Introducing the mod-bot community moderation tool. Comment for a share of the rewards about whether you'd use the tool, and any ideas you have.

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Hello everyone! Over the course of the last month, things have been hectic. I had a family emergency to address, and didn't have a lot of time to work on things Steem related. But my dad (@remlaps) and I have come up with a new idea which we have now implemented in his Popular Stem community. That idea originally was for an account which monitors promoted posts in a community, and pins them either based on order, or based on weighted pooling. Little did I know when @remlaps suggested that original idea, how much this tool could potentially do for the community experience on Steem. So I will lay out where the project currently is, and some of the ideas I have had about where we can take this project.

Mod-Bot: An experimental community moderation tool

What do we have so far?

Right now, I have mod-bot looking at several different parameters (in regards to pinned posts) for the communities it monitors (which right now is just the popular stem community). The most important of these are promoted-ordered, promoted-pooling, burn-ordered, and burn-pooling. For each of these 4 parameters, a community owner can put a number, and that many posts will be selected for pinning. I.E. If a community owner wants the top two promoted posts pinned and 2 promoted posts pinned based on random selection of a pool (which is weighted in proportion to promotion amount), he would say promoted-ordered:2 and promoted-pooling:2. When the bot checks the promoted posts, the 2 posts that are promoted the most will always be pinned, and the other 2 slots will be rotated randomly based on the other promoted posts. The concept is the same for burned posts.

The cool thing about this tool is that it will pair nicely with the browser extension @remlaps is working on which colors in burned and promoted posts.

In creating this, I made it so the bot checks if it was the original pinner of a post before unpinning it. This means that posts pinned by other community moderators will not be interacted with during the pinning process. This also means that the number of pinned posts will be in addition to whatever posts are already pinned by other accounts.

There are other parameters a community can use which are:

• A minimum and maximum amount of words required to pin a post
• A minimum and maximum promoted amount
• A minimum and maximum reputation for an author of a pinned post
• A required language for a post to be in to be pinned
• Whether a post has to be powered up 100 percent to be pinned
• Possibly more in the future

My father has not used any of them, but I'm sure other community owners would want to. For instance, I figure a community like the New Comer's community might not want to pin posts from accounts above a certain reputation. And a Spanish community may not want to allow for non-spanish posts to be pinned.

I've also added a system which monitors the account's mentions and follows commands if the commenter is a moderator or higher in the community. I.E. Blacklisting posts from being pinned and blacklisting authors from being pinned. I will keep the format for commands secret until we are ready for use by other community owners. I don't want a million people spamming the bot.

What do I plan to do?

I plan to add features for muting posts. Most communities have certain criteria pre-established. I.E. This is a community for posts in Spanish, or this community requires posts with a minimum of x words. Etc.

This system will be designed to have specific parameters for posts to be muted. Such as if a post isn't this many words, it will be muted. Or if posts aren't in Spanish mute them. This will eliminate the posts that don't meet the community's established standards which are easily monitorable for a bot. This concept also raises some other cool ideas:
something like a members only community. I.E. The community owner has a list of people who are allowed to post in the community, and anyone else who posts will be muted. This would be cool for something like a hypothetical Steem witnesses community. Anyone can comment on their posts, but all of the original posts in the community come from the witnesses. So if you want to look for official posts from that team (or any other team on Steem), you just look in the community. No one would have to sit there muting posts not from those authors, and it would create a good place to go to see those people's posts.

Similarly, this would be a cool concept for a community of only burned posts. While the burnsteem25 tag exists, people who aren't actually burning steem at 25 percent could still post with that tag, and you have to look into it to see if they are actually burning at 25 percent. With this tool, a community could be set up where all of the posts shared that are unmuted have to be burning at least 25 percent of their rewards.

Another possibility that excites me is the potential to make it so posts in a community require a community account to receive a certain amount beneficiary awards. That could really make it much more rewarding to run a successful community. So I'm definitely considering running that for communities that are interested.

There are many other concepts that this tool can be used for, and I'm sure that as community owners discover this tool, they will suggest even more concepts that @remlaps and I can't think of.

How can you get this tool for your community?

For right now, @remlaps and I are going to finish getting the service up and running for his community. Eventually we will likely run a beta period where the service will be free for those who want it while we work out the kinks and get the service working on a larger scale, and eventually we will make a post discussing how to sign up for the service. For right now, feel free to comment down below with any ideas, and if you'd be interested in using this service for your community. I will be making it so that 20 percent of the article's rewards go towards fueling that discussion using @penny4thoughts. Remember that in order to receive a share, your comment has to be meaningful and relevant.

Anyway, have a nice weekend everyone!