Readers, comments, and contact messages
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The Readers group of the console is where the staff deal with the people who read the site: their accounts, the comments they leave on episodes, the messages they send through the contact form, and the access tickets that open a paid episode to one of them without payment. What is done here reaches a reader directly, sometimes without a way back, so each page says what an action does before saying how to take it.
Not every member of the staff sees every screen:
| Screen | Tenant admin | Editor | Auditor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Readers | Everything | Not shown | Not shown |
| Comments | Everything | Everything | Reads, without acting |
| Contact messages | Everything | Not shown | Not shown |
| Access tickets | Everything | Not shown | Not shown |
A screen that is not shown is missing from the menu, and its address answers as a page that does not exist.
In this section
- Reader accounts: finding a reader's account, correcting their date of birth, removing their icon, and suspending or deleting the account.
- Comments: what each state of a comment means, approving, removing, restoring, and purging comments, and working the approval and report queues.
- Contact messages: assigning and answering the messages readers send, where their replies go, and keeping track of what is handled.
- Access tickets: opening a paid episode to one reader without payment, and revoking the ticket.
How the community limits apply
Community limits, under Settings › Limits and retention, caps how often one reader may act. A Tenant admin can make each limit stricter than the platform's, never looser, as Limits and retention describes:
| Limit | What a reader runs into |
|---|---|
| Comment posting, per minute and per day | Posting more comments |
| Comment reporting, per minute and per day | Reporting more comments |
| Contact messages per account, per hour and per day | A signed-in reader sending more messages |
| Contact messages per client, per hour and per day | Anyone sending more messages from the same network address, signed in or not |
| Duplicate comment window | Posting the same text on the same episode again within that many minutes |
A reader over a limit is told "Too many requests in a short time. Please wait a moment and try again." and can act again once the period has passed. A reader repeating a comment inside the Duplicate comment window is told, on the site and in the app, "You have just posted this comment. The same text can be posted again after a while."
Tighten a limit when a reader or a script is flooding the comments or the contact form; suspend the account under Readers when it is one reader. The limits count what readers do on the site and in the app, staff included when they comment there; what a moderator does in the console is not counted. What each limit counts is explained from the operator's side in Platform defaults and policies.