# Ex-ante moderation?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ex-ante-moderation/694>\
**Category:** Meta Discussion\
**Created:** [December 2, 2016, 2:03pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ex-ante-moderation/694 "2016-12-02T14:03:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![sylvaticus](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/sylvaticus/32/203883_2.png) [@sylvaticus](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/sylvaticus)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 2:03pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ex-ante-moderation/694/1 "2016-12-02T14:03:04Z")

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Hello, I know very well of the spam problems… but the “Please wait a moderator approves your post” is not less irritating ☹

I would opt for a ex-post moderation (maybe with a “report this item”)…

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**Author:** ![vchuravy](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/vchuravy/32/8_2.png) [@vchuravy](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/vchuravy)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 2:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ex-ante-moderation/694/2 "2016-12-02T14:09:21Z")

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Currently we operate on a progressive moderation scheme: New users who sign-up are on TL0 (TL = trust level)  
TL0 is subject to the following moderation criteria:

1. First post is moderated
2. Every new topic is moderated

Once a user spends enough time on the forum they get auto promoted to TL1 and we do ex-post moderation.  
There is a flag button at the bottom of every post to notify moderators.

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**Author:** ![johnmyleswhite](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/johnmyleswhite/32/31_2.png) [@johnmyleswhite](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnmyleswhite)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 3:25pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ex-ante-moderation/694/3 "2016-12-02T15:25:17Z")

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> [@sylvaticus](#):
>
> Hello, I know very well of the spam problems… but the “Please wait a moderator approves your post” is not less irritating ☹

The system is designed to improve the experience of the people receiving messages, not writing them. There’s exactly one sender and many recipients, so ex-post moderation optimizes for what’s essentially the inverse of the utilitarian objective.

Note that on julia-users we had ex-post moderation at the start and many people disliked it, which led to moderation of new authors.

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**Author:** ![StefanKarpinski](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stefankarpinski/32/24_2.png) [@StefanKarpinski](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/StefanKarpinski)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2016, 11:21pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ex-ante-moderation/694/4 "2016-12-05T23:21:20Z")

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You’d be surprised by how much recruiting spam gets posted to technical forums. So far none on Discourse, but it was common on julia-users and julia-dev. Maybe spammers aren’t onto Discourse yet in general, maybe we can change this, but for now, we do first-post moderation.