💢Moderation

The admin panel gives you access to an example moderator. Users with sufficient project permissions can access message history from worlds started from your organisation.

As well as viewing message history, you are able to handle muting and banning users directly via the moderation or user page. Messages that are flagged as potentially dangerous (checked against a modifiable list of banned profanity stored in live config) are highlighted in red on the application.

You are able to mute (prevent users from sending text chat in world), or ban (disconnect a user from the world and prevent them from connecting upon re-joining) via both the moderation page and the users page.

The users page, listing all players who have sent a message to your moderator

To use the moderation site you must set up the following:

1. Set up an external database to store sent messages

   1. For this example, and in the example application, we will use Redis Cloud, a free database that allows you to store up to 30MB of data in their Key Value store.
2. Configure your Unreal Project/deployment to send messages to your template application API.

Setting up Redis Cloud

You can choose to configure your Redis KVStore however you like. To use the default method for Redis client connection provided in the template application, follow the below steps to set up Redis:

1. Create an account by following the link: https://cloud.redis.io/
2. Create a new database via the Redis Cloud console.

3. Once created, grab the following variables:

   1. Redis Username: this should be default

   2. Redis Password: obtained via the Security section of your database's configuration tab

   3. Redis Host: this is the public endpoint value (e.g. redis-17071.c335.europe-west2-1.gce.redns.redis-cloud.com - you will need to remove the :[number] at the end of the endpoint) found in the General section of your database's configuration tab

   4. Redis Port: set this to match the value after redis- in the endpoint above.

4. If you have already spun up a deployment via Vercel, you will need to configure these as environment variables via your Vercel project's settings (Settings -> Environment Variables

Once set up, all messages sent via your game client will be stored in your Redis database. The template app allows you to configure various settings (such as the max messages to store per world, the time to live for each key stored in Redis, and the key prefix for message values). You can configure these in your app's @constants/config.ts file.

Setting up your Unreal Client

You can enable the sending of messages to your moderator application by modifying your Unreal project's live config.

In your project's game.override.json (you can find this under Config/LiveConfig/Overrides ), add the following:

 {
    "Inventory": {
		"HidePlaceMode": true,
        "Quickbar": {
			"GadgetTabSlots": 8,
			"EmoteTabSlots": 8,
            "UsingEquipmentTabs": true
		}
    },
    // --- ADD EVERYTHING BELOW HERE - THE SECTION ABOVE IS ALREADY IN THE FILE --- //
    "Moderation": {
      "ModerationSiteUrl": "[your-application-base-url]/api/"
    }
}

The url should either be http://localhost:3000/api if you want to test your application locally. Otherwise, you should use your Vercel site url (appended with /api at the end) if you've already deployed your application.

You should now see any messages that have been sent come through to your Moderator app! Messages that are potentially dangerous will be flagged in the Moderator.