A Message Board can be moderated, which means that comments and replies must be approved by an authorized user before they appear. Those users can either approve or delete the comment/reply. To learn which users are authorized to moderate, see Who can moderate message board .
You can force all message boards associated with a MessageBoard control to moderate comments/replies. To do this, set the Moderate property to True. On the other hand, you can allow the Message Board owners to decide if it will be moderated. To do this, set the control’s Moderate property to False. If you do, users determine if their Message Board is moderated by checking their user or group profile’s Moderate check box.
Community group members determine if a group's Message Board is moderated by editing the Group Profile's Group MessageBoard Moderation check box.
NOTE: If a Group administrator submits a comment to a moderated Group Message Board, it is automatically approved.
If a comment is submitted to a moderated Message Board, users who can see it notice a green dot border. The comment's author sees an hour glass icon (
) until it’s approved. At any time, the author can delete the comment using the delete button (
).
Who is authorized to comment and reply to a message board
For example, if a content item is set to private, a user must have at least Read-Only permission for the folder containing the content.
Who can moderate a message board
Approving message board comments
On a moderated message board, approval activity appears on the Approve tab. To approve a single Message Board comment, an authorized user clicks Approve. An authorized user any can approve several or all comments at once. To select several comments, place a check next to each, then click Approve. To select all comments, click Select: All then Approve.
To approve comments from the Workarea:
Deleting message board comments
To delete a single comment, find the comment and click Delete.
Deleting unapproved comments from Workarea:
).Replying to message board comments
Users can reply to comments on a user’s, community group’s, or content item’s Message Board. For community groups, the group must be public and not restricted; otherwise, only group members can reply.
NOTE: To learn which users are eligible to reply to Message Board comments, see Who is authorized to comment and reply to a message board
If you are in a load-balanced environment, the same reply may appear several times. If this problem occurs, stop the Ektron notification service on all but one of the servers in the cluster.
To add a reply, click Reply (
) in a comment’s lower right corner.
Next, a dialog box displays the original comment and a Reply field.
When the reply is submitted, a Replies link appears under the comment. The number of replies appears next to the link.
Click the link to view comments. They are arranged from oldest at top to newest at bottom.
If the message board is moderated, replies must be approved before everyone can see them.
Enabling message board notifications
You can send email notifications to Message Board owners and community group members whenever someone posts a comment to a board. If a comment is posted to a community group’s Message Board, all group members are notified.
IMPORTANT: To receive email notifications, a user's profile must include a valid email address. See also: Sending notifications to a community
You can turn this feature on or off in the siteroot/web.config file. By default, the feature is turned off. To turn it on, open the web.config file and set the following key’s value toTrue.
<add key="ek_EnableMessageBoardEmail" value= "False"/>
When activated, this feature applies to all user and community group message boards.
Filtering spam
Ektron lets you filter spam from your message boards. Ektron defines spam filtering as setting the following limits in MessageBoard server control’s SpamControlType property:
You can create your own spam filter in the code-behind of the page that hosts the Message Board. To do this, set the SpamControlType property to Custom, call the CustomSpamMethod in the page load event, and point it to your custom spam filter method. Your method’s signature must include the following parameters:
long objectId—the numeric ID of the object defined in the object typeEktron.Cms.Common.EkEnumeration.MessageBoardObjectType objectType—the type of object with which the Message Board is associated. long userId—the numeric ID of a user. For example, you want to block a user with the ID 18 from posting to the board.string messageText—a string of text you want to blockint interval—the amount of time, in seconds, to block posting on the Message Board. For example, if you want to block a user from posting for 30 minutes, set this property to 900.The following C# example blocks the text Hello World.
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Collections;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
public partial classWebformCB : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.MessageBoard1.CustomSpamMethod(SpamControl);
}
private bool SpamControl(long objectId,
Ektron.Cms.Common.EkEnumeration.MessageBoardObjectType
objectType, long userId, string messageText, int interval)
{
if (messageText == "Hello World")
{
return true;
}
return false;
}
}
Associating message board comments with content in the Workarea
You can associate Message Board comments with content. So, for example, a site visitor can view content then comment on it. You can view these comments in the Workarea.
NOTE: Message Boards can also be associated with users and groups. See also: the MessageBoard server control. Message Board comments are not the same as the Comments tab on the View Content screen.
).