talk/TERMINOLOGY.md

Product's Terminology

This is a guide to have a common language to talk about "Talk".

Definitions

• Site - a top level site, aka nytimes.com

• Section - the section of a site, aka, Politics.

• Subsection - the section of a site, aka, Politics.

• Asset - An article/video/etc identified by URL.

• Embed - Things we put on a asset: comment box, ToS, Stream, etc…

• Stream - All the activity on a certain asset. Container for Comments, actions, user

• Thread - defined by a parent and everything below. All replies to a comment and their replies, etc…

• Comment - a kind of user-generated content submitted by a comment author

  • A parent comment has replies to it
  • A child comments is a reply to another comment
  • A comment can be both a parent comment and a child of another comment
  • A top-level comment is a comment that is not a reply to any other comment
  • A nth-level comment refers to the number of replies away from the top-level comment

• User - an item to represent a person using Talk. It could be a moderator, reader, etc.

• User Roles:

  • Active: some who takes action (logged in or not)
  • Passive: some who just reads, no actions performed
  • Comment Author: The user who wrote the comment
  • Staff Member: someone who works for an organization (tagged for leverage in trust)
  • Moderator: someone with the ability to access the moderation queue and perform moderation actions
  • Administrator: has the ability to change the setup of their coral space

• Public Profile: information about users shown in public

• Private Profile: information about users shown only to user about themselves

• Protected Profile: information about users that only moderators and admins can see

• Queue - Group of items based on a query, aka - moderation queue

• Target - The item/s on which an action is performed

Actions

Actions are performed by users on items. Actions themselves are items. This requires two relationships: action on item, and user performs action.

Flag

• A Flagger(user) performs a Flag
• A Flag is performed on a Comment or a username or profile content

Moderation Actions and Status

Comments contain a field status. As moderation actions are peformed, the status changes.

• Initial status is empty.
• When a moderator Approves, the status is set to 'approved'.
• When a moderator Rejects, the status is set to 'reject'.

Pre and post moderation

Comments can be set to be premoderated or postmoderated.

Premoderation means that moderation has to occur before a comment is shown on the site:

• New comments are shown in the moderator queues immediately.
• The are not shown to users until (aka in streams) until they are approved by a moderator.

Postmoderation means that comments appear on the site before any moderation action is taken.

• New comments appear in comment streams immediately.
• New comments do not appear in moderation queues unless they are flagged by other users.

Word lists

• Banned words - words that the site never allows in a comment
• Suspect words - words whose usage needs to be approved by a moderator before being shown in the stream
• Approved words - words that are usually Banned or Suspect sitewide, but approved for use in a specific article stream