The Social Pinpoint Learning Centre
Social Pinpoint's moderation system helps keep participant contributions appropriate and respectful using automated tools and human review to review and remove undesirable content on your behalf.
Participation tools like Social Map, Gather, Visioner, Conversation, and Forum allow participants to post comments and images visible to all site visitors.
Our moderators monitor your site 24/7, reviewing content shortly after it's posted. If content potentially violates our Moderation Rules, it will be temporarily removed and referred to you for a final decision. You can either delete or reinstate it.
Automated processes such as a Banned Words filter and anti-SPAM technology also help keep undesirable content from appearing on your site. Additionally, you can also choose to self-moderate, taking full control of managing content (this removes our moderators from the process).
Our moderators review content against the nine rules contained in our Moderation Policy:
The moderation rules are set, and you cannot add or modify them.
Both Social Pinpoint and the Customer share the responsibility of moderation, so it's important to understand how the moderation process works.
First, our moderators perform an initial assessment of any content submitted by your participants against our standard Moderation Rules. If they believe the content doesn't meet our Moderation Rules or feel uncertain whether the content is appropriate, they'll refer it to you for further review.
When our moderators refer content to you, it is temporarily removed from public view. At the same time, any users you assign to the 'moderator' role will receive an email notification letting them know of the referral.
Our moderators do not 'reject' content outright, so you are responsible for making the final decision to approve or reject it, which you can do through the provided moderation tools.
You can nominate moderators for your whole site or specific projects only. Moderators assigned at the project level can only receive notifications and perform moderation actions related to that project.
When our moderators refer content to you, the email notification indicates the reason for their referral:
The email also includes a link to the Moderation area of the Dashboard where you can review the content and take action to 'approve' or 'reject' it(see instructions for using the moderation interface below).
Our moderators do not review video content, so you will need to screen this content internally. Your nominated moderators will receive an email notification when video content is posted (via the Gather tool).
You can control how the moderation process works on your site by adjusting the moderation method. There are two options to choose from:
You can set the moderation method you prefer to use at a default site level. However, you also have the option to override this default setting in the participation tools if necessary, so you can choose the method that best supports your project.
Two different moderation methods give you control over how your content is reviewed and approved.
You can remove our moderators from the screening process by enabling the self-moderation feature. This option makes you fully responsible for reviewing all content.
Typically, self-moderation is only necessary where the engagement collects sensitive information or there is a need for a greater level of control.
You can still select the moderation method (pre-moderation or post-moderation) most appropriate for your use case when using this option. Just make sure you're actively reviewing any contributions to keep the conversation flowing, especially if using pre-moderation. We recommend trying to review content within 2 hours.
Social Pinpoint uses automated processes to screen content before a contribution can enter the moderation system. These features prevent participants from posting obvious profanity and detect automated 'bot' activity, reducing the need for human review.
Social Pinpoint uses a 'banned words' filter to screen your participant's content for 'black words'. Participants who try to post content containing a word from the Banned Words list will have their contribution refused when trying to submit.
You can customise the Banned Words list, which contains hundreds of words out of the box (see 'Key actions' below). You should review this list to make sure it is appropriate for your organisation.
Social Pinpoint uses anti-SPAM technology to detect and prevent suspicious activity that attempts to 'SPAM' content to your site. Usually, this results from automated, 'bot' activity - robots that deploy programs to find and complete web-based forms, sometimes at high volumes.
Social Pinpoint uses Google's reCAPTCHA technology to detect non-human behaviour and block suspicious activity before it becomes a problem. You can set up this feature to always work across your site by default or configure it in relevant participation tools on a case by case basis (see 'Key actions' below).
You can also enable this feature on your site's registration form to prevent bots from creating user accounts, but you'll need our help for this (contact customer support).
When you enable this option, a CAPTCHA field appears on the input form of the participation activity and asks the participant to confirm they are not a bot before submitting their content (in most cases).
The Moderation area of the Dashboard provides an overview of all moderation activity on your site, allowing you to approve, review, or remove public contributions.
When a participant submits content, a moderation ticket is generated with the following details:
Moderation tickets are categorized into three columns:
The moderation ticket also shows its moderation status indicating whether the content is live on your site (or not):
You can take the following actions using the moderation ticket buttons:
To view the history of actions for a ticket, click 'View Details'.
Site Administrators can view all moderation activity in the Moderation area of the Dashboard and perform all moderation actions on a site. However, they will not receive referral notifications unless their email address is nominated.
To adjust the list of email addresses which will receive referral notifications:
Only users with appropriate permissions can perform moderation actions, regardless of whether they receive referral notifications or not.
You can also nominate Site Users to act as moderators at the project level. These users will receive email notifications when our moderators refer content for review. They can also perform moderation actions, but only for content collected on the projects which they are assigned.
To assign a user to act as a moderator for a project:
You can select between two moderation methods to determine whether content is pre-screened before it is published (pre-moderation), or it is immediately published and only removed if there is an issue (post-moderation).
You can set the default moderation method at a site level but can override the default within each participation tool.
To change the moderation workflow of a participation tool:
To search for a specific contribution:
You can reject any content referred to you, or remove content already approved by the moderators if you do not want it to appear on your site.
To reject or remove content:
When you reject a contribution, you can notify the participant who made it to explain the reasons for the rejection, which is generally considered good practice.
To use this feature, you need to have registration enabled on the tool or use a preset email question, so the software knows where to send the notification.
The notification email sent to the participants will include the reason for the rejection and can optionally include a custom message to provide further details.
To send a rejection email notification to the participant:
You can take full control of the moderation process and exclude our moderators from the process. Enabling the self-moderation feature makes you solely responsible for monitoring and reviewing content contributed by your participants:
To enable self-moderation:
The Banned Words list can be customised by Site Administrators to include additional, or remove unwanted, words.
To customise the Banned Words list:
You can permanently or temporarily disable the Banned Words filter on your site by clicking the 'Disallow posts that include banned words?' checkbox at the top of the page.
The anti-spam features of Social Pinpoint help protect your site from bots that automatically submit content through your participation activities or registration form.
They add a CAPTCHA field to the input form of the participation activity which users need to check to confirm they are not a bot.
You can enable the anti-spam features at a site level, and relevant participation tools will use these default settings when added to your site.
Usually, we configure these features on set up of your site, but our customer service team can assist you to make changes to your defaults settings.
You can also turn the anti-spam features on or off for a specific participation tool to override the site's default setting.
To change the anti-spam settings of a tool:
To further elevate and innovate our focus on creating the best-in-class software solution dedicated to community engagement, we have decided to rebrand The HiVE as Social Pinpoint with an exciting update to the Social Pinpoint brand to match!
Community engagement is an ongoing process of collaboration and co-learning. When we evaluate our community engagement initiatives, we give ourselves the opportunity to measure our deeper impact and make improvements for future projects.
With the right action plan in place, we can ensure we are connecting with our community on an appropriate level to enhance public decision-making.
