Use a cheap purpose-built LLM like OpenAI's free moderation endpoint to classify the text and send the original text plus the classification to clients, and let clients choose what to do with it, with opinionated defaults appropriate to the app.

Maybe you still need to identify persistent bad actors rather than acting only on content. But still, allow clients to decide what to do with that information.

I suppose my thinking is that strong default automatic moderation that's invisible to offenders is a requirement for a project like this to be able to offer a welcoming experience to users, but putting the power in an LLM and fixed filter lists feels very wrong. So my thought is to use those things to give the client power. But maybe that makes no difference if nobody changes settings away from defaults anyway.

Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.

Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.

The intent was two folds:

1. Get to know other people having similar interests,

2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.

I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed

The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol

So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.

I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.

Also, it seemed to be disconnecting quite often, maybe a hug of death thing.

I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!

Having read some of the comments, I'd happily use if there was a way to blast (prefarably with a Doom shotgun) some of the miscreants from appearing, but only on my site, and maybe some filters (slurs, etc) that auto-ban them that I can set. Other people could moderate as they will but I'm kind of tired of the toxic people ruining everything.

People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded.

Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?

https://rwsdk.com

Internal link to blog gives 403 https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/blog/

Townsquare is probably not the best name - there are tons of things already with that name

Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.

I did the "go to next town" It worked, but then I got to (https://emilesilvis.com/) and got stuck. The Town Square is in 1/2 the page, so you can't get to the two ends to be able to go to the next town.

I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :)

Regardless, I love concepts like this. Thanks!

I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.

I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..