Hi @Lola !  Welcome to the community, and exciting that you’re starting onboard!  Let me try to give some tips:

1. As moderators you can absolutely lock any thread for further replies.  You just have to click on the ‘Close topic’ slider.
2. If you’re removing content and it’s spam, you will want to use the ‘Mark as spam’ option, as this will help our spam-fighting filter to learn and automatically identify it more effectively next time.  If it’s not spam, but you just want to remove it, you’ll want to simply ‘Trash’ it.
3. When you’re in the topic overview page, you can click on ‘Profile’ next to any post, and that will take you to the user profile page that contains a ‘Notes’ section.  These are internal-only and serve as admin notes.

Hope this helps, best of luck with the onboarding!

Hello @Kenneth R,

Appreciate the fast response! Some follow up questions:

Re spam moderation - what you are saying is that we should use the “Mark as Spam” from the Topic overview in Control. There is no way to mark the spam in frontend (user UI), only in Control? Our moderator team is used to do quite a lot in the UI, so actioning things in Control will be an adjustment. 

I am trying to understand a flow where out moderator team is browsing the community in UI, comes across a post that clearly violates our guidelines by being spam post but it’s not caught by spam detection automatically. Is there a way to move that content out of sight from users from the UI, or they need to go to Control and action there with mark as spam button? 

Some articles on this forum suggest creating a private board which will host all the content that violates guidelines in the UI but does that makes sense since we have Spam and Reported queues in Control? Apologies if these are very basic questions, I am trying to understand how complicated the moderation flow will be for us. Thank you!

Hi @Lola our platform is very much built around moderation getting done in the control environment.  We highly recommend building your processes around working in that way.  In the control environment you have a single, unified view of all new content, along with the magic ‘unread by team’ status field (that indicates every topic that has not been opened in control by a moderator), along with the possibility of creating powerful custom workflows with labels and views.  That might sound like a lot to unpack, but you’ll find it quite intuitive once you get started.  Working from the front-end will require far more clicks, effort and likely double work, and in our platform many of the actions like moving or deleting content can only be done within control.

There’s no need to create a category for spam content, as that content will be invisible in the front-end the moment it is identified.  Other types of content that you want to remove you’d likely trash.  Some community teams might choose to have a private category to move some types of topics into, rather than trashing them - that’s always possible but I’ve personally not found it necessary.  

@Kenneth R that makes total sense, thank you for providing the context! Based on what you are saying, I will write our moderation guidelines in the way that moderators are actioning mostly from Control rather than browsing the community UI. 

Two last questions because I feel like I have good understanding now:

1. You mentioned Unread by team status field. Can we use it to mark the content that has been actioned and no longer needs attention? Reason I am asking is that once our team reviews the reported content or content we trashed ourself, but we don't want to permanently delete it, can we just keep it in Trash with that status Read by team? For our legal reporting we can’t permanently delete anything but we want to keep make sure that it’s actioned and out of our site.
2. Is there a way to mark the content as spam and bring it to Spam view in Control without automatically banning the user?

Hey @Lola - the ‘unread by team’ status gets removed the moment someone opens the topic within Control.  So you never have to do anything manually.  And you can indeed simply keep trashed content in the trash folder without emptying it.  

And for your second question, it’s not possible to mark something as spam without banning the author.  The way to think about this is that ‘spam’ really does mean ‘spam’, in other words content from a non-legitimate user that absolutely doesn’t belong in the community. Those reports will be taken into our machine learning / AI spam filter to learn from. 

A topic or comment from a legitimate user that crosses the boundaries of your community terms, to us wouldn’t be considered spam.  That’s something you’d want to trash (or potentially move somewhere private).  And of course, in that case you’d want to be able to determine if the user was banned or not yourself. I’d recommend designing the guidelines like this.