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In our moderation process, we add a specific moderator tag to questions that haven’t received a reply in >12 hours. This puts it into our moderator’s workflow. 

Currently, I’m doing this manually at the start of each day. I have a filtered view saved and then I add the tag to questions that newly fit the criteria. 

My question: Is there a way for me to automate this? Is there a solution using Zapier, the API, or something like that to automate adding the tag after X amount of time? 

Zapier gives me the action half for the automation, but I need a solution for setting up a trigger based on

  • time since published > 12 hours
  • # of replies = 0

Any recommendations? 

Hi @DannyPancratz,

I think you’re very close, but I’d suggest the following workflow:

  1. Use a Webhook on all posted questions as a trigger in Zapier: question.Asked https://api2-us-west-2.insided.com/docs/#section/Webhooks/Available-events, https://zapier.com/help/create/code-webhooks/trigger-zaps-from-webhooks
  2. Add a Zapier Delay step of 12 hours https://zapier.com/help/create/customize/add-delays-to-zaps
  3. Use the API to check if there are any responses either
  4. Conditionally continue the Zap based on #3 https://zapier.com/help/create/customize/add-conditions-to-zaps-with-filters
  5. Add the moderator tag using the API https://api2-us-west-2.insided.com/docs/community/#operation/editQuestionModeratorTags

Let me know if you need any help setting this up!

Thanks, @bas; this is incredibly helpful! 

Can you clarify step 3 a bit more? Will we be able to check the reply count as part of the zapier setup? Or is there another step/integration that needs to be set up with the API?

Hi @DannyPancratz ,

Ah sorry, I was assuming you already had a setup to make API calls. Zapier can make calls to the API, though it requires you to copy-paste credentials into Zapier, which can be considered a security risk. For that reason I won’t post that way of working in this public forum.

So yes, this would requires some additional work. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a way of doing it without using the API, e.g. with only Zapier steps.

 

Hey @DannyPancratz - just chiming in here with a quick thought.  You mention that you’re using a saved filtered view yourself.  I’m curious why you don’t ask your moderators to work out of a simple saved view like this directly themselves?  Isn’t that essentially achieving the same e.g. a clean view / queue with topics that have < 1 reply and > 12 hour since last activity?

@Kenneth R We don’t have actual moderators. Instead I have a team of people committing to helping out, and me looping them in to ensure community member posts get a response. Our team of helpers is too large / not enough usage to put them into the Control environment as actual moderators. Instead looking for a way to surface posts to them as best we can.

Another big part of this is just needing to engage people where they are (slack). The open/unanswered questions page on the community should be a partial solution for this as well, but it requires them going and scrolling for open questions with no replies on topics they know. It’s been more effective for us to send alerts into a slack channel and get this is front of eyes as they work on other things. Then, they hop in and answer questions they have answers on.

@DannyPancratz Got it, thanks for the extra context - makes sense!  👍

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