Improving the safety net: Automated moderation of media comments Automatically blocks inappropriate images, videos, and audio comments to ensure safe collaboration Previously, you could add images, videos, and audio to posts, and you could comment on posts, but you couldn’t add these media types to comments. This year, we’re combining these features to now allow you to add media to comments. Likewise, Safety Net previously moderated images, videos, and audio on posts, and moderated text comments. Now, with the addition of media comments, Safety Net has expanded. Safety Net will now moderate images, videos, and audio comments. How the safety net works Safety Net is our automated content moderation system. When automated moderation is enabled, Safety Net reviews posts and comments for inappropriate content. If inappropriate content is detected, it notifies Padlet administrators so they can decide whether to approve or reject. When we launched Safety Net last year, we only moderated the text of posts. Since then, we’ve improved it to also moderate images, audio, and video in posts and comments. Save time with automated arbitration Before Safety Net, posts on Padlet either went live immediately or had to be manually approved by the Padlet owner. The former felt risky in certain environments, like middle school classrooms, and the latter was boring. We know that Padlet users spend valuable time manually approving everything to keep Padlets safe in the classroom. Automated moderation is one way to save them a lot of time. Nearly 2.5 million Padlets have been moderated with Safety Net to date. Use a safety net To turn on automatic moderation, go to your Padlet settings. Under Content, go to Moderation and set it to Automatic. Now, all posts and comments on your Padlet will be automatically monitored. It’s that simple. You can enable automatic moderation on web and mobile. Safety Net is your classroom helper Safety Net can make mistakes, and its standards may differ from yours. It may block posts that you consider safe and allow posts that you consider harmful. That’s why Safety Net doesn’t automatically remove flagged content. Ultimately, you decide whether content is safe for your community. Automating Padlet You can schedule a freeze or unfreeze of your padlet up to one year in advance. You can post without visiting Padlet. You can post manually with a browser extension or systematically using the public API . You can also schedule posts. However, you must visit Padlet directly to change your settings. We want to make it easier for Padlet users to send, receive, and process information on Padlet, so we're adding automation features. The first version of Automation will allow you to schedule your Padlets to be frozen or unfrozen up to a year in advance. How Automation Works Automation has two components: triggers and actions. The trigger is what starts the automation, and the action is what happens as a result. Our first set of automations is very simple. We have one trigger called time and two actions called freeze and unfreeze. So we can schedule the padlet to freeze, and we can schedule the padlet to unfreeze. You can set it to automate and forget about it. When you freeze a Padlet, no one can add, edit, or delete anything in it. If you want students to post to the Padlet by a certain time, you can freeze the Padlet to enforce a due date. Or, if you want students to post to the Padlet only after a certain date, you can freeze the Padlet when you create it and then unfreeze it later to start accepting submissions. Without automation, you have to go back and forth to freeze and unfreeze your Padlet. If you prefer to manage your reminders and tasks with calendar notifications, sticky notes, and your iron-clad memory, we applaud you. If you don’t have spare brain cells like us, we recommend automation. This lets you schedule your Padlet to freeze from the moment you create it. One less reason to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about forgetting something important. Accessing the Automation Panel To add an automation to your Padlet, click the three dots to open the Additional Padlet Actions menu, then click Automation. Only Padlet administrators can schedule automations.
