Thank you!

Let’s begin with the most important part — thank you for making the decision to contribute your time to the Leaves community. We are only as good as the services we can offer, and it’s volunteers like you that make those services possible.

About This Document

If you’re reading this guide then you’re new to moderation for Leaves, so the things you read here will give you the first skills you need to handle much of the day-to-day work — mostly modding posts and comments.

But there’s more that makes this place run, so as you get more experience we’ll introduce you to new tasks and methods we use to handle the comment stream, moderator mail interactions, and more.

You may not be new to moderation in general, and if you’re a moderator on other subs then you’ll recognize a lot of what we talk about here, but we have a few extra steps in how we handle things and the notes we take that makes modding a little more involved process than other places. Fortunately, we’re not a particularly high volume sub so you can afford to take your time with each to get it right.

Our Moderation Philosophy

Our moderation goal across all of Leaves is consistency — no matter who is doing the modding, any contact with our members should be in a similar voice that reflects predictable values, rules, and results.

What that means is that we work hard to script and template our communications, both to make it easier on ourselves (cutting and pasting is easier than writing everything from scratch) and to try as hard as we can to ensure that each mod contact has a similar tone.

So while you’re welcome to participate in any way you like elsewhere, when you are in a moderation role try to be consistent and fair. Any action taken under the Moderator banner speaks for Leaves and is taken differently by visitors, so it’s best handled with care. Don’t worry though, you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Ready? Let’s start by getting the tools you need…

Getting the Tools >