Moderating end-user content

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Growth or higher, Guide Professional or higher
Access Agent

Moderation is a queue and a set of rules. The rules matter more, because they decide what the queue contains.

Work the queue

  1. Open the moderation queue in your help centre.
  2. Review what is waiting: pending posts, comments, and anything flagged by readers.
  3. Approve, edit or remove each item.
  4. Set up rules so the obvious cases stop arriving.

Rules before review

Word-based rules hold back posts containing terms you never want published. Requiring sign-in removes most automated spam before it exists. Both mean the queue holds real posts needing a real decision.

Without them, moderators spend their attention on rubbish and start skimming, which is when something gets through.

Approve everything, or approve nothing

Reviewing every post before it appears is defensible for a small or sensitive community. Publishing immediately and moderating on report is defensible for a large one.

What does not work is a queue nobody empties: posts sit for days, contributors conclude the community is dead, and they are not wrong.

Removing a post

Tell the person why, briefly. Silent removal produces a second post asking what happened, and a reputation for arbitrary moderation. One line is enough.

Editing somebody's words

Fix a broken link or a formatting mistake. Do not rewrite their point. A community where posts get quietly reworded stops being a community.

Give it a rhythm

Once a day is enough for most communities, and it should be somebody's actual task rather than a thing done when noticed.

See also

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