Moderation

When should members be moderated?

Ideally Freegle groups should be set to moderate new members. Moderating new members ensures that you can:

• Weed out spammers and scammers.
• Nicely share a pointer or two about how or what to post.
• Tell members that there's a group closer to where they live if that is relevant.

Commonly members are taken off moderation and put on group settings:

• after they have posted an offer or request that follows your group rules.
• if they live in the catchment area (but only if you have any policies restricting out of area posts or cross-posting).

Taking members off moderation

On FD, you will see the option to change the status of the member when you approve their first post and each subsequent post. Just click on the

They can be set back to the option Messages posted by this member are moderated (or to group settings) as necessary as follows:

• Click on Members>Approved in the left hand modtools menu, then search for the member ID or email address.
• Click on the member's Group Settings button and click to Moderated.
• If needed, add a note to the change to say why the member has been returned to moderation via the Add Note button.

Unmoderated and Group Settings

Many new moderators find the difference between these two settings confusing at first, so don't worry if you not getting it and ask on Central if you need to.

When you edit a member's settings you are given 4 options (a screen shot would be great here if anyone who actually knows how fancies putting one in)

• Use current group message posting setting.

OR

Override your group posting setting.

• Messages posted by this member are not moderated.
• Messages posted by this member are moderated.
• This member can't post messages.

New members are moderated, they start out on Messages posted by this member are moderated. When taking them off moderation you are strongly advised to put them on Use current group message posting setting.

• In extreme cases you may need to place the whole membership on Full Moderation, (perhaps to remove a spammer or to allow an on list spat to die down).
• To do this, you can change group settings to Moderated and then all the people who are set to Current group settings will then all be moderated.
• When you are ready to take the whole group back off moderation you can change the group setting back to New members are moderated and all of the members on group settings will go back to being un-moderated.
• Whereas if you change members to Un-moderated instead of Uses current group settings, if you ever change group settings they will stay 'Un-moderated.

The Yahoo Glitch

If you need to put your group temporarily on moderation it's important to restore the group to New Member Moderation as quickly as possible. For some bizarre reason, known only to Yahoo each new member who joins during the phase of Full Moderation will, due to this Yahoo peculiarity, have slipped through the net and be 'unmoderated'(!) So if your group does need to be fully moderated for a time it would be prudent to pop all recently joined members back on moderation.

Moderation Extension reference/s:

Members Status = http://wiki.modplugin.org/index.php/Status

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