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I m developing a social network site its currently in the planning stages. One of the concerns is its likely the largest group of users are likely to be children. Users will be able to post content and comment on other users posts.
What can I do to reduce the risks of :-

Bullying
stalking
Users disclosing contact details publicly
Users disclosing other personal information publicly
List item
(other suggestions, please)

Note: I m also trying to avoid having to do too much moderation manually so I m looking for suggestions to incorporate into the site design to reduce the moderation overhead and best protect users.

In regards to 3 and email address, I realize of course some form of filtering is required on posts and comments but as we all know its so easy to circumvent by doing something like myname[at]hotmail.com, etc

Edit: of course this is programming related, I m looking for a programming/design solutions to a social problem. please reopen this question.
Even SO and facebook, etc use tools and design decisions to reduce user abuse. So clearly this is a programming/website design question

To those who voted to close this I am not looking for a purely programmatic solution, I m looking for ways programmers/website designers can reduce the need for manual moderation through good design, filtering, etc.

Answer 1

Technological measures are generally ineffective at solving these sorts of social problems. Manual moderation is pretty much the only really big useful thing you can do.

Successful sites of this nature tend to leverage the community to help with the task of moderation, by recruiting volunteer moderators from the more devoted regulars and/or providing post voting / flagging mechanisms (e.g. Stack Overflow).

Answer 2

Don t allow dislike or vote down style voting . Bullying will still occur in text. That is life and will likely require manual moderation even if you filter abusive words.
Default to private profiles. You can t stalk someone you re not friends with as you can t see their info.
No suggestion as this is a very difficult, if not impossible problem. You could take simple steps of filtering email addresses out as they re easily identifiable but there are always work-around s and there s much more personal info than email addresses.
See above.

Ultimately a site like this requires manual moderation if it is going to be a friendly place for children to visit online

Answer 3

The best thing you can do to protect children from abuse of your site is to never go public with it in the first place.

That s not what you wanted to hear. But when you set up any kind of social whatzit site, the question is not if it will be abused, but when. And when that happens, you won t have a chance to be concerned about children because you ll be busy fighting legal battles that threaten to sue your pants off and throw you in the slammer.

To try to be positive, the second best thing you can do is rigorously filter who gets membership on your site. Also, I see no way to get around the requirement for heavy monitoring and moderation.

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