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MLY in Blue Reports redaction

Introduction

Psychological safety is essential for fostering collaboration, innovation, and trust. However, managing sensitive language within feedback can be challenging. The MLY AI-powered redaction solution helps you maintain a safe environment by detecting and redacting inappropriate, sensitive, or harmful language in feedback—without losing critical insights.

The Redaction feature offers multiple workflows to redact your analysis:

Keyword replacement – Substitute problematic words while keeping the original message context.
Hide & preserve insights – Fully hide offensive comments but retain key insights for decision-makers.
Complete removal – Eliminate harmful comments for sensitive audiences and remove insights altogether.

These workflows can be used to adjust the content of the analysis for review by different roles such as:

Adaptive redactions for instructors or managers:

Hide offensive language, but ensure insights remain available.
Maintain a respectful, actionable process.

NOTE

Redaction lists and Redaction rulesets are created and maintained directly in MLY. Any new Redaction rulesets created in MLY will automatically appear in your Blue Project Management screen, in the Redaction settings > Available ruleset lists panel.

Create a Redaction list

To begin creating Redaction rule sets, start by developing individual Redaction lists. These lists should include the appropriate workflows for concealing or removing sensitive information, such as names, offensive language, or harmful content. These Redaction lists form the foundation for creating effective rule sets tailored to the redaction policies of various departments, schools, or locations within your organization.

Select the Redaction icon on the main menubar to access the Redaction list page.
Click on Create redaction list to start.
If no lists have been created, this screen will be empty.

Enter a Redaction list name for this list.
Enter a Redaction list type:
a. If you are an Administrator and wish to provide access to all users to share this redaction list, select Global. This setting is exclusive to Administrators and remains hidden from view for other users.
b. Select Personal and the redaction list will only be available to you.
In the left panel, Enter terms to redact individually and click Enter or Tab on your keyboard to save each term. You can also copy a list of terms from Excel or Word using Control C, then use Control V to paste it into the Terms to redact panel. To remove terms from your list, click on the x sign beside each word you wish to delete. Terms cannot be edited, instead delete the term and enter a new one. Each term has a maximum of 100 characters.
To Include all variations of terms above, click on the checkbox.
To include Related suggestions from text, click on Look for similar terms. Click on the + sign beside each word you wish to add to your list or click +Select all suggestions.

NOTE

Once the terms are displayed, the Look for similar terms button disappears. The button reappears when the user edits or adds words in the left panel.
When you have more than 50 words, a Load more button is displayed. Click that button to display up to 50 more suggestions and repeat, if needed.
If all suggestions have been moved to the left panel, a Revert select all button appears to allow you to move the words back to the right panel, if needed.

Clear all above the left and right panels will clear all the terms in the respective panels.
Click to Save changes.
Click to Discard changes.

Create global redaction rule sets

Global redaction rule sets is a feature available only to Admins, allowing them to create a set of redaction rules that are available system-wide. The purpose of a Global redaction rule set is to group together multiple redaction lists and display methods to apply to a single analysis.

IMPORTANT

Include 'Blue' in the names of MLY Redaction lists and Global rule sets created for Blue Projects and Reporting. This will make it easy to identify those specifically intended for Blue Projects and Reports and help prevent accidental deletion by a MLY administrator.

For example, when including MLY comments in a report for faculty, you may want to hide or delete Alerts in the 80 - 100 % range, and partially or completely hide profanity, abusive or inappropriate language, and sensitive content which correspond to multiple redaction lists.

To create a Global redaction rule set:

Select the **Redaction rule sets ** option from the Redaction feature drop-down menu on the Homepage menubar.
If no global redaction rule sets have been created, this icon will be displayed.
Click Create global redaction rule set.

In the Redaction rule set name field, enter a name for your rule set.
To create your rule set, select which Redaction lists will be applied to an analysis and specify if you want to include an Alert score range. Click on the down-arrow of the Select item field to view a drop-down menu of your Redaction lists and the Alert score range. Add more Redaction lists by clicking on Add additional item. By default, the Replace redacted terms with field contains the term Redacted. This is a editable field and can be changed to another word or phrase if needed.
5a. Alert score range: Set the range of alerts which will be hidden or removed from the analysis.
5b. Redaction list: Select one or multiple Redaction lists and choose the display method for each list (Partial - hides single words or a phrases or Hide comment - hides entire comments) for each list that will be applied to the analysis.
To enable users to manually redact comments when this Redaction rule set is applied to an analysis, select the checkbox Include manual comment redaction in this version.
Click Save

NOTE - REDACTED COMMENT DELETION

If the option to delete a comment has been selected in the Redaction rule set, Blue will treat the deleted comment as if it was not answered and it will not be displayed in the MLY comment report block.

Add redaction rule sets to a Blue project

MLY provides the flexibility to deliver an analysis in various redacted versions tailored to Blue Reporting. This allows reports to be displayed to specific audiences. For example, department leaders can access lightly or non-redacted versions, where none or only select keywords are masked, while evaluation subjects receive fully redacted versions designed to ensure psychological safety. Comprehensive redactions may include keyword replacement, hidden names, and complete comment removal. Blue administrators can apply different redaction versions to each MLY analysis, with each version supporting multiple rules, such as keyword masking, comment removal based on alert thresholds, and manual redactions.

To apply MLY redactions to your project:

Navigate to Blue Management>MLY Settings>MLY Redaction>Redaction Settings.
Select the Available rule sets that you would like to use within your project and report blocks.
Select a Version of the comments for exports and APIs. This can be the original comments, or one of the Redaction rule sets.
Click Apply to confirm your selection.
Analyze your project with each analysis type (model) to apply the redaction rules.

NOTE - CHANGES TO REDACTION RULE SETS

When an administrator makes changes to any of the selected Redaction rule sets listed in Blue, synchronization is automatically performed for any configured analysis types (models) (e.g., adding a redaction version to a project will be applied to both SEI for courses and SEI for instructors simultaneously, provided they are both configured). No further action is required to ensure that all redactions are updated.
Use the Retrieve button if there are any updates done directly in MLY to transfer these updates to your Blue project and reports such as modifications to the Blue Redaction lists or rule sets.

NOTE - MANUAL REDACTIONS

Redactions manually performed by users in MLY automatically override rules-based redactions in Blue. These changes are updated in Blue when the Retrieve feature is used to transfer MLY changes to Blue.

Add a Redaction rule set to a MLY comments report block

Identify the MLY Question containing the comments you want to focus on.
Select a Redaction ruleset from the Version of comments drop-down menu to apply redaction to the comments.
Preview the report block to review changes before finalizing.
Click Apply to save your selections.

Note: This feature is not applicable to the Frequency or Cross Tabulation MLY Comment blocks as these blocks do not display actual comments.

Managing redactions: applications, modifications and exceptions

THINGS TO KNOW

Applying redactions:

Multiple redaction rule sets can be applied in different blocks in the same analysis including keyword masking or replacing, comment removal based on the Alerts threshold, and manual redactions.
Redactions manually performed by users in MLY automatically override previously applied Redaction rule sets.
MLY manual redaction may not be displayed in the report for a question(s) that has been analyzed using multiple models, for example, using both EEI and ELI for those question(s).
By default any export (either by Advanced Export, Response API, Report Publish tab) will use the original version of the comments however the administrator can choose to apply a Redaction rule set instead.
When sharing raw data with report viewers, the administrator can apply a Redaction ruleset or display original comments.
The Blue administrator can review the redacted version against the original for troubleshooting and verification that the rules were applied correctly.
Blue will treat "deleted" comments as if they were not answered and they will not be displayed in the MLY report blocks using that redaction version.

Modifying redactions:

Scheduled daily processing: At the daily wakeup time, Blue retrieves the redacted versions of all comments that haven’t been analyzed yet. New comments are processed by MLY and returned to Blue with the original and redacted versions, ready for report application.
When an MLY administrator makes changes to a redacted version, such as adding new keywords or altering the redaction alerts thresholds, the Retrieve button enables all these reprocessed redactions to be synchronized with Blue (not just the deltas handled by the scheduled processing).
If the name of the Redaction ruleset is changed in MLY, it will appear in orange within the Blue project's Redaction Settings screen, accompanied by a Change detected message and a Sync redaction naming button to apply the updated name.
Manual redactions: During synchronization, MLY notifies Blue whenever a comment is redacted and approved. Until the comment is redacted and approved in MLY, the current non-redacted or redacted version remains in Blue.

Handling redaction exceptions:

Invalid message: When a MLY redaction version is removed from MLY, the project’s Text Analytics tab will display an ‘Invalid’ message next to the affected versions already selected. This message will appear in the available list and applied settings for each of the MLY analysis types (models). Invalid indicates that the affected comments will be null until the administrator selects a valid version to send to the project. However, quantitative data and other comments not associated with the invalid analysis will remain valid for export.
Report blocks: Any report blocks using the removed redaction version will be invalid, meaning they will not displayed until the admin updates the report block with a valid redaction version.
Raw responses settings: Distributed raw responses settings will also be invalid, preventing raw responses from being included in reports until the administrator updates the settings with a valid redaction version.
Project, report export, and APIs: Both the project export (incl. GetResponse APIs) and report publish tab exports will be invalid, and the administrator will be advised to update the corresponding setting in the project.
Retained redacted data: If a MLY redaction version is removed from MLY but not yet removed from the project’s Text Analytics tab (selected list), the project will retain the redacted data. Any previously generated reports can be regenerated with the same redacted data, even if the version is no longer available in MLY.
Administrator action: Administrators should remove the invalid redaction version(s), select a valid alternative(s), and reapply to regenerate any affected reports.