Serving as a moderator helps to distribute the load of monitoring the activity of your community's forums and wikis. Moderators have privileges beyond those of regular community subscribers, including the ability to see who is subscribed to a specific forum.
To verify your moderator status
1. Log into the site, select Communities, and open your community.
2. On the community Home page, locate the Community Roster and look for your name.
3. If you do not appear as a Moderator or Administrator, have an administrator change your community role (under Security) so that you can proceed.
To view forum subscribers
Moderators can see which members are subscribing to a given forum. Seeing this list of participants allows moderators to evaluate the constituency (are these our experienced members or our newer ones? are any experts subscribed and contributing to the discussion?) and the success of the forum (should I take action to get other members subscribed?). Monitoring forum subscriptions helps you understand which topics are of most interest to members and where changes might be needed.
1. Open the forum you're interested in by clicking on its title.
2. Locate the Subscribers box under the Recent Posts (usually at right).
3. Seeing the subscribers to a forum in real time gives you valuable management information, but you can do more with those subscriber lists. Use the export commands (Word, Excel, Acrobat PDF, CSV data) as needed to capture the subscriber information for other uses:
□ Snapshot the subscriber information over time, for activity analysis by community administrators
□ Timestamp the export files, for easy management and future reference
□ Share your archives of subscriber data, to help you hand off duties to the new volunteer forum moderator
□ Export the subscriber data for quick mail merges, badge printing, or other service tasks by Public users
To approve forum postings
Being a moderator for a moderated forum goes beyond deleting inappropriate content that gets posted: you are a gatekeeper that approves (or rejects) forum posts before they ever show up on the forum.
1. Study the content standards and the action policies of your community, which should specify what content should not be allowed to post and what to do about it.
Tip: Policies are critical; fights over moderation can poison discussion forums. If these policies aren't published on the community for the members to follow, insist that your community administrators do so, to avoid future conflicts.
2. Subscribe to every forum so that you get email notifications about new content publications.
3. When you get an email that a posting was published, click through the link in the email, log on, and view the forum.
4. Since new postings can trigger quick responses, scan for new replies in the forums.
5. When you find a posting needing approval, open it and scan the body of the posting for inappropriate content (according to your community's policies).
6. Select either approve or decline as appropriate.
7. While you're logged in, open any additional forums you moderate.
Tip: Select Home at left, and scan the summary view of the forums for topics that are ...awaiting approval, and tend to those.