Moderation Team - Best practice

​Hey there @Stuart.cruttenden 

It looks like your question got missed somehow, sorry about that! I’m going to see if @timcavey is around as well, since he’s the Community Manager for the OVO Forum (which is where I come from as one of the forum volunteers). He has a good level of experience and might be able to offer some insights.

But as a user, I can also offer some thoughts of my own. I don’t have any moderation experience on forums of this type, but I have moderation experience in other ways.

I definitely think that you will probably need to plan ahead about scaling your resources as time passes, but it’s down to your judgement more than anything else I can think of. To give you an example, the OVO Forum has two full-time moderators (including Tim) who are around every weekday during standard working hours (and sometimes beyond that) backed up by a whole bunch of forum volunteers such as myself who are around pretty much daily from early until late. Plus the ability to arrange moderator cover if the need arises.

This provides enough coverage to ensure safety pretty effectively - especially when combined with the built-in features provided by inSided. With my ability to rapidly flag rule-breaking content to moderators combined with the pretty fast response times, it’s rare for such content to remain up for more than 48-72 hours before it gets zapped. But it’s usually much, much faster than that.

As for moderating all the content, the current strategy with the OVO Forum works pretty well for the use case - particularly as I’d say it’s well balanced for the pace that the forum runs at. But in other communities where the pace is a lot faster, you’ll probably want more eyes on things to keep up with the flow.

As for content specialists, this can definitely work in the right context - especially if you need to re-jig things or you get a lot of activity related to a specific matter. It doesn’t always work, but it can be worth experimenting over. This is another good example of the OVO Forum as well. I am a dab hand with bug hunting and love playing detective with just about anything related to the online platform. However, I’m out of my depth when it comes to highly detailed and seriously technical level stuff about electricity supplies and systems - but there’s at least two volunteers who get very excited about that and love to jump on those topics. In our case, the moderators mainly keep an eye on things and give us a hand if needed. But it’s primarily volunteer led and we use that to our advantage.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way to divide this up with any inSided features per se, but you can make it work with strategies in your team. It’s not really something that works well in code after all. But I think there is a feature somewhere in Control that allows you to assign specific threads to a specific team member. I’ll see if @Jeanie Lee can find it faster than I can.

Hey @Blastoise186 @Jeanie Lee Thank you both so much for the reply! 
 

@Blastoise186 All the detail, suggestions and ways of working from your experience is a great read. It’s good to see how other organisations have set this up and hearing that it is primarily volunteer led. This is the hope in the future here as well. 

@Jeanie Lee Thank you for the suggesting signing up to the next moderation training.  I have done this :) 

Stuart

Hi @Stuart.cruttenden , Welcome to the world of community! You’re in good hands with InSided :) 

If you’re looking purely for moderation, a new community can easily start with one well-trained moderator who knows what they’re doing, with that said two would be great, so they can spar with, and help each other. For round the clock moderation you’ll indeed need more, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary right off the bat, if you have a good solution in place to handle reported posts quickly and efficiently.

At Sonos we moderate the community during week days, and our Superusers will let us know through phone/SMS etc if something is amiss outside of office hours. Our mods are also taking care of support requests on the community, and they help superusers with their questions and requests.

With regards to content specialisation - depending on how well your moderators know the products, just train them well, and then let them sort it out amongst themselves. InSided’s platform is really efficient in the way of assigning topic, moderating, tagging and bagging content, so as long as your Terms and Conditions are good and easy to adhere to, you shouldn’t need to worry.

Your moderators will hopefully let you know when they start feeling like they can’t keep up - this is where you need to be prepared to roll out additional resources to support them. As time passes and your community grows, you will also start seeing the ebb and flow of content - maybe Dyson support is overall very busy during Christmas? Make sure that you have resources to handle that spike. If it’s not very busy during summer, then that’s a great time to plan some holidays, or development time, for the team. If you roll our with 3 mods right off the bat, set some development tasks for them regarding community moderation and management so they can learn the tricks of the trade when they’re not busy with the community.

Last but not least: There has never been a more efficient community killer than overactive moderation ;)