New Features: Content Filter and Block User
posted on Dec 12 2008
We are glad to announce that we will be launching the much awaited “Content Filter” and “Block User” features on Minekey shortly. We are hopeful that this will provide greater freedom and choice to the users to control what they would like to see and who they would like to interact with on Minekey.
Content Filter blocks content that has profanities and sexually explicit material that may not be suitable for general viewing. Users who do not have any objections viewing such content may turn off the Content Filter from settings page. We made sure that the experience remains close to the current experience for users who turn off the Content Filter. Our general suggestion to users is to refrain from posting profanities and sexually explicit material to the extent possible. We do understand that some users strongly feel that profanities should be allowed, as they help express thoughts more naturally and freely and do not have substitutes, and we respect their view point. However, we wanted to ensure that users who do not like to see such content should have their choice taken care as well. As a first implementation, we have chosen the filter words specified by content safety organizations. However, we would like to monitor the usage and feedback over the coming weeks to iteratively add or remove words to the initial list. Please send us your feedback and suggestions to us at community AT minekey DOT com.
In a large and diverse community like Minekey, people are bound to have differences of opinions. We advise our users to be tolerant and respectful of other people’s opinions, but we have found that this difference of opinions can sometimes lead to trolling, personal attacks, harassment and cyber bullying. We strongly advise our users to refrain from any form of personal attacks and cyber bullying since the laws in most countries around the world have started to deal with it strictly. As some of you may be aware, in the recent MySpace cyber-bullying episode the person charged guilty was sentence.
We are introducing Block User feature to provide you the power to prevent specific users from trolling on your opinions. Block User feature allows you to restrict certain users you choose from viewing your profile, commenting on your opinions or writing notes on your profile. These users may only be able to vote on your opinion if they see it on the recent, most discussed or most voted tabs on the opinion board or if such opinion is shared with them by their friends. When such users visit your profile, they will only be able to view your limited profile and will not be able to view any of your content from your profile. Further, blocking a user will immediately remove you and the user from each other’s followers list until you unblock.
We would also like to inform you that we are also working on Content Rating which would enable users to rate content on Minekey and hence provide greater control to collectively determine the type of content they would like to see more often. We are also working on implementing a User Reputation management system which will take into consideration the user’s reputation, abuse history, content rating on Minekey and will restrict certain privileges. We hope that these features will help collectively determine what’s good content and good user behavior on Minekey and reduce the moderator involvement in deleting content and disabling user accounts. We hope to be able to roll out these features later this month.
We believe these features provide adequate controls to users to feel safe and comfortable in expressing themselves freely on Minekey. We would like to seek support and cooperation from all users to make Minekey more fun and friendly. If you have any suggestions or questions, please email us at community AT minekey DOT com.
Category: Community, Community Guidelines, Report Abuse, content rating, profanity
