Respectify Documentation
Respectify's goal is to improve online conversation.
What is Respectify?
Respectify 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 have two main sets of features:
- Comment health (toxicity, logical fallacies, dogwhistles, topic relevance, and far more.) This is the API that most shows the Respectify ethos: not only to moderate, but to edify, in that moderation responses explain why and teach the user. It's also available as a Wordpress plugin.
- A Perspective replacement. Perspective is shutting down, and our tech already closely aligned in ethos (helping good communication), so we built a set of APIs that implement Perspective-style scoring using our comment health tech. This is intended to be a very easy migration path.
We also provide spam detection, and signal-based detection if text may have been written by AI.
All are available via REST, Python, Typescript, and PHP, and comment health including spam is also available as a Wordpress comment plugin, letting you use Respectify for Wordpress sites without any coding.
WordPress Plugin (Recommended)
For most users, start here! The WordPress plugin provides comment analysis and feedback, no coding required:
Quick Start
- Install the Plugin: one-click installation from the WordPress plugin directory
- Configure Settings: enter your API key and choose which checks to enable
The plugin hooks into the WordPress comment system and uses the full power of Respectify to provide feedback on comments. When someone submits a comment, it's either published, or they're shown feedback that teaches them how to improve what they wrote, with the opportunity to revise before posting.
Respectify's WordPress plugin is fully customisable by you: guide healthy interaction, avoid dogwhistles, keep comments on-topic, catch spam, and more. Check out the plugin's Settings page for customising Respectify to match your community: sites serving marginalised communities, news sites covering sensitive topics, forums that have experienced brigading or coordinated harassment, political discussion where coded language is common, or any community where you've noticed specific patterns that derail conversation.
Using Perspective? Need To Migrate?
If your site currently uses Google's Perspective API, you can move that scoring integration to Respectify without rebuilding it from scratch.
Use the migration guide if you want to keep the familiar Perspective scoring flow and change as little application code as practical.
If you also want to help writers improve comments before they post them, use Comment Scoring. That is the part of Respectify that explains what needs work and why.
Developer Integration
Most people are looking for the WordPress plugin above. This section is for programmers building a custom integration or using a non-WordPress platform.
We have native libraries for TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, and PHP. If you're using another language, use the REST API directly: all our libraries wrap it, so anything you can do with them you can do with REST.
Core Features
Comment Health:
- Comment Scoring: quality analysis covering health, logical fallacies, tone, and more
- Spam Detection: filter promotional and bot content
- Relevance Checking: keep comments on-topic
- Dogwhistle Detection: identify coded harmful language
Perspective Compatibility:
- Perspective-Compatible Scoring: Perspective-style comment scoring for migrations from Google's API
- Perspective Score Corrections: Perspective-style score correction and feedback retention
AI Detection:
- LLM Detection: detect AI-generated comments using word frequency and structural analysis
Efficiency:
- Megacall: run multiple checks in one API call. This costs less.
Reference Documentation
- Schema Reference: response field documentation with language tabs
- API Reference: method signatures and parameters (TypeScript, Python, PHP)
- Error Handling: exception types and error handling patterns
- Sample Code: complete examples in all languages