Moderation feature: next steps

[hackergrrl]

Yes! Excited that #45 is happening! Some questions and thoughts about next steps:

1. Changing your root moderator/admin affects your view of basically everything. When the person using a cabal app changes the root mod, we'll need to purge all materialized views so they can rebuild. This could be done at runtime with a new API on cabal-core, or something that detects when the key param on the cabal-core constructor is a different modkey than the last startup.
2. Moderation message types affect existing messages. Consider the case where a ban/add makes it desirable to not show chat messages from that use anymore. However, their messages still reside in the chat history view. There are multiple ways to do this, like a) rebuilding all views on moderation commands (no thanks), having the moderation view actually edit other existing views (like purging existing entries from the banned user), or having the APIs on the other views do filtering on their get API based on moderation view state. I'm leaning toward (2) right now.

[okdistribute]

In exiting chat programs, you can see the conversation before the user was banned, that means that chat history of a banned user is not removed from view. This is a feature that allows people to see what behavior led to the ban and how the moderator dealt with it. It can be useful for a variety of reasons:

1. gauge effectiveness of moderator (was the moderator professional?)
2. was this person banned for a good reason? (did the user do something ban worthy?)
3. set an example for behavior that is clear to bysyanders (how can a regular user support the community guidelines in the future even when a moderator is absent?)

For these reasons, the backscroll default in Irc-style chat programs is useful.

However, in the most egregious cases and for social media applications I could see use for a setting which turns off backscroll for banned users, that silences their history as well. However, I think this would be better as a per-user view that is separate from a ban, and can be turned on even when the offender hasn't been banned yet. This can be useful for a variety of reasons:

1. a moderator isn't available or online
2. the community is beneficial as a whole but a particular person hasn't broken their rules, you just don't want to see their messages anymore
3. above case of removing backscroll of a particular banned user that you really don't want to be reminded of

The pros of this also include from a technical perspective:

1. banning is less computationally expensive
2. my entire chat history is regenerated only when I want it to be
3. automatically removing backscroll of banned users can be implemented as a setting