Community moderators have a responsibility to maintain a sense of normalcy and balance within a community.
The Invision Community platform includes powerful tools for moderators to help them mitigate issues that may arise. We just enhanced one of them.
Our new moderator approval queue feature, available in an upcoming release for all Invision Community clients, arms moderators with more information regarding why an item was sent to the approval queue in the first place.
The approval queue is a temporary waiting room for content that can either be approved, denied, hidden or deleted by a community moderator.
Sometimes, it’s unclear to a moderator why an item was sent to the approval queue.
Our new feature solves that problem by including a reason with every item that needs to be approved. This provides clarity to the moderator in charge of handling items waiting in the wings.
There are a bunch of different methods in which an item can be held for approval:
Profanity/bad words
If a member uses a word you have deemed inappropriate, you may ask the platform via the ‘Word Filter’ option to automatically hold the post for moderator approval. In this example, the word “damn” is included in the Word Filter list. A member attempts to reply with it. Their comment is automatically held for moderator approval along with a reason why.
URLs
If a member posts a link to a third-party website, you may ask the platform to automatically hold it for moderator approval.
Email addresses
If a member posts an email address, you may ask the platform to automatically hold it for moderator approval.
Reviews
If a member posts a review on a digital download or a physical product, you may ask the platform to automatically hold the review for moderator approval.
Topics/replies
A member, or group of members, must have their posts manually approved by a moderator before they can be seen by the rest of the community.
A few other things worth mentioning:
- The moderator approval queue explanation is compatible with all of our applications (minus the Blog).
- The Forum and Commerce applications are the only two apps that can be required to have moderator approval at an item level (for example, individual replies within a topic or reviews on a product).
This new feature will be available in an upcoming release.
Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments!