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Respectify SDKs & Libraries

Welcome!

Respectify's goal is to improve online conversation. It provides APIs and SDKs for you to integrate in your website, online newspaper, blog, etc that guide your users towards more constructive conversation. Respectify encourages friendly (genuine, well-intentioned) disagreement and healthy sharing of different opinions and views. Respectify is not an engine for monoculture of thought, but in fact intends to assist in the opposite while encouraging in healthy interaction along the way.

We do this by letting you set up Respectify for any article, blog post, etc and then analyse comments your users make to assess the quality of the reply, neutrally. This provides feedback on how to write better comments and replies: to engage, understand, and reply thoughtfully.

You as a website owner can show this directly to your users allowing them to edit a comment before posting, or use the data to make automatic decisions about publishing a comment. We recommend showing the users the feedback, because the Respectify ethos is to guide and educate in how to communicate well. We hope that over time your users will improve their communication style.

Direct blog / article plugins​

  • Wordpress plugin: hooks into the Wordpress comment system and uses the full power of Respectify to provide feedback on comments and an opportunity for the poster to iterate on what they wrote before their comment is published, fully customisable by the site owner.

Libraries for custom integrations​

Read some sample code to get started quickly, or view the detailed API reference guides:

  • PHP: suitable for integrating into any PHP site and calling the Respectify API. But are you looking for Wordpress integration? We have a specific plugin for that.

  • REST: if none of the others are suitable, this is our OpenAPI v3 spec for Respectify's API. You can use this to implement support for Respectify in any language or framework.

Analysis​

Comments are analysed for the easy things (spam, low effort) and the hard things (logical fallacies, objectionable or rude phrases, and ways of writing to others that don't contribute to the conversation, in approximate level of difficulty for us.) All these are provided back to you by the APIs.

You can see the full information Respectify's analysis provides on the 'Evaluate a Comment' REST API documentation. This is the actual API call and info that other libraries, like the blog plugins, use.

Blog / Article Plugins​

Direct blog / article plugins use these to provide feedback to the user and suggest ways they can edit.

Respectify does not try to censor or prevent someone posting their genuine opinion. Instead it tries to encourage thoughtful replies, understanding the topic and who they are replying to, and communicating (even contradictory views) in a healthy fashion. It does identify potentially objectionable content, with the goal of encouraging the commenter to reply kindly.

The plugins use this to show the commenter things they could consider improving about their comment, and allow them to edit.

It is up to the site owner via plugin settings to set up criteria for a comment not being published. There is no criteria to not publish based on specific views 'in general' (with the exception that potentially objectionable statements are identified, and this allows you to catch harmful content), with our focus generally being on the quality of the reply communicating those views. This aims to encourage the goal of welcoming different views while retaining healthy, thoughtful discussion.

Test this out with our Wordpress integration.