Moderating Your Community

How to use moderation to create a happy, healthy community culture

Howdy partner! We’re looking to take your community to the next level with a little magic we call moderation. You may have heard about moderation before, but before we get started, let’s break down some misconceptions about what it means to moderate.

Moderation is important

Making your community relevant, welcoming, and engaging is important for the health and overall happiness of your community. Without moderation, communities can fall apart, lose their vision, and leave members feeling vulnerable to misbehaving members.

Moderation isn’t mean

Moderation is the best way to keep content aligned with the interests of the community. If someone is posting content that does not relate to the topic of the community, your members will appreciate you taking the time to make the community better.

Moderation isn’t hard

Moderation is a quick and easy action to do when the community vision is clear and you have responses ready to go. We will go over how to clearly define your community vision, as well as how to create friendly and helpful responses for jots and members not following your community guidelines.

Ready to get started? Here’s a simple process you can use to moderate your hello community.

Review your community content often

It’s a common practice for community creators to review jots that have been shared to their community. Take a few moments (when you have the time) and make sure that content is relevant, appropriate, and friendly.

Think of your community goals/vision

It’s good practice to include a brief description of your vision, goals, and rules in the community profile description section. This makes your job easier and prevents users from behaving against community standards.

Make your title easy to understand (if it’s not, reach out to feedback@hello.com and we will take care of you), let members know what the community is about, tell members the type of content to share, and give a short response for what is not allowed — if you have the space to do so.

Warn and remove jots

While reviewing jots in your community, you may stumble across jots that may not be relevant, appropriate, or friendly. If this happens, it’s important to take action with the jot so that the community member can learn.

The best way to handle the situation? Start by leaving a comment on the jot, letting them know that the jot is either spam, off topic, not appropriate (sexual/mature content), or harassing/offending members of the community.

Here are some examples you can use:

Spam: “Hi Kathy! We appreciate your enthusiasm for the XYZ community; however, due to lack of context and relevancy of your jot, we have removed your jot. We welcome you to share again, but keep in mind that this community is for sharing jots that relate to TOPIC 1 (and TOPIC 2). Thank you for understanding!”

Off-topic: “Hi James! Thank you for contributing to the XYZ community. Unfortunately your jot doesn’t align with our community vision/topic. We suggest sharing TOPIC 1 (and TOPIC 2) to our group to avoid having your jot removed. Thank you!”

Inappropriate/Mature: “Hi Carla, While we appreciate members sharing to the XYZ community, we do not tolerate jots of mature or sexual content. Your jot has been removed from the community for not fitting our guidelines. Thank you for understanding”.

Harassment: “Hi Steven, We appreciate you taking the time to share a jot to our XYZ community; however, many members feel that this jot does not contribute to the positive culture of our group. We unfortunately are removing the jot from the community and we encourage you to remember that we do not tolerate negativity towards members or the group. We welcome you to share again and remind you to stay friendly and positive :) Thank you for understanding.”

*Before posting your comment, save your response! You’ll thank us later*

Leaving a comment improves your chances that the member won’t post another bad jot in the near future. Once you have done this, feel free to tap the triple dots (located underneath the jot) and select remove. This will not delete the jot, it will simply remove the jot from your community.

Save your moderation responses in a notes app

Buy yourself some time by saving responses you leave on jots you moderate. Saving your responses will make your moderation efforts much easier and will also allow you the chance to improve your message over time. You can improve your message simply by making the tone more friendly and/or including a set of rules that members can easily understand and follow.

Still have questions for us? Maybe some feedback or suggestions for the app? Shake your phone to get in touch with us, or email feedback@hello.com!