Role of Moderator & Best Practices

Overview

The following article explains the role of a Moderator for an AnswerHub community. It also contains a glimpse of the best practices when using the Moderation feature.

 

Information

• Moderation & Content Curation
• Moderation Menu & Queue
• Automated Features
• Suspension & Deactivation
• Moderation Best practices

A moderator is a technical expert who helps answer questions. However, a Moderator's primary role is to maintain the hygiene and culture of the community by guiding new members, facilitating conversations, and protecting the community from disruptive forces such as spammers.

External, public-facing communities typically require more moderation efforts to defend against spammers and manage users and content in accordance with the posted rules. Regarding spammers, please make sure you read the SPAM Prevention for Public Communities KB Article so you learn a couple of tips to filter spam in the aforementioned spaces.

Some common ways that moderation may be staffed/structured:

• Moderation is handled by the community manager (during the initial stages of community growth).
• Dedicated Moderators: less common except with very large and active external sites.
• SME / Moderators: Moderation led by support or technical SMEs.
• Community volunteers: Trusted customers who have participated for an extended time and earned trust. Often these will have some limitations to their permissions to protect PII and to set the scope to particular areas of the site.

 

Moderation & Content Curation

Moderators have additional features available to them through the normal community navigation features. Some of these include:

• From the user profile menu, moderators can directly suspend a user and delete all of their content. This is a useful capability when dealing with a user who is repeatedly posting irrelevant content or content in contravention of the rules: typically a spammer.
• From the gear menu on content:
  
  
  • Edit any piece of content: Useful to re-title content to be more useful / easily found in the community, clean up posted content to comply with the rules, and re-tag with different topics.
    
    
  • Delete: Remove Unwanted content
    
    
  • Send to moderation: Useful in cases where it is desirable for the content to be reviewed by other members of the moderation team, but you want to remove it from public view.
    
    
  • Report: This feature is intended for use by regular community users to flag content for moderator review. This provides a workflow for a reason to be selected and supporting comments to be added. This action will list the content on the reported tab of the moderation queue, but it remains in the community view.
    
    
  • Move: Used to move content from one space to another
    
    
  • Wikify: This option applies to question content and is a permission that may be granted to users to open up their questions to allow editing by others.
    
    
  • Export to PDF: This option exists exclusively for article-type content
    
    
  • Revision history: This can also be controlled by permission and could be reserved for moderators or extended to other groups. Allows the user to see prior versions of the content including time/date stamps for when revised, what the revisions were, and who revised.
    
    
  • Close: This prevents further answers from being provided to the question
    
    
  • Lock Comments: This prevents further comments on the question or upon answers
    
    
  • Re-direct: Allows another question to be selected and routes all traffic to that question. This is potentially helpful when a particular question has already had an extended discussion and has a correct answer.
    
    
  • Sticky / un-sticky: Pins questions to the top of a space
    
    
  • Site Sticky / Un-sticky: Pins questions to the top of the community on the home page / main feed.

 

Moderation Menu & Queue

From the user pull-down, the moderation link will be available to moderators. This takes them to the moderator workflow which has two tabs - moderation & reported.

• Moderation - content held until published back to the community or rejected (effectively deleted, but recoverable). Ask an expert allows moderators to try to arrange help for a member
• Reported - content remains visible, but was reported by the community. Moderators can clear the flag and allow it to remain or they can delete it.

 

Automated Features

AnswerHub includes several features that can aid moderation by keeping unwanted content out of the community. These features are appropriate for external/public use cases and are generally not required for private communities. Some community managers running private communities may still wish to make use of a shield plugin to guard against profanity or in some cases, keyword protection to catch discussions about secure projects or customers.

• Pre-moderation: Permissions may be set on individual spaces or across the community so that all posts from users go to moderation before publishing to public view. This may be configured to stop once a user reaches a minimal reputation level and this may be selectively applied to questions, answers, comments, articles, and ideas as the community manager wishes. This is generally not a common practice.
  
  
• Recaptcha plugin: This plugin requires a quick setup through Google's site to obtain and enter the public & private keys for your community. Once activated, there is a control panel that allows you to select where ReCaptcha intercept will intercept. Each of these may be selected and set to except based on a particular reputation point level
  • Registering a new user account
  • Posting a new question
  • Editing a previously submitted question
  • Answering
  • Commenting
    
    
• Bad Words plugin: The use of any words contained in the list of this plugin will send a user's post to moderation. No members are exempt. This plugin makes a great backstop for other features and is useful in blocking smut and hate speech.
  
  (THIS PLUGIN IS NOT CURRENTLY INCLUDED IN THE STANDARD MT BUILD)
  (This plugin is not currently included in the standard MT build)
  
  
• Shield Plugin- This plugin may be exempted based on reputation, so setting a low value such as 3 points can allow stringent settings for new members while relaxing criteria to allow established members more freedom:
  
  • Flood control - time delays to start posting after registering, and time to wait between posting questions
  • Unrecognizable character threshold - sets a % limit for unrecognizable characters in a user's post. Spammers often try to get around keywords by substituting numbers for letters. This can also be useful for blocking double-byte postings.
  • Phrase repetition limits - spammers often post the same phrase or link repeatedly in a post.
  • Keywords - prohibit a list of keywords often used in spam. Regex expressions can be entered to safeguard against posting phone numbers, credit card numbers, etc.
  • IP Blacklist - enter IP addresses to prevent multiple accounts from being created by the same person.
  • Note - there is a special permission called "spam moderator" which must be granted to moderators or super users who will need access to modify settings and keywords in the shield.
    
    
• Akismet plugin- This plugin requires client configuration with an API key that is obtained after the client sets up an account with Akismet. Once configured and enabled, this plugin actively screens posts by users who fall below the reputation threshold setting in the configuration and passes the meta information to Akismet which scores the post and determines whether or not the post is likely spam. If deemed spam, the post is sent to the new "spam" tab within the moderation queue.
  • Any spam that makes it to a space can be reported or sent to moderation, and from there, buttons to reject it as spam are present in the workflow. Rejecting as spam moves the content to the spam tab and communicates to Akismet so that it learns.
  • Conversely, any content on the spam tab can be marked as not spam, which will return it to use in the system and update Akismet.

 

Suspension & Deactivation

User accounts may be suspended or deactivated.

• Suspended users still count in the list of registered users on the site. When a user is suspended, the system prevents them from logging back in. However, this is an action that can be reversed.
  
  
• Deactivated users cannot sign in but do not count in the user license. Internal sites with set user limits may wish to deactivate users who leave the community to free up the user license. There is an option to hide content from deactivated users (generally not a common practice).

 

Moderation Best practices

A good (and important) practice is to create and publish a set of community guidelines. These set forth the vision and purpose of the community, establishing expectations for its users in a clear set of Do's and Don'ts. Moderators will use refer to these guidelines as they go about their activities.

• Post community guidelines and include a clear link to them on all community pages.
• Create a private space for the community manager to collaborate with the moderation team, provide policy guidance, and create an environment for the moderators to cross-train new members of the team.
• Create moderator guidelines and post them in the private space; these guidelines will serve as a training guide for new moderators and a reminder to all of the cultures you wish to create in your community.
• Encourage moderators to help identify community members who participate frequently, post technically helpful/valuable content, and exhibit good judgment and a positive attitude for inclusion in the community recognition program.