Want to have a suggestion box - using a discussion board - how do we approve posts prior to public access

Right off the bat, first idea I can think of is have a secondary list where users submit their suggestion. This will then kick off a workflow and upon successful completion of the workflow, have it copy the item to the discussion board. What is great is that SPD 2007 is now free and the Workflow wizard in SPD is very straight forward for this type of task.Jeff Kozloff; Project Manager, Solutions Team; Bamboo Solutions; http://www.bamboosolutions.com

Hi You can enable Content Approval of the discussion board. Please follow the steps below: 1. Click Discussion Board Settings and choose Versioning settings under General Settings 2. Check the box Yes under Require content approval for submitted items After the configuration, the public users will not see the newly created discussion post before it is approved. Then you need to add the approver name to the approver group of the site by doing: (I assume that the discussion board list inherits the parent permission) 1. Click Site actions Site Settings People and Groups 2. Click Approvers and click New to add user names 3. Choose Add users to a SharePoint group Approvers 4. Click OK Now you will find that the user added just now still cannot approve the discussion post. Then you need to change the permission level of Approver to make it has permission to Manage List 1. Click Site Permissions SettingsPermission Level 2. Click Approve and check the box before Manage Lists 3. Click Submit Now the approvers can approve the newly created posts but at the same time, they can manage lists such as create and delete lists. If you have concern to this, you can break the inheritance between the discussion board and the parent site and set the unique permission of the discussion board list. Hope this helps. Lu Zou

Hi..Using the 1st part of method, I managed to create discussion board with "Content Approval".As a portal owner, I'm the one who will approved all the post (full control on the discussion board). And I successfully filtered the post by approved/rejected them.However, I have problem in terms of post display. It seems that I'm talking to myself. After I approved the post, the discussion board display my name instead of the original sender's name. So, people don't know who the sender was.Do you have any advice how to fix this issue?Thank you.

Haven't tried this in my test environment so may be off the bat here but it sounds like you are displaying the modified by column. Can you amend your views to show the created by column instead?SharePoint Administrator | SharePoint Fan www.davepyett.wordpress.com - Follow me on twitter: twitter.com/dpyett

Thanks Dave. It is normal flat view actually. The issue is in the Post by column. When the approval status is "Pending", the Post by column is appear accordingly (displays sender's name) which is correct. However,only moderator will see the message. Unfortunatelly, if the status is "Approved" after the moderator's approval, then moderator's name appears instead. Seems like the moderator is posting on behalf of the sender. In fact, there are no sender's names mentioned in the post. Always from moderator. It's confused me. :(FYI, I haven't faced this problem when the Require content approval for submitted items is set to be "No".Thanks and really need help here..

Yes, I am curious too on how to resolve this. Been searching the Internet and no resolution on this yet.

You can add a default approval workflow and asign it to some one for approval.Now when he approves it ,the status is changed from "in progress" to "approved" in the workflow column,Based on this column filter the contents and create a view.I checked now the posted by column remains the same as created not of approver. Not to mention workflow should be "Approval -Sharepoint 2010" and on "Discussion " not on "message nor all". This should solve your problem:)

What do you do though, when you have WSS 3.0 or SP2010 Foundation? These versions don't have the approval workflows.

Got to go with custom workflows then :(

Even with custom workflows, it will do the same thing. So long as you touch the record, the Modified By user will always become the "Posted By". Any hints or guidance on how to change the content approval process just for Discussions?

You can add a default approval workflow and asign it to some one for approval.Now when he approves it ,the status is changed from "in progress" to "approved" in the workflow column,Based on this column filter the contents and create a view.I checked now the posted by column remains the same as created not of approver. Not to mention workflow should be "Approval -Sharepoint 2010" and on "Discussion " not on "message nor all". This should solve your problem:) I am sorry, but this doesn't solve the issue either. Like the other posters, I have turned on the approval setting on the list and everytime someone approves this message, the posted by value becomes the name of the approver, not the submitter. When I use a workflow, it does go through the approval process, but the posts show for everyone, thus defeating the purpose of having "approval" enabled on the list. My recommendation for anyone experiencing this issue is to create a custom workflow and custom view where the view doesn't show items unless the custom field used for approving is marked as approved. I don't know of any other quick and easy way to do this without writing custom code. Again, this is sad that approval is attached to the discussion board content type and has a very obvious bug.

...and you would think SP3 would fix this but unfortunately no. I end up creating a custom Discussion Board template where I modified the Posted By field to always be the Created By field. I then had to use some jQuery to make it all work together. Now it works exactly like a Discussion Board with the exception that when one replys, the original text does not get quoted (more like a conventional forum).