Abuse Reporting Made Easy

Flagging user generated content as a service

By Ivar Rafn · Published Sept 24, 2013

I was working on a web app that required functionality to allow users to report an item as offensive, spam or any other junk. I realized that I have built spam reporting functionality more than once before and thought that this could be something people could use as a service.

In short, this service would allow you to add flagging functionality to your web app very quickly without having to build one yourself.

Why?

Anything I can use to speed up development and get my minimum viable product out there is always welcome. When the goal is to get the product out quick and start receiving feedback I don't have time to make all the functionality myself so I leverage every tool I can find to save valuable resources.

How?

The idea is that when your developing some web app you could drop a lightweight JavaScript snippet into your page along with a simple anchor with data attributes which would serve as the report button.

You could add a report button to any content you like such as articles, comments or any other user generated content.

Example:

<a class="report-this" href="#" data-id="1">Report This</a>

When clicked the modal box will load a form which the user can fill out and submit the report.

The values from the data attributes such as an identifier or any other information will be included with the report so you'll know what is being flagged, who flagged it etc.

Features

The following is a list of features that could be available in this service, any ideas are welcome in the comments on Hacker News.

Basic features that will definitely be included:

Customized form inputs, title, text and styling
Admin panel with an overview of reports and simple management functions such as changing status of reports (solved, pending etc.)
Email notifications when reports are received
Optional Captcha spam protection

Extras:

You or your staff could respond to reports with messages to the user who submitted them
Google Analytics integration
OAtuh integration so only logged in users can submit reports
Webhooks that ping an url when certain conditions are met f.e when a blog post has been reported X no. of times

Short Survey

Comments