Building and designing a flagging system.

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JellyFish
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Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:18 pm
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Building and designing a flagging system.

Post by JellyFish »

I'm looking to build a flagging system. One like craigslist's flagging system. Though I don't know where to start or how craigslist's flagging works. :S

So I was wondering if anyone on this forum knows of any tutorials, resources, or how flagging systems work in general? I'm looking for a system that would require very little, if any, maintenance.

Any help on this is extremely appreciated.

PS: I know this post isn't very "full", but maybe this post can be more like a discussion, that is, you can ask me questions and visa versa. :wink:
josh
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Re: Building and designing a flagging system.

Post by josh »

If I designed it it would have 2 components to the database schema. A table to record all "flaggings" to ensure each user can only flag each piece of content 1x. Another column on the content's table would hold the "flag count" for the content and would be incremented on each flagging. Then I'd enable the admin to view content in descending order by flag count, for each piece of content you could look at the "reason" that was used most ( the "mode" ) and display that next to it's flag count. So the admin could view all content in order of "flagginess" along with the most commonly used "reason", if that worked out you'd probably also need an "ignore" option if users were flagging content that needed to stay online

*edit - saw you also want this to be possibly automated? That would be as simple as setting a threshold and when it is passed take the content down. A good way might be to assign the threshold as a function ( ratio ) of the total # of views for each piece of content
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