AI-DRIVEN FORUM MODERATION TOOL
Forum Challenges
Our client PPAMAP has a forum that faced three significant issues that are common across many online discussion platforms:
- Spam Detection: The forum frequently received spam posts, which cluttered discussions and diverted user attention. Moderators had to constantly manually filter these posts.
- Sentiment Analysis: Some comments carried hostile or negative tones, which could escalate conflicts and discourage healthy participation. Detecting these comments manually was time-consuming and often subjective.
- Content Moderation: Ensuring that posts followed community guidelines, staying on-topic, respectful, and appropriate, was a constant demand on the moderation team.
Manually addressing these problems consumed a lot of time and effort. PPAMAP needed an automated solution to help maintain community standards while reducing reliance on human moderators.
AI Forum Solution
To solve these challenges, Logic Replace implemented an AI-based moderation system. This solution was particularly valuable because:
- It automates repetitive tasks, such as detecting spam and classifying sentiment.
- It ensures more consistent enforcement of forum rules.
- It reduces the time moderators spend reviewing content, freeing them up to focus on user engagement and high-level issues.
- It scales effortlessly, handling increasing volumes of forum posts without additional staffing needs.
The integration of AI not only improved the moderation workflow but also enhanced the overall health and professionalism of the forum environment.
Integrating to phpBB
Instead of altering the core phpBB forum code, Logic Replace developed a custom extension. This extension served as a bridge between the phpBB system and externally hosted AI models from OpenAI.
This approach was chosen for several reasons:
- Preserves forum stability by not modifying core code.
- Allows easy updates without breaking the forum.
- Leverages secure, cutting-edge AI tools hosted externally.
This solution is sustainable, maintainable, and allows for future upgrades with minimal disruption.
AI Prompts Used
To handle the three identified aspects, our developers crafted specific system prompts to guide the AI in evaluating user comments. These prompts were designed for high accuracy and adaptability, a summary version of the prompts are below (we used much more details ones in the system).
- Spam Detection: “Does this comment contain irrelevant or unsolicited content that appears promotional or disruptive to the discussion?”
- Sentiment Analysis: “Evaluate the emotional tone of this comment. Is it positive, negative, or neutral? If negative, does it include aggression, hostility, or abusive language?”
- Content Moderation: “Does this comment violate forum rules or go off-topic from the original post? Does it require moderator intervention?”
These carefully crafted prompts help ensure that the AI can reliably assist with identifying problematic content.
Automated Actions Based on AI Responses
The AI model returned results using specific prefixes that triggered actions by the system:
- Moderation Needed – Comment is flagged for human review due to a potential guideline violation.
- Negative Sentiment – Comment is marked for tone review or potential warning.
- Spam – Comment is auto-flagged or removed for being irrelevant or promotional.
Logic Replace handled these outputs by implementing logic that performed tasks typically done by human moderators, automatically flagging, hiding, or marking comments for further action.
Summary
This project demonstrates our team’s ability to:
- Identify and solve real-world forum moderation issues
- Integrate AI into existing software without disrupting core functionality
- Use AI prompts strategically to ensure high-quality, actionable results
- Improve operational efficiency and user experience through automation
This is a key project in our Portfolio, highlighting our strengths in AI integration, custom plugin development, and automated moderation workflows for online community platforms.
This was a well progressed & tested AI project from Logic Replace, they worked out most of the details for us and after some fine tuning, we are very pleased with the results. 
MICHAEL RYAN MANAGER PPAMAP