This month we're shipping several features that give you more control over how you monitor and tune your moderation setup - plus five new policy models covering regulated content categories.

Email reports

You can now receive email reports for new and unresolved queue items. Each queue can be configured separately, and each user manages their own notification preferences.

Daily, weekly, and monthly reports are available on all plans. Hourly reports are available on Growth and Enterprise.

Shadow flagging

Shadow flagging lets you test new policies before fully enabling them. Items matched by a shadow-flagged policy appear in a dedicated queue but are not acted on. This gives you a safe way to evaluate coverage and tune thresholds before going live.

To enable it, set a policy to "Do not flag" and configure a queue to show shadow flagged content.

Available on all plans.

Policy thresholds

You can now set per-policy thresholds to control how strictly a policy is enforced. To help you calibrate, we show how many messages would have been flagged at any given threshold over the last 30 days.

Available on all plans.

5 new policy models

We've added five new models covering regulated content categories. Each is trained using our risk-based approach: content that poses a direct risk to the end user scores higher, while a passing mention scores lower. This lets you set a threshold that blocks promotional or facilitative content without flagging incidental references.

• Adult: Detects content related to adult services, products, and websites.

• Firearms: Detects content related to the sale, acquisition, or promotion of firearms and related accessories.

• Gambling: Detects content promoting gambling services, platforms, or solicitations.

• Crypto: Detects content related to cryptocurrency promotions, investment solicitations, and related financial schemes.

• Cannabis: Detects content related to cannabis products, dispensaries, and related services.

Secondary features

• Usage rate limit cadence indicator: You can now see your maximum request cadence directly in Billing → Usage & Limits, making it easier to plan traffic bursts and avoid throttling. Available on all plans.

Improvements

• API: Switch to a 1-minute rate limit window for clearer, more predictable throttling behavior

• Dashboard: Change overview percentages to show share of total messages instead of month-over-month deltas

• Discord: Update Discord plugin to use the new endpoint; upgrade to the latest plugin version

• General: Fine-tune topic detection for better categorization on edge cases

• General: Retrain phishing model to reflect the latest tactics and improve precision

• Improvement: Accept Base64 images in submission requests to simplify file handling

• Improvement: Update WordPress plugin to the new endpoint; install the latest version to stay compatible

• Improvement: Improve item detail load time for a faster review experience

• Improvement: Save request timings so you can inspect end-to-end latency in logs

• Performance: Speed up review queue queries for snappier filtering and navigation

Fixes

• Bug: Author histogram now updates correctly after new data ingests

• Bug: Author trust scores classify legacy accounts correctly instead of marking them as new

• Bug: Insights now attach when adding policies through the API

• Bug: Filter by action works as expected across all queue views

• Bug: Resolve slow queries to stabilize response times under load

• Bug: Now showing more accurate unique author counts in project overviews

We're shipping new features every day this week. Check out what's new and what's coming.

See Launch Week →

Next time you sign in to Moderation API, the dashboard will look, and work, very differently. We rebuilt it from the ground up to:

1. Make it easier to configure moderation policies

2. Improve the development experience

This redesign introduces channels, clearer project scoping, smarter content types, and a faster, more testable workflow.

Content channels

We’re adding a new abstraction: channels.

Think of channels as receivers for different content types. Policies are configured per channel, so each content type can have its own rules. In API calls, you just pass the channel key to apply the right policy set.

Examples for a marketplace:

• Chat messages

• Reviews

• Listing descriptions

• Profiles

Channels can represent anything that needs distinct rules: community trust levels, individual apps, client workspaces, and more.

Note: Existing “projects” have been converted to channels, with your previous filters mapped to policies. If you update your configuration, please use the new API endpoint.

Content types

Often our projects require moderating different types of content. Messages, websites, comments, profile descriptions, just to name a few.

Knowing which type of content is being moderated is beneficial for a couple of reasons;

1. It gives us context to improve the accuracy of the moderation.

2. We can display the content in a more meaningful way

For example for messages we can look back in the conversation history to gain context, and for comments we can check the relevancy of the article or post.

In the dashboard you'll see messages show up in the context of the conversations.

Profiles are displayed as structured objects (picture, description, username), making it obvious which field triggered a flag.

Configure content types per channel or include them in your API call when submitting content.

Projects

Projects now encapsulate all content and users. Review queues, channels, authors, API keys, and moderation actions are scoped to a single project.

That means you can create projects for different development environments to keep test content out of production.

Agencies can create a project per client and invite them to a dedicated review queue.

Custom models and wordlists remain at the organization level, so improvements roll out automatically to all projects.

Playground

The Playground is now a modal for quick policy iteration and testing.

It also includes results of our new recommendation fields and severity score to show what contributed to the recommended action.

Prefer raw JSON? Switch views - the dashboard remembers your choice.

Other changes

• Use channel ID or key in API calls (instead of changing API keys)

• AI agents removed in favor of channel-level custom guidelines

• Easier organization switching

• Performance improvements and bug fixes

• Press an author ID in the Content View to navigate directly to that author

• Improved authentication

• Content severity score in API result

• Sort review queues by severity

• Recommended action in API result - block, review, allow

We’ve consolidated all moderation routes into a single endpoint to simplify integrations and deliver richer, consistent responses.

New unified endpoint:

• https://api.moderationapi.com/v1/moderate

Deprecated:

• /moderate/text

• /moderate/image

• /moderate/object

• /moderate/video

The new endpoint streamlines submissions and introduces improved response data, including several new fields.

New response fields

Evaluation

The evaluation field is the final result of the analysis of your policies and other channel specific configurations. It includes a flagged field indicating if any policies caused a flag.

It also includes a new severity score which is calculated based on your selected policies. A higher severity score indicates more serious violations and lower severity less serious.

The severity score can be used as a granular indication, where the flagged field is a simple binary indication. You can also use the severity score to prioritize content in your review queues.

Recommendation

The response also includes a recommended action to help you decide whether to reject, review or allow content.

We recommend using this field for deciding what to do with content in your code.

This recommendation primarily considers severityScore and author status (e.g., blocked or suspended).

You can adjust the thresholds for blocking or reviewing in your channel configurations.

Policies

All enabled policies are returned as an array, each with:

• id: the policy’s unique identifier (matches the dashboard)

• flagged: whether this policy triggered

• probability: the model’s confidence

Some policies include extra data (e.g., PII detection returns matched items).

How to migrate

Using typescript SDK

1. Upgrade the SDK to at least v2.0.1.

   1. Recommended: Remove the api key from the constructor and add your project API key in your env variables as MODAPI_SECRET_KEY.

2. Update all calls in the moderate namespace to use content.submit and follow the new content structure.

   1. Recommended: Include your channel key; use different channels per content type.

3. Rename contextId to conversationId.

4. Read flags from evaluation.flagged instead of the root flagged key.

   1. Recommended: switch to use recommendation.action instead of flagged, and check for reject, review, or allow.

import ModerationAPI from "@moderation-api/sdk";

const moderationApi = new ModerationAPI();

const result = await moderationApi.content.submit({
  content: { // new content structure
    type: "text",
    text: "Hello world!",
  }, 
  metaType: "message", // new field
  contentId: "message-123",
  authorId: "user-123",
  conversationId: "room-456", // renamed from contextId
  metadata: {
    customField: "value",
  },
});

// OPTION 1: Same behavior as before
if (result.evaluation.flagged) {
  // Block the content, show an error, etc...
}

// OPTION 2: Use the API's recommendation (considers severity, thresholds, and more)
switch (result.recommendation.action) {
  case "reject":
    // show error, don't save to db
    break;
  case "review":
    // save to db, but review in moderation API dashboard
    break;
  case "allow":
    // save to db
    break;
}

Using API endpoint directly

1. Switch base URL from https://moderationapi.com/api/v1 to https://api.moderationapi.com/v1

2. Replace all calls under /moderate/{type} with /moderate and follow the new structure for content.

   1. Recommended: If you previously used multiple API keys for different projects, you can now use one key and pass different channel keys per call.

3. Rename contextId to conversationId.

4. Read flags from evaluation.flagged instead of the root level flagged key.

   1. Recommended: Prefer recommendation.action over evaluation.flagged, and check for reject, review, or allow as shown above.

Dive deeper in the docs

See full API reference and content schema:

https://docs.moderationapi.com/api-reference/moderate

When multiple content policies can flag the same item, it’s hard to know whether a violation is minor (e.g., profanity) or critical (e.g., illicit behavior) without digging through each policy.

To solve this we've built a top level model to output a single score to give you an instant idea about the severity of a violation.

Severity score solves this by providing a single, opinionated score across all your policies. It weights violations by impact so you can see urgency at a glance.

For example: illicit content ranks above hate, which ranks above swearing.

Use severity score to:

• Sort review queues by severity.

• Set thresholds to automate actions (e.g., block above 90%, review above 50%).

• Understand historical impact on your dashboard, including how many items would have been blocked. Note: historical data is available if you’ve used an API endpoint that supports severity score for the past 30 days.

Implementation:

• Read the score at ‎evaluation.severity_score.

• Read the recommended action at ‎recommendation.action.

• See the docs for example and integration details

• You now get the author details in the moderation response.

• New author endpoints to update, retrieve, and list authors.

• Update authors with data to improve trust scoring.

​

Dashboard features

• View Messages in Context: You can now see moderation items with surrounding conversation context for better decision-making

• Image & Video Blurring: Added ability to blur sensitive images and videos in content view for safer moderation

• Global Queue Option: New global queue setting available. This will remove content from queues if it has been reviewed in any queue.

• Use variables in masking: You can now use $ variables in masking. For example, if you want to wrap matched words in <b> tags, you can use <b>$</b> as the masking value.

​

Bug fixes and improvements

• Improved dashboard performance and stability

We’ve introduced a new comprehensive author-level dashboard system to enhance end user management.

• New Author Detail Pages: Comprehensive user profiles with complete activity overview, trust levels, moderation history, and detailed analytics

  • Summary Tab: Trust level management, sentiment analysis, message statistics, and top violation categories

  • Timeline Tab: Complete chronological view of user activity with context grouping and advanced filtering

  • Fraud Detection Tab: Advanced behavioral analysis including bot detection, location anomalies, device fingerprinting, and risk assessment

  • Metadata Tab: Technical user information and account details

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Trust Level SystemA new trust level system allows you to tailor moderation actions based on user behavior and find bad actors more easily.

• Automated Trust Adjustments: System automatically adjusts trust levels based on user behavior and moderation history

• Manually upgrade or downgrade trust levels as needed

• Trust Level Impact: Trust levels can be consumed via the API or to influence moderation decisions, such as auto-approving content from high-trust users

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Author-Level Moderation Actions

• Comprehensive User Actions: Block, suspend, and unblock users directly from their profile pages

• Duration-Based Suspensions: Flexible temporary blocks with customizable time periods (1 hour to 1 year)

• Remember to set up webhooks to handle actions taken on authors