True moderation in phpBB
phpBB, one of the most popular forum systems, does not have proactive moderation capabilities. Proactive, or “true” moderation is forcing any post made by a “non-special” user gets queued until it’s approved by a moderator. While draconian, proactive moderation is a popular way of preventing inappropriate content in forums.
After a lot of thought, the least intrusive mechanism is to extend the “posts” table by a single tinytext field that will store the “forum_id,topic_id”. The forum_id and topic_id in the post record will be set to 0, and thus never be displayed. Once someone approves the messages, the tinytext field will take the forum_id component and set that, and if there is a topic_id, then set that. If there is no topic_id component, then it’s assumed this was a new topic, and one needs to be assigned.
I’m still in awe that phpBB has no proactive moderation……. Yet.
