Feed Moderation
There are many ways to curate and moderate the posts which come into your feed.
Include and Exclude
All of these examples are working in real time on this Daffodil feed.
Including terms, and excluding terms, are the bluntest tools for curating your feed. You might find that you can make them specific enough for your feed to work as intended just using these.
First, what will your feed include? You can see that the feed will capture any posts with the terms:
- Daffodils
- jonquils
Some posts need to be approved first. We've set that up this way.
This is useful if you find that some of the terms which would make sense for your feed have other uses, for example, as names (Daffodil). In this case, Narcissus is the Latin name for a daffodil, but it's also a name in a classical Greek myth.
If our feed picks up a post based on the following terms, it will capture it but the post will be hidden until it's approved manually:
- Daffodil
- Narcissus
- Narcisseae
Then there's exclusions. If you find that there's a term which is never relevant, you can include it here. In this case, Black Narcissus is a cult film. We're sure it's very good, but it's not relevant to our feed which we just want to be a stream of daffodil imagery.
Our feed excludes any post with mention of:
- NSFW
- Porn
- Nudity
- Black Narcissus
Other Base Moderation Tools
These tools work on top of the included and excluded terms.
Post Languages: You can set your feed to only collect posts from specific languages using the Post Languages tool.
This is helpful if you find that one of your included terms has a meaning in another language (or is a common name in another language).
Include Replies
This makes the feed either:
- collect posts AND their replies (if a reply has an inclusion term in it, it will be included but the post it's replying to won't be if it doesn't have an included term), or
- Only collect top level posts with inclusion terms
Posts With Images
This makes the feed either:
- Allow all posts which have image(s)
- Require approval if a post has image(s)
- Exclude all posts which have image(s)
- Only capture posts with image(s)
Posts With Gifs
This makes the feed either:
- Allow all posts which have a gif
- Require approval if a post has a gif
- Exclude all posts which have a gif
- Only capture posts with a gif
Posts With Video
This makes the feed either:
- Allow all posts which have video
- Require approval if a post has video
- Exclude all posts which have video
- Only capture posts with video
Quote Posts
For posts where the main post (not the post being quoted) are captured by the feed, this makes the feed either:
- Allow all quote posts
- Require approval for any quote posts
- Exclude all quote posts
- Only capture quote posts
Order of Posts in Feed
This makes the feed either:
- Be in order of when posts were posted
- Be in order of when posts were added to the feed
This is useful if you're manually curating posts in a feed where you have an intended order, such as an art feed.
Capture posts from all users or just specific users
This makes the feed either:
- Capture posts from all users (i.e. everybody on Bluesky)
- Capture posts from specific users (i.e. people you've picked out/approved)
This is useful if you're manually curating a feed of a very specific topic, e.g. your own pet, your own art, posts to do with a particular project which a particular group of people are posting about, etc.
Contributors
Here are the ways you can moderate who can do what on a feed.
People who are allowed to post
One really easy way is to use the Allowed Users function.
A user can be added to this list by manually approving a post from them. You will get an option to either ‘Approve This Post' or ‘Allow User' - see below.
In your approval queue, the ‘approve post' button below…
…will give you these options.
Clicking on ‘Approve This Post' will approve only this post as a one off.
Clicking on ‘Allow User' will allow the user all the time if a post of theirs meets the include/exclude rules for your feed.
Lists
You can use a list from Bluesky to automatically approve all captured posts of the people on the list.
You will find the Lists function inside the linked number of users who are allowed to post on the feed, in this case, 8 user(s):
You can also find the lists in the sidebar under My Synced Lists, which looks like:
Contributing Administrators
You can add additional administrators to a feed using this tool (only available in the Premium tier). An administrator can perform most of the same management actions that you can as the feed creator - such as approving posts and blocking users from posting in the feed. However, they can't unpublish the feed, change the path or change the associated Bluesky account (which would be yours, as creator).
In the screenshots below, you can see the process for adding another administrator.
If the person you're inviting doesn't have a Bluesky account, their email address will have an ‘Invited' tag next to them. If they do have a Bluesky account, this tag won't show up.
They will receive an email which looks like this:
And, once they log into their Bluesky Feed Creator dashboard, they will see this:
Manually adding posts
You can use this button, which appears below your Feed View graph, to manually insert posts even if they don't meet your regular include/exclude rules. This is helpful if you run an ultra curated feed such as one collecting particular art.
Click the ‘Insert post manually' button, and you will see this dialog box. You can follow the instructions to get the post link in Bluesky. Copy the post link into the Link to Post box and click Insert Post - now the post will be visible in your feed.
Pausing Your Feed
You can stop your feed ‘listening' for new posts using this button:
When you switch it off, the feed will not collect posts that meet your rules for inclusion.
Switched on, the feed will work as normal, measuring posts against the rules and including them if they meet the rules.
Auto Moderator
Auto Moderator is a more advanced tool which can perform actions you would otherwise need to do. It is a finer tool, and requires you to use some YAML code. The Auto Moderator looks more closely at posts using the Auto Moderator rules you give it. It can be found here:
We've created a detailed help document just for Auto Moderator which can be found here. You can even copy and paste our blocks of sample text, and amend them to make them work for your feed.
If you're confident with YAML, or interested in learning, you aren't restricted to the examples we've set up. It's a great tool to experiment with!
Troubleshooting
| If you are: | You can try: |
|---|---|
| Getting irrelevant posts in your feed | - Making your inclusion terms more specific, especially if the irrelevant posts tend to include a particular inclusion term. Sometimes, making it a plural can help if it's a term which is also used as a proper noun. - Excluding terms which tend to show up in the irrelevant post (this is useful if the irrelevant posts are all within the same genre e.g. a fandom which you're not including on purpose). - If the irrelevant posts all come from one person, you can block the user from posting in the feed. |
| Not seeing any posts in your feed | Make sure you're separating terms appropriately i.e. using commas between or putting each on a new line in the ‘Search for words or tags in posts' box. It could look like either of these: Daffodils, jonquils, narcissus (No space after the comma will also work) Daffodils Jonquils narcissus |
| Not seeing a post in your feed that should be there | - Go to the Tools area in the sidebar and enter the link to the post in the ‘Debug post against feed' box. It will tell you why a post was not added to your feed. - Rejig your moderation tools (include, exclude, etc) and then debug the post again. If it matches now, it will be included in the feed. |
| Wanting to change your post capturing rules and get rid of old posts which don't match the new rules | After changing your post capturing rules, go to the Tools area in the sidebar and select your feed under Reprocess Feed. Your feed will be reprocessed and any posts which now don't meet the standards for inclusion will be hidden from your feed as viewed on Bluesky. They will still be present on your dashboard to you, the feed owner, but you will see that they have been hidden. |