School community.

Most platforms treat the social layer as a decorative feed widget in a corner of the page. YESS treats it as the shared square: the one place the whole school gathers, moderated with the same care as the classroom. A post can be a photo of the science fair, a poll about the club logo, a milestone the alumni office wants celebrated, or a teacher's shout-out to a student who turned a term around.

Under the surface there is one canonical table — the feed was unified into a single post model, so there is no fork between "the feed" and "posts." Every post rides the same moderation gate, the same eight reactions, the same comment thread. This chapter is honest about which of the square's benches are built and which are still being carpentered: the feed, reactions, polls, stories, hashtags, mentions, and following are real; comment moderation and audience scoping are named plainly as the edges.

A feed that makes a school feel like one place — moderated so it stays that way.

The main feed lives in the portal at /portal/social. Students, parents, and staff all read the same square from here, filtered by All / Following / Pinned / Mine. Every post is a row in one canonical posts table — an earlier split between two social systems was deliberately collapsed into this single model, so the feed you see and the posts an author writes are the same thing.

The defining feature of the square is that it is moderated before it is seen, not policed after. When a post is created, a database trigger decides its fate the instant it is inserted: if the school's moderate student posts setting is on (the default) and the author is not a moderator, the post lands as pending and is held back from the public feed; otherwise it is approved immediately with the approval stamped on the row.

The moderation console

Staff moderators work the queue at /dashboard/social-feed — a permission-guarded console with Create, All-posts, Moderate (the pending queue), and Flagged tabs. Approving or rejecting a post calls a database function that records the decision, writes a moderation log and an audit entry, and notifies the author. On the Flagged tab a moderator can restore, hide (archive), or delete a post; each action is logged against the content it touched.

Officers can moderate too

Moderation is not staff-only. An elected student-government officer whose position grants "can moderate content" is treated as a moderator by the same rules — they can approve pending posts and act on flags exactly as a staff moderator does, without holding the staff permission. A school with a healthy peer-moderation culture can lean on its prefects; one that would rather keep it in the staffroom simply does not grant that officer power.

A square needs more than posts. YESS carries a full engagement layer, most of it fully wired.

Eight reactions

A reader reacts with one of eight types — like, love, celebrate, support, insightful, funny, thoughtful, and applause. Each carries its own icon and tone; a user has exactly one reaction per post (tapping the same one again removes it, tapping a different one swaps it). "Celebrate" and "applause" are the reactions a recognition post is built for.

Comments

Comments are threaded in the schema — a comment can reply to another — and any school member can leave one. They post live: a comment appears immediately, and while the database keeps a flag for review, there is no comment-approval queue today. If your feed copy mentions a comment being "submitted for approval," treat that as aspirational — comments are not held back.

Polls, stories, and the rest

• Polls. A post can carry a poll (2-10 options, single or multiple choice, optional close time); voting goes through a function that enforces the rules and tallies live.
• Stories. Ephemeral media that expires (24 hours by default, up to 48); a scheduled job purges expired ones, and each opens in a story viewer at /portal/social/stories/[id].
• Hashtags. Parsed from a post, counted, and surfaced as trending; a tag opens its own feed at /portal/social/hashtag/[tag].
• @-mentions. Mentioning someone notifies them (and re-notifies on approval if the post was held); a person's mentions collect at /portal/social/mentions.
• Bookmarks. A reader saves a post privately to /portal/social/bookmarks — visible only to them.
• Following. A follow graph powers the Following filter, so a reader can narrow the square to the people they care about.

The square also keeps score of good citizenship. A school defines community badges — each with a code, a label, a tier (bronze, silver, gold, platinum), and criteria — and awards them to a profile with a reason attached. Badges are authored and granted from the communication cluster; the community hubs link across to them.

Alongside badges, each profile carries a reputation score that rolls up its helpful replies, best answers, appreciated posts, petitions signed, and badges into a single number. The scoring formula is real and the score is stored per profile; recomputing it runs as a scheduled job rather than instantly on every action, so a profile's reputation refreshes on the platform's cadence, not the second a badge is awarded.

The square is governed by permissions, and the defaults matter.

• Teaching staff can view and post by default.
• Students can view by default but cannot post unless the school grants them the create permission through a custom role — so the "moderate student posts" queue only fills once a school has actually let students post.
• Parents can view the feed; per the database rules they can react, comment, and bookmark, but not author posts.
• Admin, owner, principal, vice-principal can moderate; so can elected student officers with the content- moderation power.

Staff reach the square through the hub at /dashboard/community and the moderation console; families and students reach it through the portal hub at /portal/community and the feed. The hubs themselves are navigation aggregators — they gather events, elections, student government, forums, the feed, clubs, and recognition into one landing, and do not mutate anything.

The core square — feed, moderation, reactions, polls, stories, hashtags, mentions, following, badges — is fully built and wired. A few edges are scaffolded in the data model but not yet finished in the interface; they are named here rather than glossed over.

The community feed is one bench in a wider square. It shares the notifications fabric, the portals, and the student-life cluster that runs clubs, elections, and student government.