Listings & moderation

Listings in the admin panel is where everything your users publish appears, and where you post listings yourself.

The listing rules

Listings → Settings. These decide how the site behaves for everyone. Set them before you have users, not after.

Setting	What it decides
Only logged in users can post listings	Whether publishing needs an account. Off means anyone can post; on cuts spam sharply, and cuts volume too.
Hold new listings for admin moderation	New listings from users are disabled until an admin approves them. Listings an admin posts are never held.
Hold edited listings for admin moderation	The same, for edits to an existing listing. An admin’s own edits are never held.
Users have to validate their listings	A new listing stays inactive until the user validates it, with a threshold: After n validated listings the user doesn’t need to validate the listings any more. So regulars post freely while newcomers are checked.
Logged in users don’t need to validate their listings	Skips that validation step for anyone who is logged in.
Warn about expiration	Days of notice a seller gets before a listing expires.
Attach n images per listing	The photo limit.
An user has to wait n seconds between each listing added	Rate limit on posting: the cheapest defence against a bulk poster.
Only allow registered users to contact publisher	Whether the contact form needs an account.
Notify admin when a new listing is added	An e-mail to you on every publish. Useful early, unbearable at volume.
Enable the “send to a friend” form	A sharing form on the listing page.

Moderating

The listings list filters by status, so the moderation queue is a filter rather than a separate screen. Work through the ones awaiting validation, then the reported ones.

Actions apply in bulk to selected listings: enable, disable, mark as spam, delete.

Reported listings

Listings → Reported listings collects what visitors have flagged. Each entry shows the listing and how many reports it has drawn.

Two things worth knowing:

Reports are keyed by visitor IP. If your site sits behind a reverse proxy or CDN (a service that sits in front of your server), it must pass the real client IP through, or every report looks like it came from the same person. See the caching contract.
A high report count is a signal, not a verdict. Competitors report each other.

Comments

Settings → Comments controls whether listings accept comments at all, and on what terms:

Allow people to post comments on listings: the master switch.
Users must be registered and logged in to comment.
Require a CAPTCHA to post a comment: see spam and abuse.
A comment is being held for moderation: turns moderation on, with a threshold next to it: Moderated comments (the number of previously approved comments an author needs before theirs appear without review).
Comments per page: break comments into pages, with n per page.
Notifications: e-mail the admin when a new comment is posted, and e-mail the listing’s owner when there’s a new comment on his listing. There is no separate notification for a comment held for moderation.

Comments are moderated from the Listings → Comments screen, with the same enable/disable/spam/delete actions as listings.

Unmoderated comments on a classifieds site become a spam channel quickly. Either moderate them, require registration, or turn them off. Leaving them open and unwatched is the one option that always ends badly.

Users

Users lists everyone registered. From there you can activate an account, enable or disable one, edit its details, or add a user yourself.

Users → Settings carries the registration rules:

Anyone can register: the master switch.
Users need to validate their account: e-mail confirmation before the account works.
When a new user is registered: notify the admin.

Ban rules

Users → Ban rules blocks registrations and posts matching a pattern: an e-mail domain, an address, an IP range. This is how you stop a returning abuser without watching for them. Rules marked Messages only come from a member’s report and only stop contact mail; see Spam and abuse.

Alerts

Users → Alerts lists saved searches. As the admin explains: alerts notify a user by email when a new listing matches their saved search.

Alerts are sent by cron, on the schedule each user picked for their saved search: hourly, daily or weekly. If your users say they never receive them, check cron before anything else. See setting up cron.

Clearing out old content

Tools → Cleanup removes content in bulk by category:

Group	What it removes
Reported listings	Listings visitors have flagged as spam, unchanged for the chosen number of days.
Expired listings	Listings past their expiration date.
Unactivated listings	Listings never activated from the confirmation e-mail.
Spam listings	Listings marked as spam.
Blocked listings	Listings that are disabled or blocked.
Unactivated users	Accounts never activated from the confirmation e-mail.

You can run a cleanup on demand, or save settings so the daily cron does it for you. On a site of any age, this is the difference between a fast database and a slow one: dead rows still cost you on every search.

Take a backup before the first run.