Forum moderation — that is, keeping a forum posting in queue until a moderator approves (or rejects) it for publication — is sought by organizations that feel urgency to prevent erroneous, inappropriate, or damaging content from being distributed under their name, so much so that removing such postings and posters after the fact is not good enough. Such organizations are often
■ new to social media and reluctant to host forums at all
■ in health care, for which misinformation incurs liability
■ involved in industry arbitration, where disgruntled individuals seek to hijack channels for their own ends
Best practices: Controlling forum postings
Whenever possible, decide against controlling forum postings on the front end. Enabling this approval workflow creates extra work for forum moderators, and forum members experience frustrating delays in seeing their postings broadcast and in getting input or help they may be seeking.
Are you without any control, then? Not at all.
■ Be sure to post forum use policies that make clear your rules for content and behavior as well as the consequences for violation (such as two warnings and then permanent removal from the community).
■ Direct your moderators to post warnings, delete inappropriate postings, and have offenders removed from the community, according to your policies. This goes far to covering your accountability.
To enable forum moderation
If your organization cannot allow any inappropriate forum postings ever getting through to members and subscribers, even temporarily, you can enable moderation on your forums. This moderation prevents postings from appearing until a forum moderator approves it.
Note: Forum moderation is community-wide: either all forums are moderated, or none are.
1. Log on as an administrator.
2. From the Community List, click edit for the community whose forums need moderation.
3. Scroll to the bottom and enable Community forums are moderated.
4. Select Save.
5. Open the community and go to Security.
6. Open the Community Moderators tab and add members to the moderation role, to help manage the additional work of forum post pre-screening.