How to design my servers database for my iOS application?

Question

I am developing an iOS application from which users can post various kinds of events in a server and view the events created from all the users. The question i have , does not have a programming nature. I would like to show here , how i would design my servers database and tell me your opinion about it and how i could improve it.

The application has a very simple interface where the user when he wants to post an event , simply writes a title , some comments and attaches a photo if he wants . Then this information is sent through XML to my server and stored to the database.

The problem is that because some people are immature , they would try to post inappropriate words or even photos. So i would like to have some control on my users. What i am thinking is , at the first time that the application runs on the mobile phone and connects to the server , the server would send a user id back to the phone. Then every time the users sends an xml file , he attaches his user id with the xml (programatically attached). Also i would keep another database with all the user ids that have been created over time. So if i notice an inappropriate event , i could delete the user id from my database , and the next time the user tries to send something, the server would understand that this id is not in the database and so not allow the posting. Of course if someone decides to uninstall and reinstall the application and get a new user id , he could again post but thats ok with me.

Would it be an easier way to prevent immature behaviors or this one sounds ok?

Answer 1

Sure what you describe is possible. But there is one big problem with it: that interface can easily be used by a robot (a script). So if someone really wants to missuse your service, he can flood you with whatever he likes in a second. Or he can try again and again, until you have to give up removing his posts from the service.

I suggest you take a look at one of the existing frameworks instead. This way you do not have to reinvent the wheel (which has already been done 19562394792 times, and counting) and don't have to learn from your mistakes (which you certainly will make).

Answer 2

This is about the only workable solution with images since you can't easily perform any recognition on an image to decide if it is appropriate. The comments they post would be more easily scanned for inappropriate items.

If you are will to do this kind of moderation then your solution sounds like the right one. As with any open system you can't really stop people from creating new accounts as you mentioned. You could log and ban IP addresses, but that is not a very good solution anymore as most IP addresses could really be shared gateway addresses and those addresses rotate frequently between users.

Create an ID. Watch for behavior. Ban the ID. And encourage community involvment in alerting you of bad posts with some kind of a Flag button.

Answer 3

There are many ways to design a database and not just for use with an iOS app. However when I'm building a mobile app (iOS, Android or any other) I want to make sure that the amount of data being sent and received is as small as possible; this is why I use JSON instead of XML... smaller footprint.

Because I use JSON I like to use an object database like MongoDB (my favorite) or CouchDB, because I 1) don't need to worry about the structure of my data and 2) the database stores the objects in JSON format.

I then use Node.JS for my application server so now I have JSON database -> JSON objects in my server application code -> outputting JSON... seamless with no Mappers or serialisation required. FTW.