Product Updates

PubNub's Chat Moderation Dashboard Enables Custom Control

JP Shipherd on Sep 28, 2021
PubNub's Chat Moderation Dashboard Enables Custom Control

We’re excited to announce the release of PubNub’s new Moderation Dashboard. Our Moderation Dashboard is a pre-built, open-source, configurable GUI application that enables moderation capabilities for our customers’ chat apps. With this release, you’ll be able to mask or block inappropriate text and images, monitor message activity, and enforce moderation rules on users such as flagging, muting, or banning them.

Why rely on pre-built moderation?

Online communities are a vital part of an authentic virtual experience—like gaming or virtual concerts and events. As these online spaces continue to grow, it is important to prioritize having real-time chat that is welcoming and safe for everyone involved, especially if your user base includes children. Plus, with the App Store now requiring that all apps hosted on their site have profanity filtering, adding moderation to your platform is essential to remain competitive. 

Relying on PubNub’s pre-built method of automating moderation keeps your online communities healthy, without taking up developers' precious time. And, because our Moderation Dashboard is open-source, your team can fit the moderation approach and tools to fit your specific needs. 

Why PubNub Moderation Dashboard?

Customize moderation parameters to fit your needs

Admins are able to customize the safety features they want enabled, and to limit only the content they choose. This can range from blocking profanity for all-ages platforms, to limited moderation in cases of hate-speech or offensive language.

An open source framework that gives you full flexibility as you build

We understand that there is no one size fits all solution, so we made PubNub’s Moderation Dashboard completely open source.

PubNub’s Moderation Dashboard includes all the best-practice approaches to the most common moderation needs, and developers have full control over how they want to customize the dashboard to their specific requirements. Admins can choose to deploy the dashboard as is—which already offers complex and fully-automated moderation—or they can leverage it as a starting point to build more nuanced and custom capabilities to fit their specific needs. 

Key features of PubNub’s Moderation Dashboard:

PubNub’s Moderation Dashboard includes best-practice implementations of the following types of moderation functionality:

Configure automatic text and image moderation 

Your admins can use the Moderation Dashboard GUI to publish Functions that can inspect messages in real time as they are published, and mask or block messages before other users see them:

  • Automatic Word List moderation: check if messages contain specific words or phrases.

  • Automatic Text moderation: powered by our partner, Tisane Labs. Tisane Labs detects cyberbullying, hate speech, sexual harassment, and other problematic content.

  • Automatic Image moderation: powered via our integration with SightEngine—who detects and filters any unwanted content in images.

Admin Message Moderation Features

Your admins can have complete control to monitor and moderate message activities in a channel through the following options: 

  • Admin can view history and real-time activity on a channel.

  • (If configured) Admin can view text and images that have been blocked or obfuscated by automatic moderation.

  • Admin can make after-the-fact deletes or edits of messages.

Admin User Management Features

Your admins can also perform moderation actions on users, with complete control over the content your users can post through the following options: 

  • Admin can flag/unflag users. 

  • Admin can block/mute users from a particular channel.

  • Admin can ban users from the app completely.

Ready to get started?

Check out this Quick Start Guide and GitHub repo to get your own moderation dashboard up and running in no time.

And if you’re excited to implement this new release, or have any questions about how to implement and deploy this dashboard in your own app, make sure to join us on October 20, 2021 for Developer Office Hours with our Product team!