderation model allows for collaborative or formally controlled approval of page edits and comments, as well as new content. With TeamPage, moderation users who can read "drafts" in any number of blog/wiki workspaces can view, navigate and search the entire system based on its draft state or based on the "latest stable" published state.

Note: The Add New Article Form has a Save Draft / Load Draft feature (see Add New Article) which is not related to publish/draft moderation. That feature auto-saves content in your editor as you work on articles or comments. Those drafts are "local" to the user and not visible to anyone else.

Permission settings per project workspace grant rights to read, edit, reject or publish drafts to any individual or group. With draft and publish permissions widely granted, this model supports wiki style collaborative editing while keeping the "latest stable" state available for reference until consensus is achieved.

With publish permission closely held, this supports open collaboration followed by formal review and approval of important wiki content - such as changes to a contract or approved HR policy.

Enabling Moderation

Moderation permissions and features are not active until a project administrator has clicked to activate Support for Published/Draft Articles (Activate Draft/Moderation Support)

Permissions for Publishing, Editing and Reading Drafts - Locking Too

The spirit of Wiki is for open contribution, but even the public Wikipedia limits editing of some pages. Traction TeamPage supports multiple project spaces and makes it simple to state the rules for creating, editing and moderating content in each space using Permissions that grant or deny rights to perform specific actions on content within that space. A project administrator can grant or deny rights within a project space to individuals or groups - including groups defined as roles in an external LDAP or Active Directory server.

Traction's permissions provide the flexibility to support whatever moderation model you want to use. Per project space permissions include:

Author or Comment: Controls who can create new articles or comments within a project space
Edit: Permission to edit any article or comment
Edit Own: Permission to edit only those articles or comments you created
Read Own Articles: Permission to read your own published and draft articles
Read Published: Permission to read published content
Read Draft: Permission to read draft content
Read Edit History: Permission to see edit history (includes draft edits if you have Read Draft)
Publish: Controls who can publish draft content within a project space
Publish Own: Permission to publish only those articles or comments you created
Lock and Unlock: Permission to lock and unlock, or edit locked content

Two important notes

1) Erase is stronger than Lock. If an article is locked, any user with Erase permission can still erase the article.

2) This Lock permission applies to the content of Articles. It is different from Locking Files

The set of permissions give you all kinds of flexibility. For example, allowing a user to Read Own, Read Published, Comment, Edit Own and Publish Own will allow that person to add comments but not articles as well as edit toggle the publish status of their own comments. Simply removing their Publish Own permission will mean they can add comments that will be moderated. Meanwhile, they will be able to see their draft comments but not see any of the other draft content.

Moderating Draft Articles and Comments

Users who have "Publish" or "Publish Own" permission can publish every edit with one click. For others, all new entries and edits will automatically appear as Draft versions.

Users with Publish permission can click one button to publish any draft content as they read, or browse through an automatically maintained chronology view of Drafts pending approval.

When in Draft Mode, titles of Draft articles and comments are shown in Grey, and you can easily flip between the curent Published version, current Draft version and Edit History. In the default Mexico skin, the Published/Draft Mode toggle is below the date range selector:

If you toggle to Published mode, the section content and label counts will not reflect the impact of the draft content. However, in a single article view, you may see pending comments and a tab that lets you click to the Draft Version of an article.

In the example below, there are simple controls to Publish or Reject a Draft version. You can also Unpublish or Reject currently published versions.

Once an article version is published, then any pending Draft comments may also be published.

Moderation History and Edit History

Curious about how this article has evolved over time? If you are interested and have permission to read the history, you can easily dive into the details. Reading through the trail below, you can see:

Edit History: Version 94 is currently Published and all other versions are marked as Draft
Name History: The Page Names "Health Policy" and "Health Care Policy" have been added to the Draft version of the article.
Moderation History: Version 95 was the first Published version, but it was later Unpublished and the Previous Version 94 was Published
Label History: The original version of the article was tagged "Policy" and then it was tagged "Health" a few days later.

From this History view you can look at specific versions and you can then Publish, Unpublish or Reject that version.

In this view, you can see the chronology of selected aspect of the history (edits, names, moderation, labels). If you want to see a merged view of the history (including other types of Audit Trail information), you can click on the Show Reference Map link to learn more about how this article and the context around it has evolved. The map also interleaves references to when comments were made and when this article was emailed.

"Latest Stable" and Work in Progress Views

Traction Release 4.0's collection of features makes work-in-progress collaboration easy while keeping the "latest stable" version visible for reference. People who have "Read Drafts" permission can work in a Draft mode which shows the latest working version of content across the TeamPage server - or flip to a Published mode to show the latest stable (published) view of all content.

This makes it simple for people with Draft permission to work collaboratively on new versions of content across one or many project spaces without disturbing people who prefer (or are limited to) the latest stable version of content.

For example, during the often-knotty process of refactoring a wiki - which may require performing a set of related edits over many pages - authors can collaborate on changes for days or longer without disturbing the "latest stable" view of the wiki. Page changes can be published later, when all the pages are ready - or have been reviewed and approved.

The moderation model is seamlessly combined with the TeamPage 4.0 page name and page history model to support "fearless refactoring" of the names, links and content of a set of draft wiki pages prior to publication of that set of pages as the "latest stable" version.

Access to the moderation history is also controlled by the per workspace permissions granted to individuals or groups. This makes it possible for members of the groups participating in draft discussions to see all of the draft history, discussion and content of any draft version, while groups who are not party to the draft discussion can only see the history and content of published versions. This makes it possible to support a "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" rule to enable lively internal discussion and wiki style collaboration to establish a consensus (spanning many wiki pages if necessary) and use of attributed comments rather than draft edits for published content that represents an important stable consensus – or a legally binding agreement.

Project Newspage View - Draft vs. Published

See below for sample screenshots of a HR Project Newspage in Draft and Published Modes. Content and label counts (tag cloud) change when toggling between modes.

Draft Mode -
HR Newspage

Grey titles indicate draft content

Bulletin (count 1) label appears.

Published Mode -
HR Newspage

Grey titles disappear or revert to brown, if there is a Published version.

Bulletin label shows no content.

Search Results View - Drafts vs. Published Entries

Search results (TeamPage FAST Search Module style results shown here) also can present Draft content, Published content - or both. By default, people who can read both Draft and Published content see search results that include the most recent Published results as well as any more recent versions that are still Drafts. Note, In the example below, there are two hits for the same article - the draft version and the published version.

Managing and Monitoring Your Draft Moderation and Publishing Activity

Sections can help you manage and display information and meet a variety of use case needs (see Sections Overview for more information). Sections related to moderation include:

Recently Published
Recently Rejected
Recently Locked
Recently Unlocked

You can also filter other sections by whether articles or comments are in Draft, Published, Rejected, Locked and Unlocked state.

To Monitor Drafts, you might use the Recent Drafts link to see content ordered by when it was made a draft:

or you might use the Recent Articles section but filter it to Drafts (screening out Published and Rejected entries - as was done in the image below. The 2nd section in the image below shows articles based on when they were toggled to Published (though they are, coincidentally also showing in reverse chron based on the date they were posted)

Attachments:

HealthPlan_Moderation.png
HealthPlan_ModerationEditHistory.png
HR_Newspage_Draft.png
HR_Newspage_Published.png
HR_SearchDraft.png
Draft_Published_sections.png
DraftPublishedToggle.png

referenced by (8)

Doc612: Advanced Moderation Techniques Doc522: Concepts of Wiki Spaces Doc518: Page Name Management and Name History Doc493: Support for Published/Draft Articles (Activate Draft/Moderation Support)Doc357: Traction User Guide Doc159: Locking Files Doc74: Edit an Article Doc22: Sections Overview

references (1)

Doc5: Add New Article

Article: Doc516 (permalink)
Date: December 26, 2008; 2:50:01 PM Eastern Standard Time

Author Name: Paul Needham
Author ID: pan