GSoc/2023/StatusReports/RishiKumar

Adding moderation tool in Tokodon

This project aims to enhance the functionality of Tokodon by integrating moderation tools which will allow moderators and administrators of Mastodon instances to efficiently manage their communities through the easy-to-use interface of Tokodon. This project aims to provide Mastodon instance owners with a comprehensive suite of admin tools, making Tokodon a more versatile and usable tool for the fediverse moderators.

Mentor

Carl Schwan

Merge Request

• Add Federation Tool.
• Add Report Moderation Tool.
• Implement correct logic for Last Used Value .
• Add Account Moderation Tool .
• Display moderation tool icon when account with admin permissions logs in .

Blog Posts

• Google Summer of Code Introductory Blog #1
• GSoC-23 Community Bonding Period Blog #2
• GSoC-23 Week 1-2 | Adding Account Moderation Tool #3
• GSoC-23 Week 3-4 | Finalizing Account Moderation tool & Adding Report Moderation Tool #4

Timeline

Week 1 and Week 2

The first task I worked on was implementing the account moderation tool. This tool enables moderators/admins of an instance to view all the accounts available on the server and take action against them.

Initially, when attempting to receive raw JSON data from the /api/v1/admin/accounts endpoint, I encountered a 403 error response. Upon spending some time debugging my code I couldn’t determine what I was doing wrong and so I finally resorted to asking for help in the Tokodon matrix chat, where redstrate❣️ helped me identify that we didn’t have the necessary scope set in Tokodon to access admin endpoints.

Images showing implemented Account Moderation tool

I decided to implement a QAbstractListModel to expose all the data and required properties in the QML UI. With this in mind, I created a new class AccountsToolModel that inherited from QAbstractListModel. For making all the filter options functional I created QProperty instances with the necessary READ, WRITE and NOTIFY methods.

To display the admin-related information for an account, I parsed the received JSON data and created a new method AbstractAccount::adminIdentityLookup which will populate QProperty instances of AdminAccountInfo to store all the required information for the moderation tool. Once all the cpp backend was ready, I started with the qml implementation, figuring out the best way in which the data can be presented.

Once the UI was implemented, I encountered an issue with pagination not functioning correctly. After debugging the issue, I discovered that when requesting a response for the next page using the v2 endpoint, the response received was actually v1. This discrepancy messed up the query parameters and rendered pagination impossible. To address this issue, I implemented a simple code block: url = url.toString().replace("/v1/", "/v2/");. This replacement fixed the problem and allowed proper pagination to occur.

Week 3 and Week 4

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I had worked on implementing the initial page of the Account Moderation Tool in the first two weeks. This week, I began implementing the MainAccountToolPage.qml which serves as the main page of the tool where moderators can view admin-level details and take actions against an account.

Contact

I am on Matrix as @k3ys:matrix.org.