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User Content Checklist for AI-Built Apps

Comments, reviews, social features

When you vibe code user content with tools like Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Claude Code, the generated code often works in development but misses critical production requirements. This checklist helps you catch what AI missed before you ship.

Danger Zone

moderate risk

Letting users post things means someone will eventually post something you wish they hadn't

A comment box looks simple. Behind it is a sprawling web of questions: who can see what, how to stop spam without blocking real people, what to do when someone posts something illegal or abusive, how to handle deleted comments that other comments replied to, and whether notifications about replies are going to spam your users. Every feature you add (reactions, threading, mentions) multiplies the edge cases.

Failure scenario

You launch a community feature for your app. It's going great until someone posts spam links in every thread. You add a basic filter. Spammers adjust. Now they're posting coded messages that look innocent but link to scams in their profiles. Meanwhile, your notification emails are hitting spam folders because you're sending too many. Two months in, you're spending 10 hours a week manually moderating instead of building features.

Common mistakes

  • No limit on how fast someone can post (so bots flood your app with spam)
  • Deleted content disappears completely (breaking threads and losing evidence of abuse)
  • User-uploaded images aren't checked for file type or size (so someone uploads a 50MB executable disguised as a JPEG)
  • No way to find and remove all content from a banned user at once
  • Notification emails sent immediately for every action (overwhelming users and triggering spam filters)

Time to break: 2-6 months before moderation becomes a daily time sink

How are you building this?

Showing what to check when using a managed service

Audit Prompts

Copy these into your AI coding assistant to check your implementation.

Can your content moderation keep up?
reliability
Look at how we handle user-posted content. Is there a way to review flagged content? Can we find all posts by a specific user? Is there rate limiting (like max 10 posts per minute)? If we're using a moderation service like Perspective or OpenAI, does it run on every post or just flagged ones? What happens if the moderation API is slow or down?

Moderation starts small but grows with your user count. What works for 50 users breaks at 500.

Are you accidentally leaking private content?
security
Check who can see what. Can users see content from accounts they've blocked? If someone deletes a post, does it disappear from search results and feeds? Are direct messages actually private (not appearing in public APIs or sitemaps)? Can you change the URL to see another user's private content?

The most common bug is hiding content in the UI but forgetting to actually restrict access. It's like closing the curtains but leaving the door unlocked.

Will user content slow down your app?
performance
Check how content is loaded. Are you loading every single comment at once or paginating (showing 20 at a time)? Are images and videos served through a CDN or directly from your server? Do threads with hundreds of replies take forever to load? Are you counting reactions/likes on every page load or caching the totals?

User content grows unpredictably. The first thread with 500 comments will grind your app to a halt unless you planned for it.

Do notifications make sense?
reliability
Review our notification setup. Can users control what they get notified about? Are notifications batched (like one email with multiple updates) or sent individually? Do reply notifications link directly to the specific comment? Does unsubscribing from one thread stop notifications for that thread only (not everything)?

Bad notifications either overwhelm users (so they ignore everything) or end up in spam folders (so they never arrive).

Checklist

0/10 completed

Smart Move

It depends

Basic user content (like comments on your own posts) is reasonable to build yourself. But if you're adding reactions, threading, real-time updates, or full social features (feeds, follows, mentions), the complexity explodes fast. And moderation is always harder than you think.

Stream

Full-featured activity feeds, chat, and social interactions with built-in moderation

3 million feed updates free per month

Moderation APIs (OpenAI, Perspective)

AI-powered content filtering to catch spam, abuse, and inappropriate content automatically

OpenAI: paid only; Perspective: 1 request/second free

Disqus

Drop-in comments with spam filtering and moderation tools built in

Free with ads, or paid to remove ads

Tradeoffs

Building it yourself means full control and no recurring costs, but moderation becomes your problem. Services handle the hard parts but add monthly fees and you're trusting them with your user data.

Did you know?

The average social platform spends $2.50-$3.50 per user per year on content moderation, and 60% of users abandon platforms where they encounter spam or abuse.

Source: Trust & Safety Professional Association 2023 Industry Benchmark Report

Related Checks

🔐Authentication

Sign up, log in, password reset, 2FA

🔔Notifications

Push, email, and in-app alerts

🔍Search

Find content across your app