Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

Isolated Forums-level Moderation in Community Server

I worked though this issue with a user yesterday and thought it was such a powerful feature of Community Server that I had to blog about it:  Isolated Forums-level Moderation.  What I mean by that is enabling custom roles to moderate certain forums and only those forums.  In fact, moderators of those select forums cannot even VIEW other forum posts, in the Control Panel or otherwise.  So we're talking true isolation between Community Server Forums.

We have two forums, two custom roles and three users we're going to deal with here:  The forums are HarryForumsAdmin Moderated and JoseForumsAdmin Moderated.  The custom roles are HarryForumsAdministrator and JoseForumsAdministrator.  The users are Harry (in Harry admin role), Jose (in Jose admin role), and Susie who is in neither.

Here are the broad strokes we're going to demonstrate.

1) Create roles.  Add users
2) Additionally add users in Custom Moderation Roles to Moderate Role Group
3) Update \CP\web.config to give access to Control Panel. 
4) Update \CP\tab.config to display "Forums Administration" Tab. 
5) Update \CP\Moderation\web.config to give access to Moderation functions.
6) Remove Moderate role from User and Admin roles of custom Moderated forums.

Achieving the forums-level isolation is mostly a matter of clicking on the appropriate role checkboxes.  The interesting part of this process is giving non-admins access to the Control Panel and Forums Administration functions.  That's where updating the .config files comes in.  As for adding the users to the Moderate Group, then removing the Moderate role from the custom moderated forums, I don't have the details as to why, only that it works.

We'll link to several screenpics and config files to walk through the process.  Here are our forums, HarryForumsAdmin Moderated and JoseForumsAdmin Moderated, moderated by their respective Custom Role Groups, HarryForumsAdministrator and JoseForumsAdministrator.

Susie is an ordinary user and her posts to both forums are moderated, as you can see here.  Now we're going to have Harry login.  He isn't in the Site Administration group, but we've updated the \ControlPanel\web.config to give access to the custom role groups.  So now Harry sees the Control Panel tab

But Harry does not have access to the complete Control Panel, only the Forums Moderation functions which we enabled by updating the \ControlPanel\tab.config.  (Here are the \CP\Moderation\web.config changes to support the moderation functions.) When Harry goes into the Control Panel, this is what he sees.  And notice, while Sally posted to both moderated groups, Harry can see only the HarryForumsAdmin Moderated posts.  He cannot see the JoseForumsAdmin Moderated forums posts.  And when Jose hits the Forums Moderation service, he doesn't see HarryForumsAdmin Moderated posts.

Life is good when you know what checkboxes to click on, so here are the permission panels for the JoseForumsAdmin Moderated Forum.  First the User Permissions, secondly the Admin Permissions.

Forums-level Isolated Moderation.  Just another ho-hum feature of Community Server.

[tags: Community Server, Forums Moderation]

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Posted on 8/8/2006 10:36:00 AM by Dave Burke
Categories: Community Server
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Comments (3) -

8/10/2006 8:40:56 AM Permalink

Updating \ControlPanel\web.config will not give Harry the CP tab, you will also need to edit siteUrls.config to do that.

Would it not be possible to do this without editing any files at all, by clearing all the priviliges for the Moderator role and adding Jose and Harry to the Moderator role aswell.
eg Harry will be in the Moderator role and HarryForumsAdministrator role, he can access the CP because he is in the Moderator role

Dave |

8/10/2006 10:32:30 AM Permalink

Just came to read this article again, and I see that my trackback looks like a comment of mine with a strange question out of it's context. Smile But it is a trackback from a post I wrote on my blog.

J-O Eriksson |

3/9/2007 5:49:13 AM Permalink

Hi,
Every time we need to update web.config files when new Moderator role is created for new forums...?

Deepak |


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