Apple’s AppStore routinely comes under fire for inconsistent and sometimes outright bizarre behaviour when it comes to approving and rejecting applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. From the very start of our work on Bodega, moderation has been an important issue. How much influence should we have on the content that people submit to Bodega?
We thought we’d give you a glimpse behind the scenes of our moderation system, both technically and ideologically, and tell you what we’re working on to make it even better!
Our primary concerns are malware, profanity, and spam. We want to ensure that Bodega only displays legitimate and appropriate content. Whenever a developer submits a new application, a change to an existing application such as screenshots and release notes, or a user writes a review of an application, we route it into a moderation queue. We have one full-time moderator, Patrick, and the rest of us help out when the load gets really heavy. We review the new content for profanity and spam, download and test the application, check all the URLs, examine the screenshots and icons, and ensure that text is properly formatted.
We’ve spent a considerable amount of time building the moderation front-end to make it as efficient and easy as possible. When a change to an application listing is submitted, say a new release, moderators are presented the existing content on one side, and the new content on the other, with highlighted text showing the changes. After examining the changes, there’s a text area where we can address the developer by email once we click approve or reject. This lets us explain to a developer why we’ve rejected a particular change, and what they should do to correct the problem before re-submitting. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, because developers have an open dialog with moderators, they can reply to a rejection email if they have any questions or concerns.
Our system works well, but we’re always looking for ways to improve it. One of the initiatives we’re working on is something we call Trust Points. We have over 650 registered developers, some of which have had their accounts since our first developer beta back in April. The majority of our users are good citizens, dutifully respecting the rules and submitting perfect content that breezes through moderation. We believe these developers should be rewarded, thus we’re going to issue points for every trouble free submission a developer makes. Once certain thresholds are crossed, developers will not be subjected to any moderation delays when posting new content.
We are very fortunate to have a great developer community on the Mac platform, and we can’t wait to tell you about more of the upcoming features in Bodega.
