Moderation Best Practices

Develop a Community Usage Policy

Make the usage policy for content and discussions available and easy to find.

Here are some ideas for usage policy statements:

• Don't use profanity.
• Treat others with respect.
• Stay on topic.

Encourage Users to Report Abuse

You can design policies to ward off abusive or inappropriate posts. Early warning can make a big difference by preventing users from having a negative experience. Make the consequences clear for unacceptable behavior. Other community users are more likely to follow the guidelines when you enforce them quickly and publicly, for example, by removing or editing an offensive post. For more information about abuse reporting, see Setting Up Abuse Reporting.

Designate More than One Moderator Per Place

Relying on only one moderator can cause a bottleneck if that person becomes unavailable. Consider designating more than one moderator per place and more than one global moderator. Here's why:

• The moderation queue for a given place is visible only to its moderator(s). It is not visible to moderators of other places.
• Content set for moderation will remain unpublished (and invisible to the community) until it is approved by the moderator.
• Existing moderation requests cannot be routed to another moderation queue (for example, from a sub-space to the root space) after they're in the moderator's queue. They will remain in the queue until they're moderated (i.e., approved or rejected).
• Users added as new moderators in a place won't see existing moderation requests in that place's moderation queue, only moderation requests that are posted after they became a moderator.