Moderation has three queues. Requests are posts waiting for your approval before anybody sees them. Forum access holds members asking to be let into a forum that only opens on request. Reports are posts and comments that members flagged after the fact.
Requests
A post lands here when it was written in a moderated forum. Until you act on it, nobody but its author sees it.
Each one can be approved or rejected, and the list splits into open, approved and rejected so you can look back at what you decided.
Rejecting asks for a reason. Write one. A rejection without a reason reads as arbitrary, and the member has no idea what to do differently.
Moderate a forum for the first weeks of a new community, then switch it to a normal discussion forum once the tone is set. Permanent moderation slows a community down more than it protects it.
Forum access
A forum can be set to On request. Every member sees it in the forum list, but nobody gets in without asking, and those requests land in this tab.
A request shows who is asking, which forum, and the reason the member wrote. A forum can require that reason or leave it optional. The list splits into open, approved and rejected, the same way post requests do.
Approving opens that one forum for that one member. Rejecting leaves it locked, and the member can ask again later.
Both decisions send the member an email, and your note goes into it. Write the note when you reject, because it is the only explanation the member gets. You can also select several requests and decide them in one step, with the same note for all of them.
Reports
Members report a post, a comment or a chat message. Reports land here with the reason attached.
| Reason | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Blocklist word | The system, automatically |
| Automatically hidden | The system, automatically |
| Inappropriate content | A member |
| Harassment | A member |
| Spam | A member |
You can filter by reason and by content type, so a wave of spam reports can be worked through in one pass.
What you can do with a report
Three actions.
- Delete the content, which removes the post or the comment.
- Release anyway, which publishes the item again and closes its reports.
- Dismiss the reports, which keeps the content and clears the queue.
Deleting and releasing work on posts and comments. A reported chat can only be read and dismissed, so when a chat report is about harassment, answer the person rather than the message: deactivate or ban the member from their profile.
Dismissing is not doing nothing. It is a decision that the content is fine, and it takes the item off the list so the next one is visible.
Several reports about the same item are grouped, so you judge the content once rather than once per complaint.
The word blocklist
In the community settings you can keep a list of words. A post containing one is caught automatically and appears in reports as a blocklist match, with the matched word shown.
Keep the list short and specific. Broad words catch ordinary sentences, and every false positive is work for you and confusion for a member who did nothing wrong.
Allowed media types
The same settings decide whether members may attach images, videos, audio and files. Switching off what your community does not need is quieter moderation than deleting the results afterwards.
Automatically hidden
Content can be hidden by the system before anybody reports it. It is not deleted: it waits in the queue for your decision. Release anyway publishes it again. Delete the content confirms the removal.
A workable routine
Look at the queue once a day rather than reacting to each notification. Handle the two request queues first, because somebody is waiting on those, then reports.
If the queues are permanently full, the answer is usually structural. Check for a moderated forum that should be open, a blocklist that is too broad, or one member who needs a conversation rather than a delete button.
Members can also be deactivated or banned from their profile, which is the right answer to a person rather than to a post.