Moderator Guide
Getting Started
The purpose of this moderator guide is to tell you all you need to know in order to moderate the forum with confidence. It is to be read in addition to the User Guide in order to explain how designated moderaters can moderate their forums.group.
A Special Message to those looking to migrate here from YahooGroups.
We understand that the thought of changing from the familiar YahooGroups platform to a different system may seem daunting at first, so that is why we have put a lot of effort into creating these online instructions with the YahooGroups moderator in mind. We think that once you have spent a little time reading through this manual, you will discover that it is not that different and where it differs, it is due to it being better and well thought out. We are using the well-established phpBB forum platform which is open source and has been developed by the people that use it. It is well proven and stable and forums.group is here to handle all the technical background issues. Let us migrate your YahooGroup for you and while we are doing that, read through this Moderator Guide and the User Guide and you will then better understand why we choose this platform. Our team had their own YahooGroups and forums and therefore fully understand where you are coming from. We designed Forums.Group especially as a replacement for YahooGroups and are now the ONLY platform capable of bringing your online archives back to life. If you want to see a real group that has already been migrated from YahooGroups, click here and have a look. It will give you a good impression of what we can do for your group.
Many of you will have moved here from YahooGroups, so let us first point out the differences in regard to moderation.
Differences in Moderating a Yahoo Group and Forums.Group!
A mailing list, like YahooGroups, (referred to as 'groups' from here on) is a reasonably simple system. You sign up, and then you can send in your messages (a new topic or in reply to a message you have just received) via email to yourgroup@yahoogroups.com and providing you are a member, that message gets sent out to all the other members of the group. Before things started to change, you also had the option of writing those messages on the group's website as well where you could also read all the past messages (often thousands of them) in one long unsorted list.
Each group had an owner/moderator that was in control of the group and was able to control who joined the group and hold back incoming posts for approval before being sent out to the 'list'.
- Forums.group gives you much more control of the system than YahooGroups, yet there are a number of similarities:
- You can still decide who joins the forum and reject those you do not want to approve.
- You can moderate messages so that they are not seen before you approve them.
- Announcements can be made to the entire group. Additionally, topics can be "sticky" - that is messages that always appear at the top of the list.
In addition, there are a number of additional controls available to make using the forum even better:
- Topics can be individually locked, so that no more posts can be made
- Whereas YahooGroups had just one long list of messages, forums.group lets you have a number of separate sections called "forums" where different aspects of a subject can be discussed.
- You have the abilty to give warnings to troublesome members, leave private notes on a member for other mods to see and even ban members who do not want to learn.
The moderation task gives you powerful means to control the conversationgs if needed, while being relatively easy to use. This moderator guide will explain what you can do as a moderator and how to do it.
If you have a premium forum, there is also an admin role that has greater power over the design of the forum, etc. The Admin Guide will explain what you can do in full details (when available).