M2 FOR COMMUNITIES: MODERATION MANDATES!
Community Assemble is a bi-weekly newsletter about creating and growing communities that add value to both customers and brands the right way. We feature tweets, quotes, blogs, and ideas from our experts and various community leaders across the globe.
When we think about community and community health for a successful community, how can we create a strategy that helps us tackle community health?
One thing that came to my mind when I think community health is a good moderation strategy!
What this actually means in a community is that yes of course you can have optimal community health, but to achieve that, first you need to understand your community well and create a good moderation plan that is expected from your users.
Community Moderation is the practice of managing comments and discussions from members/users on your platform so it aligns with your Terms and Conditions and Code of Conduct, usually done by a community moderator or team of moderators.
Good Moderation controls for any community is super important to maintain a positive atmosphere in the community and ensure your members feel safe and comfortable to express themselves.
Typically, the kind of moderation controls you will need for any community are:
Filter out inappropriate content that makes any user uncomfortable.
Resolve issues and conflicts between members.
Observe and resolve inappropriate behaviour by members.
Maintaining moderation transparency and clear communication with members to promote a healthy community.
Enabling members to become moderators within the community.
Maintaining a community that motivates users to engage in open but appropriate conversation is crucial. We live in a world that respects privacy and safety on all levels. Community platforms like Glynk, tribe and influitive highly focus on providing great moderation controls for the community to create a safe space for members in a community.
If you want to check out the moderation controls that glynk offers to its users.
Click here.
What are the moderation mandates you need to follow in a community?
1) The first mandate is to establish ground rules for member participation by having a set of community guidelines to be followed along with a well-structured code of conduct that is so clear that members themselves can become moderators.
2) Moderators can make or break an online community! So, it is important to build a moderation handbook or a document to ensure that your moderators stay consistent in their roles. Usually, moderators tend to drop their motivation due to the constant pressure of having to morally police the community. Ensure that you have regular weekly meetings with them to keep track of their duties, motivate them and have updates about the health of the community.
3) If you are building a new community, even before you get into planning a moderation strategy understand the community. Get to know what the user expectations are. Experiment with them using real-life examples. Understand their backgrounds. This may seem like a super huge task initially, but the results are worth it. You can never be a great moderator if you do not know how your community wants you to interact with them.
4) You always need to follow the four-step NMRA rule as a moderator!
1st step: You NOTIFY the member that the content posted by them is inappropriate and for that reason, it is sent to the admin/moderator for further action.
2nd step: As a moderator, You MODERATE the content that has been reported as spam or send it to the admin to take a further call on the reported content, while making sure the user knows that their post is under scrutiny.
3rd step: You REMOVE content that is deemed inappropriate for the community, and you notify the user that the post or content generated by the user has been hidden from the community.
4th step: You can also APPROVE the post after the moderator chooses to edit the content and make it suitable for the community. The member can be notified of the respective changes that have been made and can be published as a post in the community.
It is interesting how overdoing or underdoing it adversely affects the health of a community. Moderators need to be aware of the control they exercise as it seems to be a very fine line between letting communities go wild and providing a safe space for the members of a community.
SNIPPETS OF THE WEEK:
“I tell people how you respond to a question in a community is the important thing, not deleting it, not moderating it, but responding to that. I try not, as best as possible, to delete anything, but I am not saying that there are no reasons to delete certain content, but this should be a rare case.”
- Chris Detzel
“Through studying where communities have gone wrong - we can work towards building a better web for everyone! By keeping a few key principles in mind namely trust, moderation transparency and honesty. You too can keep your community from going wild! ”
-Erin Staples
COMMUNITY OF THE WEEK:
The super cool Grindr community is the world’s largest dating and social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people. The Grindr community is focused on creating inclusive and forward-thinking moderation policies that honour the full expression of users’ gender identity. They strongly believe that having inclusive policies is necessary for all businesses – not just those that focus on LGBTQ+ people – so that all users can feel supported, included, and welcome.
We love such moderation policies that respect every user’s voice. Let us know in your comments below if you found any community with such awesome moderation policies.
If you found this interesting, then you can read this article where their policies are explained in detail: Grindr Moderation Policy.
Top 5 articles we found super useful for a great moderation strategy:
“How to Moderate an Online Community. A-List of Skills, Tips, and Tricks”
written by Corina Stirbu is an article that speaks about her experience in the community space and a few tips to keep a clean, respectful, and insightful community engaged.
“How simple moderation rules can create worse communities!” written by
Carter Gibson speaks about how simplicity can be an enemy in welcoming communities and having more specific defined guidelines is a must.“Moderating tips you should know!” written by Alexandra Bowen gives insightful tips to moderators who are new on their journey.
“What we can learn from communities gone wild” written by Rosie Sherry is a delightful read about how communities go wild without moderation transparency and what is needed to prevent communities from going wrong.
“Important online community moderation tips and tricks” written by Chris Detzel speaks about the methods a moderator should follow and how micro analysing user-generated content can be wrong for a community. He also shares great tips to work around it.
Do you have any tips/ suggestions about a good moderation strategy that you’d want me to add here? You can reach out to me via mail, Twitter or shoot me a question in the comments below.
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