DiscussIt Desktop Moderator - Quick-Start Guide

Login Screen

When you open the DiscussIt desktop client for the first time you will be asked to login using the email address and password you signed up with. If you haven't got an account yet get one here, following the wizard to add sites you wish to moderate to your account.

Once logged in you can see that on the left-hand side is an accordion listing your moderatable sites. Selecting a website in the accordion will load the comment view for the site and also display co-moderators with their current online/offline status.

Across the top of the application are tabs (Comments, Statistics, Mentions & Logs) that relate to sections of the active site.

Comments tab

The left column shows a list of recent comments. New (unmoderated) comments are denoted by a yellow stripe; approved comments have a green stripe; withdrawn comments have a red stripe and comments that have been marked as spam have a purple stripe next to them. You can toggle the type of comments to display using the "New", "Approved", "Withdrawn" and "Spam" buttons at the top of the panel. Found next to these buttons is a filter box that allows you search your comments based on a URL pattern. This is extremely useful for sharing the moderation workload on larger sites. You can use multiple URL patterns by using a space separator. You can also use an exclamation before a pattern to instruct the filter to ignore. e.g. "/news /sport !/sport/football" - this filter would get the news & sport sections but exclude the football section of the sport.

Moderation

To change a comment's status, use the buttons which appear on the right-hand side of a comment's entry in the moderator:

The square button with the tick inside it will set the status of the comment to approved. The round button with the "x" in it withdraws comments. The triangular button with the exclamation mark in it marks the comment as spam. Changing the status of a comment is immediately reflected in what is shown on your live site.

Viewing Individual Threads

If you click on a comment it's thread will be loaded into the right-hand panel. By default the comments shown here will relate to what is actually being show on your live site. You can show un-approved/withdrawn/spam comments in this view by clicking on the "Show all" button above the thread.

Advanced features

A context menu for a message can be brought up by right clicking on a message. From here you can reply, edit, ban (not all platforms support edit and ban) or view the log history of the comment.

Statistics tab

The statistics graphs give you a snapshot of information based on a set time period. By default the time period is the last 30 days but you can change this by selecting two dates from the date picker in the top right of the screen. The textual information at the top gives you a break-down of comment status and authentication type for the time period before your selected dates.

The graphs shown are;
Stacked bar chart of the comment status.
Pie chart of the authentication types (e.g. Facebook, Twitter).
Bar chart of the most popular threads.
Line graph showing emails sent, opened and clicks - These emails relate to notices sent out to posters alerting them to new posts.

Mentions tab

Mentions is a great way of keeping track of your brand and/or competitors on Twitter. You can setup multiple searchers that are colour coded and linked to buttons at the top of the page. Clicking on a button will toggle the display of the search results.

Logs tab

Logs are split up into three sections, recent activity table, related activity table and log detail area. By default only the recent table is populated. Clicking on a row from here will populate the related table and the log detail area. If arriving into the logs by the right click context of a comment then the related table will be populated and the 'comment post' log entry will be shown for the specific comment.