Having complained about the relentless and shameless abuse on Steemit, I had made the decision to only include authors who were "whitelisted" - i.e. people known to be trustworthy. Whilst it's clear that those who appear trustworthy today might not remain so when they are entrusted with a modicum of power, it made sense as an approach and users can be easily removed.
As a slight aside, I'm formulating a plan that will highlight if the steemcurator keys appear to be being abused to upvote low quality content. I'll save the mechanics for another day - I need a new API before my plan will come to fruition.
The reaction to the whitelist idea both publicly and privately surprised me with every response in favour of the idea but despite this, something was niggling away in the back of my mind - something telling me that it wasn't right. And in time, this niggle became a clear thought - I didn't want to penalise new, honest users who have something good to offer.
I still like the idea of a whitelist and this platform needs a blacklist. So I've spent the last couple of days merging the 2 ideas. Taking what I had originally and merging in the whitelist.
I've made good progress with this idea and have introduced a "flag" to highlight users on the whitelist. For now, I have labelled them as "★ Approved User" as you can see from the screenshot below (please don't be offended if you're not whitelisted yet - I've added enough for demonstration purposes). I also hope that you like the "multi-tags" example to show how helpful it can be to a specific curator 🙂
You'll also notice in the screenshot above, that I've introduced the date that the post was made. Whilst this may look fairly trivial, it took me ages to get things lined up and looking good (cue @tomoyan sexy gif).
For those that only want to see whitelisted users, I've included a filter which will only display content from these users...
Whilst I've not decided on the mechanism on how to toggle this on and off yet, the code is there and functioning well.
The way that I've coded the whitelist and integrated it into the previous code will also make it easier to sort the posts in various ways. Currently, it's coded to sort by date but this can be changed to be sorted by number of upvotes, post value, or better yet - number of comments. Other than date, the only order I've tested it with is author.
I think that this covers everything for now - please let me know what you think.
I've got a few bugs to sort out before moving on to the next enhancement - which will likely be the additional details that come with a post - e.g. number of upvotes, value, etc... I'm very tempted to make the financial element of Steemit less prominent - perhaps even hidden as I'd like to shift user's mindsets away from money and towards interaction.
I might also introduce a notice next to blacklisted or bot voted content.
Oh, and introduce something to hide the images from "NSFW" or "xxx" tags. The volume of porn being uploaded to Steemit came as quite a surprise to me!
Now I've covered everything. I think.