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Moderator guide
This guide documents actions that only moderators can perform from the Dignitas web interface. Refer to Sysadmin guide for actions that require sysadmin skills.
Your dashboard contains links to all these moderation tools.
Moderators can see a checkmark next to each answer. Click it to accept that answer as proof for the statement.
To set a verdict for the statement, edit the statement. Only moderators can see and modify the verdict field.
You can define canned responses that address common problems concerning the style, format or contents of statements and answers. Users who comment on those items can pick a canned response (and possibly change it before posting it). For example, if a lot of new users post off-topic statements, you can define a canned response explaining why that is not acceptable.
Every author must have a type (person, party, government body, company, church etc.). Fresh Dignitas installations begin without any author types defined; therefore you must define at least one type before users are able to add new authors. Each author type has a name like "person" or "party" and several checkboxes:
- Whether authors of this type may have loyalty or be the object of loyalty. For example, we are generally interested in people's loyalty to political parties, so you may wish to check the "has loyalty" box for the "person" author type as well as the "object of loyalty" box for the "party" author type.
- Whether or not authors of this type may have colors. Parties and alliances traditionally have colors.
Every relationship must have a type. A person can be the mayor in a City Hall, the deputy mayor or a spokesperson. Similarly, a person can be the prime minister in a government, the justice minister or the education minister. These relationship types must be defined explicitly, including:
- The name (for example prime minister).
- The "from" and "to" author types (for example from person to government).
- The weight, which is a fractional number between 0.0 and 1.0 and is only relevant when the "from" author type has loyalty. The weight defines how indicative this relationship is of a person's loyalty. For example, party membership is very relevant and should receive a weight of 1.0. Distant kinship is only slightly relevant and deserves a weight of perhaps 0.25.
- The "symmetric" checkbox. For example, kinship is symmetric. If A is related to B, but B is not related to A in a symmetric relationship, the system will complain during its nightly integrity check.
- The "membership" checkbox. If checked, relationships of this type will be listed on the target author's page. For example, the person-to-party relationship should be checked as a membership, so that users visiting the party page can see a list of its members.
Some items have external URL links:
- statements should provide links to a reputable press source;
- author profiles should link to their official page;
- author relations should state their source.
By default, Dignitas displays the domain part of these links, such as en.wikipedia.org. Moderators can map these domain names to more user-friendly values such as Wikipedia.
You can configure static resources (images, HTML, Javascript, CSS) to customize certain pages. These are currently limited to the home page for anonymous users and for logged in users.
The default configuration looks for homepage-top.html, homepage-bottom.html, homepage.js and homepage.css for anonymous users, and does nothing for logged in users. Feel free to create additional resources (such as images) if your HTML requires them. Each of these resources has a URL link so you know how to include it in your HTML.
Every resource specifies the locale (language) it uses. When multiple resources exist with the same name, the system will load one in this order of preference:
- the current user's locale;
- the "any" locale (this can be useful for language-independent resources such as images, Javascript and/or CSS);
- the lexicographically smallest locale.
Moderators can write help pages and group them into categories.
We would like to display an author's relationships in human-friendly fashion. Sometimes this is easy: Jane Smith is a member of the Green Party. But what about being the mayor of Paris? Defining an author called Paris is not useful. Paris is a city administered by many governing bodies which should not be lumped together. A much cleaner approach is to define the author type city hall and an author of that type, the City Hall of Paris. We can then define relations like mayor and deputy mayor between persons and city halls.
But now another problem arises. If we simply display relationships as «author name» is «relationship name» of «author name» since «date», then the mayor relationship would be displayed as "Anne Hidalgo is mayor of The City Hall of Paris since 2014". We would really like to display this as "Anne Hidalgo is mayor of Paris since 2014". This is where possessive forms come in. Possessive forms are especially useful in languages with inflected case systems.
Whenever you add a relationship type, you can choose a phrase type to indicate how relations of that type are to be displayed.
- normal: simply print the relation type name and the target author name, e.g. «close relative of» «John Smith»;
- long possessive form: «member» «of the Green Party»;
- short possessive form: «mayor» «of Paris» (when the target author would actually be The City Hall of Paris);
- none: omit the target author entirely: «prime minister» (when the target author would be The Government of France).
This works in conjunction with long and short possessive forms defined for authors that may need them. Only moderators can see and edit these values. For example, if a user adds The City Hall of Lyon, the system will note that all city halls require short possessive forms (for the mayor relationship type) and will nag moderators to add one for The City Hall of Lyon.
When specifying possessive forms, moderators can use [square brackets] to indicate which portion of the target author name should be hyperlinked, if any. For example, if John Smith is a member of the Green Party, we don't want the entire possessive form to be hyperlinked, only the actual party name. This can be spelled as of the [Green Party]. This will produce a hyperlink like "member of the Green Party".
You do not need to list party memberships if a person has none. Similarly, if they leave their last party, you can simply put an end date on that relationship. However, two things will happen which may be undesirable to you:
- You will not see the "indepenent" keyword anywhere on the person's page.
- The loyalty bar will not be visible (at least, not after enough time passes since the person left the party).
If you want to explicitly list a politician as independent and have an independent loyalty bar, here is how we accomplished it on dignitas.ro.
- Create a new author type. Call it "independent" if you will (the name will not be visible publicly). Check the "object of loyalty" and "has a color" boxes.
- Create a relationship type from "person" to the newly created "independent" author type. Call it "independent" or anything else. Give it the "none" phrase type so that it won't be listed as "John Smith, independent independent". Give it a weight of 1 so that loyalty flows along it.
- Create an author of type "independent" called "independent". The title will show up when a user hovers over the loyalty bar. Give it a nice color (white sounds good for independents). No other data is necessary.
- For every independent politician, edit their profile and add a relationship of type "independent" and target "independent". Set the start and end dates as usual.
Loyalty bars will update after you run scripts/computeLoyalties.php.
Users can search for "independent" and land on the independent author page, which is perhaps not ideal, but nothing to worry about either. You can display a list of independent politicians on this page if you wish. To achieve this, check the "membership relationship" box at step (2) above.
Moderators can send out email invitations, if these are enabled in the configuration file. Recipients can click the link in the email to join Dignitas. Currently, invitations cannot be revoked.