What are moderated communities? How do they work?

When a new entry is posted, the moderator(s) will receive a notification with a link to a page where they can approve or reject the entry. Until the entry is approved, it is not visible to the other community members. When approving an entry, moderators can add or edit the entry's tags if they have the ability to do so. Use the Manage Tags page to adjust who can add/edit tags in the community. Moderators can only add tags that already exist for the community. If a moderator needs to create a new tag, they will need create it before moderation, or add it after approving.

If the entry is approved, an email notification will be sent to the poster informing them it was approved. If the LiveJournal default comment pages are being used in the community, the owner and maintainers will see the username of the moderator who approved the entry displayed above the entry subject line.

If the entry is rejected, the entry will be completely deleted; the poster will receive a email notification with the full text of their entry and the reason why the request was rejected, if the moderator chose to give one. Moderators also are able to report an entry as spam when rejecting the entry from the moderation queue. Community moderators are listed on the Community Info page, if you wish to discuss their decision on your entry.

Moderating a Community

Enable moderation for your community by going to the Manage Communities page and clicking the "Settings" link next to the community that you wish to moderate. In the "Community moderation" area, you can choose one of the following options:

• Do not moderate.
• New entries must be approved by a moderator before they appear in the community.
• Entries including links to whitelisted domains will be automatically posted. Entries containing links that have not been added to the whitelist will still require manual moderation. If you select this option, a link will appear that allows you to edit the whitelist for your community.

Once you've selected the desired setting for your community, click "Save Changes". The maintainer who initially enables moderation for the community will be designated as the moderator of the community.

A maintainer can add or remove other members as moderators by going to the Manage Communities page and clicking the "Members" link for the community. Selecting the "Moderator" checkbox next to a member's username will grant them moderator status in the community; deselecting the checkbox will revoke a user's moderator abilities.

A moderator can also give a member Unmoderated status to let them post to the community without going through the moderation queue; this option is useful for frequent posters, who would otherwise be unable to post a new entry when one entry is already in the moderation queue. Give a member Unmoderated status by selecting the "Unmoderated" checkbox next to that member's username or after approving a member's entry.

Error Messages

There are limits to how many entries can be in the moderation queue for a community, as well as how many entries one user can have in a community's moderation queue. If a user receives one of these error messages when trying to post to a moderated community, the moderator(s) will need to approve or reject the existing entries in the queue before the user can post their entry to the community.