How do you set up a effictive moderation proces?

Good question indeed!



Insided should be able to help with an e-course, some how to's and maybe some one on one tips. In fact, in this topic @Julian answers pretty much the same question you have. All roads lead to Rome, but our workflow seems to work OK 🙂 Here's an overview:

The basics

In order to know which topics need an action, you can use advanced filters and labelling. To know if an action is needed, you can filter by 'status'. Status 'new post' means that a user has started a topic or replied to a topic which a moderator hasn't seen yet. If a moderator has viewed the topic, it will show up in another filter you can create that doesn't filter on 'status' or filters on the status 'viewed by moderator'. If you accidentally click on a topic that should remain its 'new' status, you can click on the button "More options" in the top right corner of a topic page and click on "Mark as unread".

Our workflow

• Every moderator has their own and their colleagues advanced filters for 1) all their topics and 2) all their new replies. Normally, a moderator has ownership over their topics from beginning to end, apart from a few exceptions like long holidays.
  
• We've made a mock moderator account called "ex moderator" to be able to batch reassign topics to this moderator when someone leaves the team (see filter 'New posts').
  
• We've also made a mock moderator account called 'collection topics', which we assign topics to if they get a lot of replies that all need to be handled individually. Each member of the moderation team reviews these topics in shifts.
  
• No need for every moderator to make these filters individually: you can share filters as a URL (in fact, as an export of bookmarks) and add tags like "&sort=lastpost.desc&size=10" to make sure the lists are as long as you'd like them to be and already sorted the way they should be sorted.
  

Some of our other filters:

New posts

- Moderator not equal to: all moderators except "ex moderator" (for moderators new replies filters, you simply specify their username)

- Status new post

- Sort from oldest to newest publish date (tip: make sure users don't cut in line)



Unanswered questions

- Publish date after [date you're starting this filter]

- Questions "yes"

- Answered "no"

- Sort from oldest to newest publish date



0 replies

- Publish date after [date you're starting this filter]

- Comments less than 1

- Status viewed by moderator



It's quite common to have a few subforums that are restricted to most users, so you would filter these out as well. We also use some labelling and have filters for all these labels.



Making and sharing advanced filters like this is pretty tricky and requires some practice. And even if you have these filters, they only provide you with one perspective per filter. It's important for moderators to look at the forum from different angles (for example, sorting in reverse order or browsing through the forum frontend), so that they not only help customers that ask questions but for example also nip any unwanted behavior in the bud.



Good luck!