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 the 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. When you enforce usage guidelines quickly and publicly, for example, by removing or editing an offensive post, other community users are more likely to follow the guidelines. 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 (space, sub-space, social groups, blogs, and so on). 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• Content set for moderation will remain unpublished (and invisible to the community) until it is approved by the moderator.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 moderators in a given context won't see existing moderation requests in that place's moderation queue, only new moderation requests.

Be Aware that Private Content Cannot Be Moderated

Private content includes content created in private groups, secret groups, private discussions, and Your Documents that have visibility limited to the author or specific users.