Semi-automated Moderation

Today I shipped my first moderation feature, it's a secret endpoint that takes a space id, then sends an email to the creator of the space asking them if they want to add it to explore cuz it's cool and more people should see it.

Requests to this moderation endpoint have to be authenticated as coming from a moderator user, and spaces can only be asked once, so complete user safety is baked in.

Before I built this, I spent a couple days sending these outreach emails by hand. What I learned from that was that people were really into it, almost everyone mailed did go in and add their space to explore, and no one was offended that I was emailing them. But making all those emails and copying and pasting names got old fast.

With this new tool, I was able to blast off 20~ share space emails in the time it would've taken me to do 1. The email very closely resembles the template I was using when I was hand-sending them so I'm hoping that the response is similarly positive.

Besides that there's a couple related goals for this:

• I get to engage with users and open a dialog in an easy, genuine, and non-creepy way
• Turns a high anxiety, high labor process into an easy thing to do - so I can do it more often
• More spaces on explore, mean that I have more opportunities to promote/market cool spaces on the @kinopioclub twitter as well
• Creates a flexible 'moderators' architecture I can potentially use in the future to give other people (eg support staff) the ability to moderate the kinopio aspects, without giving anyone root/admin access to the server or db