When establishing an online community a lot of people are really stuck when it comes to the area of moderation or monitoring activity on their communities. Typical questions I hear from clients include:
- How do we create a moderation policy?
- How much/ often should we moderate?
- What should we be moderating for?
- How much is moderation going to cost?
Here are some best practices that I have picked up from the creation of moderation programs:
- Moderation Policy – get started on this early on. If the community is for a large enterprise they may already have corporate policies around moderation. If not, you may find yourself creating the company moderation policy by default which can be time consuming and make you wish you had taken that law class after all. Overall, the moderation policy will be in place to enforce your Terms of Service and Community Standards. Determine what kinds of violations you will be monitoring for, how often and what the escalation paths are.
- Moderation Tools – If you are using a community software package you may have built-in moderation tools – or you may have to create these yourself. A major benefit of the tools will include filtering, the automation of responses and workflow as well as the documentation and reporting of activities and violations.
- What to Monitor/ Frequency – What you monitor will depend upon your community standards. In general, most communities monitor for Terms of Service violations (profanity, illegal activity, threats, etc) and Community Standards violations (off-topic postings, disruptive behavior). How often you monitor usually comes down to volume of posts. An experienced moderator can review about 200-300 posts in an hour. 24/7 moderation can be expensive – so most communities start with a “sweep” every few hours and expand as volume increases, there are filtering tools that flag suspicious posts plus they give the community themselves the ability to flag postings that might be inappropriate.
- The Cost of Moderation – moderation costs need to be forecasted early on and built into the ongoing cost of managing a community. Depending upon the level and frequency of moderation there are a few things you can do to keep costs in check.
§ Hire an experienced moderator early on to help you establish your moderation program – it will be worth every $ you spend.
§ Volunteers – use community volunteers to help you moderate the community
- Leverage the Moderator to seed the community. Experienced moderators know what kinds of topics and posts spur debate/ interest and can be invaluable in jump-starting discussion.
