Background
Moderators are the core of every online community. While it is pretty standard to have a single enthusiast that drives a community, sharing this makes the community more robust, sustainable, and equitable.
Here is a general guide to moderating a community on our platform (Discourse):
In our specific context (the eHealth Forum), we have category moderators and site moderators. They have three main roles: moderating, support, and governance.
Category Moderators
These people have oversight of a specific area (category) of the eHealth Forum. They have specific powers over that area, and provide support and governance to that area only.
Site Moderators
Site moderators have powers that apply to any area of the eHealth Forum that they have access to. They are also expected to support users across the Forum, and contribute to the governance of the eHealth Forum.
Communicating
Moderating is a dedicated private category for Moderators to discuss things. They also have Moderators for casual group chats, and can have semi-private Messages with other groups and individuals.
You can @mention moderators to get their attention, flag a post, send them a message.
Moderating
This means keeping an eye on the conversations that are occurring in the Forum, and ensuring that it remains a safe place where we can build constructive discussions together.
Moving stuff
It is quite common for people to post in a less than ideal place. This can be just one post, a run of posts and replies, or maybe the even the whole Topic. Or maybe it was tagged poorly.
Changing the Category or Tag
This is pretty easy for @moderators - simply edit the title of the Topic, and you can change the Category and Tags at the same time.
This can also be done in bulk from a list of Topics if need be.
Moving one or more posts
This guide covers it nicely:
Encouraging and facilitating the good stuff
Moderators look for opportunities to help others get quality responses to their posts.
This might mean shoulder tapping others (who might have missed it) via email or txt, encouraging a postive edit, making their link Onebox nicely, pin the post, etc, etc.
Stopping the bad stuff
It is fortunately rare to need to intervene when things go sour on the eHealth Forum, but it does happen. And it isn’t a comfortable thing to have to do. But it is also vitally important that it is done rapidly and sensitively.
Typical actions (in order of escalation):
- Send a message to the poster politely asking them to reign it in (and edit their post)
- Pull the post off the forum by converting it to a Personal Message and discuss it with the person there
- other moderators can be added to the PM as needed
- Delete the post +/- put restrictions on the poster
- these actions / decisions will be peer-reviewed
The other aspect is responding to Flags - users can flag a post and it will appear in every Moderator’s review queue. These get urgent attention.
Support
Simply helping those who need help, ideally in the dedicated Support category - however, people tend to send stuff to moderators that they know personally instead.
Where possible (and with consent), these interactions will be published to Support so that others can benefit too.
Governance
We do not currently have a formal governance structure on the eHealth Forum; instead, the moderators fulfil this informally, and governance decisions are shared with the whole or part of the online community and key stakeholders as appropriate.
If you see or feel strongly about any governance issue regarding the Forum, please raise it in #support or as a personal message to one or more @moderators.
Apply to be a Moderator
If the prospect of contributing to this wonderful volunteer driven community warms your heart, and you have the capacity to give of your time and skills, we would love to have you on the team.
New moderators are supported in the role with a supportive community of other moderators, mentoring, and regular review.
Click on this link to apply. Please treat this as a ‘covering letter’, and include either a link to your LinkedIn profile or your CV.