Moderation

When should members be moderated?

Ideally Freegle groups should be set to moderate new members. Moderating new members ensures that you can:

• Weed out spammers.
• Share a pointer or two about how to post, extravagant WANTEDs, etc.
• Tell members that there's a group closer to where they live.

Commonly members are taken off moderation and put on group settings:

• after they have posted a correctly formatted OFFER or two (including their location if it is policy to state this in your group).
• if they live in the catchment area (if you have any policies restricting out of area posts or cross-posting).

Taking members off moderation

If you use the plugin, you can do this with one click. See http://wiki.modplugin.org/index.php/Status.

Otherwise follow these instructions BEFORE approving the post as it's easier than trying to find them again after approving the message.

• Click on message, check it has all the correct features.
• Click on New messages posted by this member are moderated (Edit) (top right of pending message)
• In Message Posting Privileges, change to Use current group message posting setting (**Never** change to Messages posted by this member are not moderated)
• Click on the Save Changes button
• Finally click on Pending messages again and approve the message.

They can be set back to the option Messages posted by this member are moderated (or to group settings) as necessary as follows:

• Click on the Edit Membership icon under their name in the Members section
• In Membership privileges click on the Edit button beside their Posting messages setting
• Change to the required setting.
• Click on the Save Changes button.

Unmoderated and Group Settings

Many new moderators find the difference between these two settings confusing at first, so don't worry if you not getting it and ask on Central if you need to.

When you edit a member's settings you are given 4 options (a screen shot would be great here if anyone who actually knows how fancies putting one in)

• Use current group message posting setting.

OR

Override your group posting setting.

• Messages posted by this member are not moderated.
• Messages posted by this member are moderated.
• This member can't post messages.

New members are moderated, they start out on Messages posted by this member are moderated. When taking them off moderation you are strongly advised to put them on Use current group message posting setting.

• In extreme cases you may need to place the whole membership on Full Moderation, (perhaps to remove a spammer or to allow an on list spat to die down).
• To do this, you can change group settings to Moderated and then all the people who are set to Current group settings will then all be moderated.
• When you are ready to take the whole group back off moderation you can change the group setting back to New members are moderated and all of the members on group settings will go back to being un-moderated.
• Whereas if you change members to Un-moderated instead of Uses current group settings, if you ever change group settings they will stay 'Un-moderated.

The Yahoo Glitch

If you need to put your group temporarily on moderation it's important to restore the group to New Member Moderation as quickly as possible. For some bizaire reson, known only to Yahoo each new member who joins during the phase of Full Moderation will, due to this Yahoo peculiarity, have slipped through the net and be 'unmoderated'(!) So if your group does need to be fully moderated for a time it would be prudent to pop all recently joined members back on moderation.