What is community moderation? The Complete Guide

moderate your online community

How does community moderation work? What are its benefits and drawbacks? How should moderators behave?

Community moderation is a form of social media management, where members of the public moderate each other’s comments or posts. Community moderation is to allow everyone to participate without being censored or banned from posting. Moderators usually review comments and remove inappropriate ones.

What is community moderation?

Community moderation refers to the practice of moderating comments posted on social media platforms such as Face. This usually involves removing spammy links, profanity, personal attacks, hate speech, and other inappropriate content from their feeds.

Community moderators often rely on third-party services to filter out harmful comments. These include services such as BuddyPress Moderation Pro and BuddyPress Moderation.

These individuals aren’t paid employees, but rather volunteers who donate their time and energy to moderate content on behalf of these companies.

Companies pay these moderators to remove objectionable content that violates their terms of service.

Communities, where this form of moderation takes place, tend to attract a highly engaged user base. Hence, they can share content at high volumes and generate higher revenues.

What role does a community moderator play?

Community moderators play the most important role in an online community. Moderators are the ones who enforce guidelines for the members of your community. They read threads and discuss to make sure that they adhere to the community’s standards.

When rules are not followed Moderators of the community must decide to take action. It could range from removing posts to banning members. A clear set of actions in moderation guidelines will ensure that the rules are consistent.

Moderators also have the power over who can join an online community. In this situation, they must examine applications to determine who can join.

6 ways to ensure a successful community moderation

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1. Be sure to present the rules in the front

Make sure individuals can access your code of conduct after you’ve written it. If members don’t understand the rules, they can’t obey them.

Before joining, new members should be encouraged to read the rules. Make sure to send new sign-ups to a page that provides your rules and ask them to indicate their agreement with the rules in your community application form.

You could also automatically send everyone who registers a welcome email that includes community rules.

Make it simple for current members to view your rules. This usually entails making a post in your “About” or “General Announcements” area. This makes sure that everyone in your neighborhood may access the rules whenever they’re needed.

2. Make sure to state the rules and enforce them continuously

An important component of community moderating is outlining the repercussions. It demonstrates to members what will occur if they breach the rules.

The fact that these procedures are written down helps moderators as well since it guarantees that they are able to handle various issues promptly and effectively.

Written rules also aid in consistency, which is essential for effective moderation. People in the community want to believe that the laws are being administered fairly to all.

3. Don’t just give out orders, lead from the forefront

Administrators and moderators in the community should constantly set an example. They must establish the norms for acceptable behavior in your neighborhood.

This entails urging moderators to stay out of heated debates and conflicts. You might also need to remind them not to stop talks that don’t violate community guidelines.

This need to apply to more laws as well. If your community has a stringent no self-promotion policy, blogging about your business’s most recent deal could look unfair.

4. Be all ears

It’s critical to hear what your neighborhood has to say when issues emerge. This does not imply that you alter your policies in response to criticism. However, you may consider altering the guidelines if lots of others experience the same problems.

It may often just be a matter of modifying the rules to better suit community demands.

Here are a few modifications that community moderators have made in response to complaints in the community:

In one group, excessive self-promotion was a problem. Instead of openly prohibiting self-promotion, the community established a route for linking to other websites.

5. Moderate right from the start

It may be tempting to believe you don’t need to actively regulate the community if it’s new or has few members.

But that’s not the case, regrettably. A positive community culture established early on will inspire all new members to carry on this custom.

On the other hand, inexperienced newcomers who join a group might quickly fall into these undesirable habits. It’s also hard to alter a poisonous culture once it exists in a community.

6. Organize proper entrance tests

If your community forum is quite open, you can get a lot of requests from potential new members. This is encouraging since it shows that the community is prospering. However, it can also provide a serious moderating difficulty, particularly if the expanded user base includes trolls.

There are actions you may do to lessen the likelihood that new members will cause trouble.

A few of these are:

Request that each new member completes a brief questionnaire outlining their background and motivations for joining the group.

Request connections to their LinkedIn or other social media profiles from them. You may use this to confirm their identity and weed out possible spammers.

Community Moderation – Final Thoughts

You’ll find that there are many different ways to moderate a community. Some communities are very strict with their rules while others allow almost anything.

However, the key is to always remember that moderation is a two-way street. You’re responsible for setting the tone of the community and making sure everyone follows the rules.

At the same time, you must listen to the needs of the community and respond accordingly. That is the role of community moderator. Thank you for reading the article!


Interesting Reads:

Importance of Moderators in an Online Community

How to grow an online community

The Community Moderation Handbook 101

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