101 Managing your Community as a Moderator

By being a member of our default Moderators group, users cannot alter content they are not the original author of. Keep in mind that you can lessen these new capabilities, or enhance them, through the use of our permissions. In addition, you can also force new content to first pass through moderation before appearing within the community.

Four Main Ways Content will Make its Way to the Moderation Queue

1. Intentional Permissions: By revoking the publish x permission(s), all content submitted automatically, routes to the moderation queue, and awaits approval before publishing and made visible to your user base.
2. Shield Plugin: This plugin contains a set of filters that, when triggered, will automatically send content it believes to be spam-based, directly to moderation.
3. SPAM Words Filter: This is part of the shield plugin and will send any content users are attempting to post that contains one of the pre-defined "bad words" to moderation.
4. Manual: If a post is no longer relevant, but you could revive it with a few key changes, sending a published piece of content back to moderation allows your team to remove it from your standard users, while you take the time to make the appropriate changes before re-publishing.

Community UI Relevant to Standard Users in the Moderators Group

1. Moderation Option in the User Avatar Drop-Down Menu:

• Moderation Tab: Content awaiting moderation is not visible to standard users.

  • There are three options: reject, publish, and ask an expert.
  • You can filter the content by space if your team has assigned moderators to be responsible for the various areas within your community, rather than the community as a whole. If a post needs an edit before publishing, click on it to view the post and then click the gear icon to view the edit option.
  • All posts in moderation will have a permanent notification at the top, so you can tell whether it is in moderation. The system also temporarily removes the ability to provide an answer.

• Reported Tab: Reported content is still visible to standard users.

  • There are two options: cancel report or delete the post.
  • Posts can accumulate more than one report. It shows the user, date, time, and reason for the report.

  2. QA gear icon: Now displays a handful of additional options. The common aspect of these options is that as a moderator, you now can edit content you're not the author of. Clicking the gear icon offers the following options:

• Edit: You can edit all available fields, including, version, title, body, space, and topics.

  • Version: This allows you to roll back (or forward) to a past version of the post and save.

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This is especially handy if a user makes unwanted changes to a post. Instead of having to re-edit, you can simply revert to the desired version.

• See Revisions: This view displays the history of the post, the various contributors, and the changes that have been made over time.
• Redirect: This is our version of merging content. When you redirect a post, it allows a copy to remain in the original space the user posted it to. This allows any users that have been referring to it, to still search/find it. Once clicked, the post is only visible for a few seconds, and then you'll get redirected to the better post that you previously manually redirected it to.
• Close: This removes the ability to provide an answer. If there is already an answer, it will remain visible, but users cannot add additional answers.
  • Users can provide a reason for closing the question. This permanently displays at the top of the post to all standard users for long-term reference.

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You can choose to exclude closed questions from your unanswered queue by enabling an admin configuration here (/admin/content/settings.html) Admin > Content > Node Structure > General Settings, select Exclude 'closed' items from unanswered lists.

• Report: This acts as a flagging mechanism to bring attention to a post. Users can provide a reason for reporting content. Once reported, a message will appear to the user letting them know it was successfully reported. Once they navigate away from the page, the message will disappear. Reported posts do not show any signs of a report to standard users long-term.
• Delete: Once a post is deleted, this option in the gear icon drop-down will change to an Undelete option.
  • When a post is deleted, community admins and moderators can still view it, but it will have a red border around it to make spotting deleted content immediately obvious to these higher-level users.
• Wikify: You can only wikify Questions and Answers. This allows any user, regardless of their permissions, to edit a post they were not the original author of. If you wikify a question, a Wiki label will appear next to the question in all list views. This allows users to easily see which questions have a wikify associated with it before even clicking on it. Wikifying an answer, receives the same wiki label next to it as a question. This provides users to help in the following ways:
  • Questions: If a user is unfamiliar with the topic they're asking a question about, their post may be confusing, misleading, or generally lacking in various ways. By wikifying the question, other users, who are knowledgeable in the topic at hand, can make changes to the question so the original asker can receive the best answer.
  • Answers: If a question has multiple parts to it, for example, A, B, and C, some users may have an answer to one part, but not all. This allows that user to share their knowledge around a part of the question, wikify it, and for other users who have the remaining answers, to update the answer with the missing pieces. The original asker then has one full, clean answer to accept.
• Send to moderation: If the standard users have deemed published content unfit for viewing, you can send it back to moderation.
• Move: This is straight-forward. If the user publishes the post to the wrong space/sub-space, this option provides you with the ability to select a different space/sub-space to move the post to.
• Lock Comments: This prevents users from adding any additional comments. Keep in mind that some content types, like questions, also allows comments on other areas within the post aside from the main node, such as answers. Be sure to lock comments on all parts to create a read-only post.

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To transform a question and answer into a read-only post you must lock the comment and close the question. This prevents additional answers, so the only method of collaboration left is your community support style of either thumbs-up or up/down voting.

• Sticky:
  • Make Sticky: Only pins the post to the top of the space it lives in. If you use this in a sub-space, the post will also pin to the top of all parent containers, but will stop there.
  • Make Site Sticky: This pins a post to the top of the newsfeed on the home/index page and its respective list view based on content type. For example, if you make a Question site sticky, it also appears at the top of the questions list (/questions/index.html). You can access this by navigating to the Explore icon.

3. User’s Profile:

• Suspend: This is a temporary disciplinary action. Suspended users cannot access the community, but their published content will remain visible to the rest of your standard users.
• Delete all users’ posts: This is a nice, quick, and easy way to immediately delete all posts from a specific user.

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If you realize a user is responsible for an influx of spam, immediately suspend and delete all posts. This prevents them from creating new posts and removes all unwanted content with a few clicks.

Admin Console UI Relevant to Moderators

CONTENT

Manage Menu

• All Content (more options): Here you can apply several filters that aren't available to standard users to zero in on specific content. Typically, you use this area to find specific content to apply bulk changes, such as moving, deleting, publishing.
  • New filter: If you use the same set of filters regularly, make your life easier by saving a new custom filter. When saved, this will appear as a quick-link in your left-hand sidebar. If, over time, users don't use this filter often, you can delete it by clicking on it, selecting more options, and you'll see the delete filter option.
• Content in Moderation: (same list of content shown in the front-end)
• Reported Content: (same list of content shown in the front-end)
• Manage Topics:
  • Merge: If you find yourself with junk topics or duplicate topics, like sale, sales, sales department, you can select merge, find those topics, select a main, and merge. In this example, if I selected "Sale" as my main topic, the other topics will be on any existing posts with be replace with the topic "Sale".
  • Parent/child: The parent/child relationship of topics is an organizational tool used by admins. Communities that do not allow their users to create their own topics use this feature more often. By maintaining control of the topics within your community, you can leverage the ability to implement a hierarchy. This allows admins to see a clearer view of what categories (parent topics), and the topics within them, users have offered to them. A parent topic appears and functions the same way as a child topic within the community. Your end-users will not know any existing parent/child topic relationships.
    • There are however, two settings that can be found on this page (/admin/settings/site.topic.html) in the admin that can whether or not the parent/child topic relation is taken into account in search results and when viewing the topic specific landing page.
      • Expand Topics In Queries:
        • Enabled: When you click on a topic, it will bring you to a topic specific landing page that shows content that has that topic and/or content tagged with a pre-defined child topic of it.
        • Disabled: You'll only see content that a user has tagged with that exact topic regardless of an existing parent/child relationship.
      • Show Sub-Topics In Topics Page:
        • Enabled: When viewing the All Topics list, all parent and child topics displays.
        • Disabled: When viewing the All Topics lists, only parent topics displays.

USERS & GROUPS

General Settings

• Hide content from deactivated users: If enabled, this will immediately hide all content within the community created by deactivated users.

Manage users

• Suspend: This prevents users from accessing the community. Use this as a temporary form of punishment.
• Deactivate: This is our version of deleting a user. If a user is deactivated, their account is considered irrelevant, meaning that if you have a private community with a license based on user seats, deactivating a user will discount them from your licensed users providing you with a new user seat.
  • Deactivating also prevents a user from accessing the community.

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There is an admin setting (shown above, under General Settings) that allows your team to hide content from deactivated users. Public communities typically use this setting, since internal communities may see some customer/employee turnover. This results in a deactivation, but that does not make their past contributions less valuable.

Additional Tips & Tricks

• Analytics: Often, the members of your team who are acting as your community moderators are also interested and/or tasked with gathering analytics. We hold the Analytics and Advanced Analytics within the admin area of your AnswerHub community. While we don't recommend opening up admin access to all your Moderators, you can grant the View Analytics permission to the Moderators group to provide them with access to this specific area.

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If you decide to open this up, be sure to provide your Moderators with the direct link to the Analytics tab in the admin (/admin/analytics/index.html). Without the link, they won't be able to reach the admin area from their personal drop-down. Moderators only have access to this one specific area, not the majority of the admin.

Spam

• reCAPTCHA Plugin: The main goal of this plugin is to prevent spam. Once you enable this plugin, a few configurations become available (Admin > Site > reCAPTCHA config - /admin/recaptcha/config.html), so you can determine when and who gets forced to use reCAPTCHA.

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Allow your existing trusted users to automatically skip reCAPTCHA in two ways:

• In the reCAPTCHA configurations, change the Show recaptcha for logged in users? to skip if reputation is higher than X, and define a threshold.
• Once you enable this plugin, a new permission, Skip reCAPTCHA is available. Grant this to trusted user groups, like the default Moderators group or a custom group of employees, so they don't have to go through the validation process to prove they're not a robot.

• Shield Plugin: The main goal of this plugin is to prevent users from publishing spam to your community. There are various configurations you can tweak to tailor this plugin to your community for better results. Find these configurations by going to Admin > Content and clicking on the Spam Protection Configuration link.
  • Bad words filter: Content that users post with any of the words in this list are immediately sent to moderation for approval before publishing to the community for all standard users to view. Included in the Spam Protection Plugin.

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To reach the configurations available with our Shield Plugin, you must have the Spam Moderator role granted to your user. If you don't, you'll receive an access denied message if you attempt to navigate to the configuration settings.