moderation

[ghost]

This is a rough initial implementation for subjective (yet sticky) moderation.

When you initialize a cabal, your own key is added as admin for your view of the network. You can optionally set another key in the cabal URL via cabal://modkey@cabalkey. This way you can share a cabal chat with somebody inclusive of a moderation setting so you can share your subjective view of the network (and not have that other person see filtered content that you don't even see).

This patch adds ban/add, ban/remove, mod/add, and mod/remove types. When you add a moderator you can set the role to be admin, mod, or a custom string for custom application purposes. Setting admins and mods can be channel specific or cabal-wide (by not specifying a channel or using the special @ super-user group). Admins can add and remove admins and mods and can add and remove bans. Mods can add and remove bans.

More info: https://github.com/substack/materialized-group-auth

Clients will need to be updated for ban and mod commands once this lands and a lot of other UI work will need to be done.

[hackergrrl]

Great work! Could you also update the readme /w the new APIs you've surfaced?

[hackergrrl]

Travis is failing because a package-lock.json got introduced. If you rebase from master and force-push you should get more useful results.

[hackergrrl]

@cblgh @nikolaiwarner @cinnamon-bun (and anyone else): any of you want to block this / request changes?

I'm feeling not 100% on the cabal://modkey@cabalkey URI syntax. It makes the URIs quite long. I wonder what other ways there are of letting folx choose a custom root mod. If we do do the URI approach, I also have a kinda nitpicky preference toward a cabalkey@modkey ordering, since it makes mod info easier to shave off the end and join the cabal /w the default mod setup.

[ghost]

cabal://modkey@cabalkey is more similar to how the URI schema uses scheme://authority@host which is why I did it that way. I'm also not very attached to this particular scheme. Other options include cabal://cabalkey/modkey or many more.

[cblgh]

oh hell yes, i'll review later tonight!

[okdistribute]

This is great, thanks substack. Excited to use this.

can we use role/update instead of mod/add and mod/remove? It's a bit more flexible

[okdistribute]

In hyperdrive the syntax folks use is dat://key@seq, not sure if cabal wants to reuse that to refer to a specific message, or come up with another scheme for referring to a message

[cinnamon-bun]

Yay moderation ✨

Cabal keys and user pubkeys are so long that the @ or other separator will be lost in the noise. I'd guess most people will only look at the first couple chars and they will think of that as the name of the cabal.

I don't know which is better to come first:

• A. If the cabal key comes first, people will think that different admin-views of the same cabal are the same thing, not noticing the difference in admins
• B. If the mod pubkey comes first, every admin-view will seem like a totally different cabal address

Could you maliciously re-use a pubkey across multiple cabals to make them have similar looking addresses in case B?

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Do we care if the whole address can be easily selected by double-clicking?

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Personally I feel itchy about cabal://pubkey@cabalkey because, by analogy to email, it seems like it's identifying a user rather than a view. I would choose something like cabal://cabalkey?mod=pubkey to allow for further expansion later, like linking to a specific message.

But I don't want to bikeshed it and we can change it later! I'm excited this is happening 🐰 👍

[cblgh]

from IRC:
(bikeshed proposal == cabal://<cabal key>?mod=<public key of mod> instead of mod@cabalkey)

10:22:28 < cblgh> substack: i started adding the bikeshed proposal by rewriting the tests, but i might have found a bug
10:22:28 < cblgh> 1339a78
10:22:35 < cblgh> that should work right?
10:22:54 < cblgh> one's a mod, one's banned, one subscribes to the bans, one doesn't
10:23:12 < cblgh> the test errors out tho, not sure if i'm missing something
10:24:02 < cblgh> also the other test case has been edited to the new mod syntax and still passes
10:24:15 < cblgh> despite me not having changed anything else yet
10:27:54 < cblgh> (that the new mod syntax is part of the other test is a mistake; that's how i started doing stuff and noticed the tests were still passing)

[hackergrrl]

Depends on https://github.com/substack/materialized-group-auth/pull/1

[hackergrrl]

Remaining tasks for this PR:

• utilize the banned users list to hide content from the messages API

Future work:

• API to expose list of mods and admins and/or list of roles on a user
• refusing to download hypercores of cabal-wide banned users

[hackergrrl]

Actually, let's do message pruning in another PR: it's nontrivial and I'm keen to get this in.

[hackergrrl]

🎉 thank you @substack

[cblgh]

🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉