disabling public annotations and enabling group moderation

[Mike Gottlieb]

Hello,

I am the the publisher of the free-to-read online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics [FLP], hosted by Caltech. I would like to embed Hypothes.is on our pages, however I am unable to do so currently because the publicly available Hypothes.is embedded code ("https://hypothes.is/embed.js") supports public annotation, and it does not support group moderation. 

People could use public annotations to pollute our website with irrelevant (or worse) matter that would be visible to all of our readers, and Caltech won't allow that. Private annotations are, of course, harmless, but too limited. Allowing only private and moderated group annotations would be perfect. Then people could form discussion groups, etc, and it would be up the reader and the group's moderator whether the reader sees the group's annotations, or not.

I've read about "Publisher Groups" on this Hypothes.is website and am wondering if there is a version of the embedded code available that uses that group model for sharing annotations exclusively, and does not permit public annotations.

Best regards,

Mike Gottlieb

---

www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

www.feynmanlectures.info 

[Robert Knight]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for reaching out, it would be great to see Hypothesis available on the FLP!

We are planning to develop some new capabilities for Hypothesis over the next couple of months which may be what you are looking for. The first is a new type of group which is publicly visible to anyone but which can be moderated by the group owner. The second is the ability for the publisher to control the default annotation layer/group(s) which are presented to the user.

https://web.hypothes.is/blog/publisher-groups/ actually shows mockups for a set of features we are planning to build, not something that has actually been fully built yet. Apologies for the miscommunication there. What we have today is a subset of the described functionality whereby publishers can: 1) Integrate Hypothesis with the account system on their website (so that if the user is logged into the "parent" website they are automatically logged into a corresponding account in the Hypothesis client), 2) Register a single group associated with that set of publisher-managed accounts, which is shown instead of the "Public" group and is moderated by the publisher, 3) Customize some aspects of the look and feel of the client.

Kind Regards,

Robert.

[Mike Gottlieb]

Hi, Robert.

Thanks for responding so quickly. I have a few a couple about the new capabilities you are working on:

(1) Given that there is no account system for the online edition of FLP (and we prefer not to institute one), will there be a way to simply disable Public annotations?

(2) Will there be a way to disable unmoderated groups?

(3) You write that "new type of [moderated] group ... is publicly visible to anyone." I assume you mean that the name of the group is publicly visible, but that the group's annotations are not publicly visible. Is that correct?

(4) Is it possible to disable the new type of moderated group's name from being public, so that it appears only to the members of the group?

Best regards,

Mike

[Robert Knight]

Hello Mike,

All groups in Hypothesis are actually moderated. The only difference with the "Public" group versus the others is that we (Hypothesis staff) are the moderators of the Public group and reserve the right to delete any content posted there that doesn't conform to our community guidelines [1]. For private groups, the creator of the group is the moderator.

> (1) Given that there is no account system for the online edition of FLP (and we prefer not to institute one), will there be a way to simply disable Public annotations?

Although the current incarnation of "Publisher groups" requires the publisher to manage accounts, that won't be the case in future. If we implement what is currently being planned, you as a publisher would be able to create a group, which you can moderate, and set that to be the default group which is shown when users visit FLP pages. Hypothesis users would use normal Hypothesis accounts.

> (3) You write that "new type of [moderated] group ... is publicly visible to anyone." I assume you mean that the name of the group is publicly visible, but that the group's annotations are not publicly visible. Is that correct?

My understanding of our plans is that annotations will be publicly visible. The use case we had in mind was where publishers (eg. of a scientific article) want to allow their readers to comment on an article and see comments by others, but they wish to have moderation capabilities over the default annotation layer so that they can set their own rules for what is/is not acceptable in that space. Does this sound like what you are looking for?

[1] https://web.hypothes.is/community-guidelines/ . 

Kind Regards,

Robert.

[Mike Gottlieb]

Hello, Robert.

There are certain things we can not do on a Caltech server, and one of them is to enable a member of the general public to post _anything_ , even just the name of a group, that is visible to the general public, even for only 1 second. 

The ability to remove inappropriate content visible to the general public after it's been posted and brought to a moderator's attention is necessary, but insufficient.

What I had in mind initially was to eliminate the "Public" group, and for the default group to be "Private." A moderated default group whose annotations are publicly visible, such as you suggest, could also work, if we can find someone willing to moderate it, but I'm not sure we can, so I would vote for at least having the option of making "Private" the default group.

To be clear (at the risk of repeating myself): for Caltech to be able to use Hypothesis in the online edition of FLP, both the names of non-default groups and all their data (the annotations, replies, etc. made by the members of those groups) must be visible only to the respective group members. [If, for example, a member of the general public can create a private discussion group called "Eat my shorts," and that name can appear (even momentarily) in the list of groups seen by the general public, that won't do.]

Best regards,

Mike

[Troy Cauble]

Robert,

As a reader, not a publisher, I would like to be able to turn off Public annotations altogether.  I am not reading an article for random people's highlights and notes.  It's distracting.

As hypothes.is becomes more popular, Public annotations will be abused as a way to annoy people.  I seem to recall this being a problem with an earlier annotation system.  And do you really want to moderate the whole internet?

-troy

[tompree...@gmail.com]

I also need, as a publisher, the ability to disable public annotations. Hypothes.is looked perfect for my web site, until I realised anyone could publish anything. I want visitors to see their own and their groups' highlights and that's it. Hopefully this is not too hard to implement. 

[Thiru]

All,

Trying to resurrect this question again. I also would like to embed the client onto my website but do not want to enable Public Group, I dont have need to be partner to show any private groups or moderation. The visitor/user should create/use his own Private Group and do annotations/notes when he/she visits the website. 

I don't see a direct option in the client config to implement this - listed few I thought would work, please point to right direction.

1. Use groups client settings with an empty list

2. Use groups client settings to RPC, implement the message request, on call filter the public group and return.

3. Clone the client repo, change the code to filter the public group, create the embed javascript code and embed it in the website. Basically custom built.

Follow up question would be - what if the user use the browser extension? Would it override the custom client and show Public?

Please advise

[mdiro...@hypothes.is]

Hi there,

I've spoken with our developers and unfortunately the methods you list above will not work. For numbers 1 and 2, the groups client setting can't be used that way. It's being used in the Hypothesis LMS app (distinct from our web app). That client setting does not support the "user should create/use his own private group" part of the request.

For number 3, you could always create a fork of Hypothesis and your own client, but I'm not sure that would stop anyone from using our version of Hypothesis and our client over your site.

Best,

Michael