Situations and Resources

We’ve given you a lot to consider in this document, but as we said in the “How to Moderate” section you’ll be taking many of the same actions repeatedly despite the situation. The hard part won’t be the procedure, but actually deciding what the right action is to take.

It would be great if every post or comment were cleanly covered by a rule so there is never any doubt, but nearly every post or comment finds its way into some kind of gray area, and some will really stump you.

When that moment comes, and it will, here are some resources you can use to get things sorted out.

r/leavesmods

When you were added as a mod you were also added as an approved submitter on r/leavesmods. It’s a subreddit we recently added so the Leaves mods would have a place to compare notes and ask questions. Subduction will monitor it every day and you should too, both to get help and help others.

The Report Button

Reddit flags reports that come from mods, so if you report someone or something we’ll know it came from you. Feel free to put anything in a report, and also ask higher level mods to take actions that you can’t take yet. Some things higher-level mods can do:

• Worried that a particular post might get controversial or off-topic comments? You can ask for every comment in that post to be automatically filtered for mod review.

• Concerned that a user might cause trouble in the future? We can send all their posts and comments in for mod review before posting.

• And if a user is causing trouble now or not acting in good faith you can ask us to review their history and consider a ban. Bans are rare on Leaves, fortunately, but they are critical if someone doesn’t have the best interest of the group at heart..

Feel free to ask for any of these action in a report or on r/leaves mods and we’ll follow up.

And finally, your ultimate safety rule:

If in Doubt, Take it Out.

As you already learned, when you press the remove button your list of removal reasons will pop up with messages to be sent to the user. You’ll notice, however, that one of your options at the bottom of the page is “No Reason”

If you click “No Reason” then the post or comment will be taken down, but nothing will be sent to the user.

If you’re not sure if something should stay up, then just take it down with “No Reason” and ask for a second opinion from your other mods. You’re backed up by a team here, take advantage! If you take down a post we can always put it back up, but if you leave a post up that turns out to be a problem then those problems tend to multiply in no time.

Okay, that’s it, you are now as official a mod as you can be just by reading about it! Now’s the time to jump into the moderation or unmoderated posts queues and take some action!

Have fun, and thank you again for contributing to Leaves!

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