There have been a lot of observations since we launched on how we moderate content on Spaces.   Just so there aren’t any misconceptions floating around, here is exactly what we do, and why.

One of our main goals for Spaces was to create a platform for people to share their thoughts and feelings with their friends and the outside world.  However, we wanted to make Spaces usable by not only the people who are blogging today, but also be approachable by the general internet user, who might not have heard of blogging previously, or been given an opportunity to try it out.

Unfortunately, whenever you create an open platform for people to say whatever they want, and open it up to the wide world (14 languages, in 26 different markets), there is always a handful of people who spoil the party, and post a bunch of inappropriate (and in some cases illegal) stuff. And to make matters worse, what exactly is deemed “appropriate” or not is very subjective, not only from person to person, but from country to country.

So, we need to do what we can to make our platform available for people to use in the way they like, but we want to keep wildly inappropriate stuff outside of public forums.

How do we do this?

Well, mainly, we ask for your help. If you think something is indecent or inappropriate, there is a “Report Abuse” link at the bottom of every Space. When you submit a problem, we have real live humans looking at your report, and they make an analysis of whether someone has crossed the line. And that line is fairly high. Mostly, we don’t want pornography on our site. But, there are other cases, like hate speech, that we take action on.

So, 99% of our “policing” has to do with users reporting something offensive, and us making an evaluation of whether an abuse took place, and if so, we do something about it.

However, there is 1% left over.  Not everyone on the internet subscribes to the same “netiquette” that some of us who have been around for awhile know and understand. So, we do one proactive thing, to make the world a little less bumpy. We block a set of specific words from being used in 3 areas: the url you select, the title of your Space, and the title of your blog entry. These three fields are reused and displayed in a variety of areas, like search results, so we thought it would be a little thing we could do to cut down on the obvious cases that would most easily offend.

The simplistic way we search for profane words could easily be laughed at. We laugh about it, too. There are 100 different phrases that I can use that are obviously bad, but they short circuit our filter. But that’s OK. Our goal wasn’t to make it perfect, but to cut down on the obvious stuff.

Note that we do not do any filtering whatsoever in blog entries. However, we did ship with a bug, where the profanity filter was turned on for comments. Not only was this a bug that it was turned on, but our simplistic algorithm does not work well with large bodies of text. This has caused some problems with entering comments, and it hasn’t been clear to people what exactly the problem was. We discovered the issue shortly after we shipped, thanks to feedback from users within the first 24 hours, and we posted a fix Saturday afternoon. So this particular problem should be gone.

So, that is what we do. We believe what we’re doing is pretty minimalistic, and a good thing for the overall Spaces community. But, I’m sure not everyone agrees with that . Would love to hear more on this topic, so we get this right over time.  We’re in beta, so we’re here to learn.