Moderating Leaves Chat
How To Moderate
While the decisions you make as a moderator can sometimes be hard, the actions you take are pretty easy, and are usually the same whether it’s comments, posts, or other issues. There are four steps to every mod action:
Read the post or comment and decide if it’s within the rules or needs to be removed.
If it’s okay, approve it.
If it’s not okay, remove it, and send a message to the user using a pre-formatted modmail.
Add a note indicating your mod action in Snoonotes.
Pretty simple! Let’s run through an example. Here’s a post that was removed and is sitting in the Mod Queue:
But what could be wrong with that? It seems positive and right for the group. If your ever unsure as to why something was removed or what the moderation history on a post is, just click “show recent actions” under the post:
Ah, it looks like AutoMod removed it for the word “acid,” which is meant to catch LSD references, but here it’s okay. So this one’s easy — just hit the “approve” button and you’re done.
How about this one?
Since we don’t allow videos or any outside links, this was definitely removed correctly. So let’s remove it by clicking the “remove” button.
When you click the “remove” button, Moderator Toolbox will give you a pop-up menu of pre-formatted mod messages that will automatically be sent to the user. We’ll talk about those in more detail on the next page.
They are roughly arranged by the rules, but there are other useful ones in there too in case you need them. Pick the right one, in this case the notice about outside media, and press “Send” at the bottom of the page:
When you press “Send” the post is removed and the user is sent the message you chose via direct message.
Don’t forget the last part! You need to enter a note to keep a log for other mods.
The highlighted parts of the mod message title below are suggested tags for the mod message, and you’ll see those on every mod message. The “W:” is an Action and stands for “Warned,” and the second part is a Tag for the action taken.
Click on the SnooNotes box and you’ll get a pop-up notes form:
Enter the recommended Action and the Tag, select “None” below (it’s a Snoonotes thing) and “Submit.”
That’s it! You removed your first post!
Please try to be consistent about entering the recommended Action and Tag. We use these to keep a log of our mod actions and they’re read by both humans and machines.
If you feel like there should be more information in the note, just enter it after the tag, like:
“W:Media — This is his own YT channel and he’s posting this a lot. Maybe a spammer?”
The good news is that this is the process for everything. Comments, posts, Mod Queue, comment stream, whatever. Evaluate the post, remove it, choose a mod message, and enter a note.
So you just learned the way we enforce the rules, let’s take a look at the rules...