The Moderation feature gives Super Admins and Community Admins an opportunity to review every new Discussion post and Library Entry before they're publicly available. This feature is often used in public communities (such as the Open Forum community in your Community Essentials site) to ensure that content is reviewed and approved prior to being made available for the community.

If your community is configured to moderate discussions and library entries, you'll want to stay on top of them so that content is available to your members in a timely manner. The best way to do this is in your community's Moderation Queue, where all moderated items are in one place.

NOTE: You can also manage every moderated item from every community across your site in the Admin interface. From there, navigate to Communities > Moderation > Queue. This is helpful in cases where a lot of moderated content is appearing from across your communities and you want a singular place to review it rather than checking each community's queue individually.

Access the Moderation Queue

1. On the community Home page, click Settings.
2. Under Moderation, click Moderation.

NOTE: The Settings button displays Moderation Alert when new items are in the queue and the Moderation option displays the number of items in moderation.

Manage the Moderation Queue

This Moderation Queue lists all of the community's user-created content that has been put into moderation by a community member. It includes details about each item, such as the author and title, the creation date, and reason for the moderation.

NOTE: These items won't be visible in the associated Discussion or Library until they're approved by an admin.

Filter & sort the list

• Click the All Types dropdown and choose a type. The list refreshes and displays just those content types.
• Click the Open Forum dropdown and choose a community. The list refreshes and displays the items in moderation for just that community.
• Click the All Reasons dropdown and choose a reason. The list refreshes and displays only those items that are in moderation for the chosen reason.
• Click the dropdown on the right to sort the list by date, title, or author.

TIP: Apply multiple filters for a more refined list.

Access your moderated content

• In the Author/Title column, click the content title to open the content page in a new tab.
• In the Community column, click the name of the community to access the message-thread page (discussions) where you can see a list of the community's messages or the folder-content page (library entries) where you can manage the community's folders and their contents.

Manage your moderated content

• In the Reason column, click view log to open a dialog that details the history of the moderated content. Click Close to return to the list page.

TIP: Refer to Set the Moderation type to learn how to access your moderation settings and see descriptions of the moderation types.

• In the Actions column, click Preview to open a dialog in which you can review the content and the reason for the moderation.
  • Click Approve to approve the content; it will immediately be public.
  • Click Reject to reject the content; it will be moved to the Rejected tab.
  • Click Close to take no action and close the dialog.
• In the Actions column, click Approve to approve the content; it will immediately be public.
• In the Actions column, click the down arrow and choose:
  • Edit to access the content's Edit Message page where you can change the content of the original messages and any replies. Click Save to preserve your changes.
  • Reject to reject the content. In the dialog, provide a reason and click to confirm the rejection; the content is moved to the Rejected tab.
  • View Moderation Log to open a dialog that details the history of the moderated content. Click Close to return to the list page.

Rejected content

This tab's layout and behavior mirror those of the Pending tab, with some expected differences in the column titles and content.

• In the Actions column, click:
  • Preview to view the content in an overlay dialog.
  • Approve to approve the content. In the confirmation dialog, click Approve - Release from Moderation to allow the moderated content to be visible in the community.

Set the Moderation type

You can set which level of moderation will be applied to your community's Discussion posts and Library entries.

To set moderation:

1. On the community Home page, click Settings.
2. Under Administration, click Settings.

3. On the Edit Community Settings page, click the Moderation Setting dropdown and select one of the options (detailed in the table below).

4. Click Save.

Moderation types

There are three moderation types in your community: