One of the key attributes of any successful moderation system is its scalability. For communities with high levels of user engagement, this is especially true—higher engagement translates into more comments and users to have to potentially monitor. Any suite of features that effectively does that work for you is absolutely essential to your team's moderation efforts, because let's face it—nobody has the time or inclination to sit there and moderate each and every comment individually.
Disqus offers just that suite of features. Let's dig into Moderation Rules and other tools that ease the burden of moderation and set your community up for success.
What are moderation rules?
Moderation rules allow you to establish automated moderation policies by designating certain actions to be taken according to different triggers. Defining these rules enables you to effectively set the tone for how your comments section's moderation policies, freeing up your time to focus on more impactful and enjoyable activities.
Moderation rules can essentially be separated into two categories: comment-related rules and user-related rules.
Comment-specific moderation rules
Comment rules allow you to determine specific and automated courses of action to be taken if a comment meets one of the following criteria:
- has restricted word
- is toxic
- contains a link
- contains any type of media
For each of these criteria, you can choose to automate one of the following courses of action:
- the comment is sent to pending queue for further review
- the comment is deleted
- the comment gets marked as spam
User-specific moderation rules
You can also leverage user-specific moderation rules to proactively ward off potential spammers or bad actors.
Comment-specific rules enable you to choose to have comments made by A) users with a low reputation score, or B) users who have been flagged at least 5 times, either sent to the pending queue, deleted outright, or marked as spam.
When you bolster this approach with pre-moderation settings, you can also choose to have posts made by new commenters automatically require approval for a designated timeframe of your choice. With this system in place, you're ensuring that your community remains a safe, civil space where users with good intentions can flourish.
Additional moderation settings
There are additional proactive moderation settings that you can employ to further establish your community's guidelines. For example, you can choose to allow or disallow comments made by guest users or decide whether or not to allow your users to post comments that feature images or videos.
Want to go even further? Use our moderation profiles feature to select from different packages of moderation presets that have been curated by the Disqus team. There are also the traditional word filters and user bans that you can use to supplement your moderation setup.
A little time spent automating your community's moderation policy goes a long way.
Who has access to moderation rules?
The full suite of moderation rules and pre-moderation settings are available to Disqus Pro and Business customers. If you're an existing Pro and Business customer and you didn't utilize these features when you initially installed Disqus, that's no problem—you can set them up at any time.
Interested in trying out these features? Sign up for a free 30-day Disqus Pro trial to get started. A little time spent automating your community's moderation policy goes a long way.
We have additional documentation designed to help you harness the full power of our moderation tools. An effective moderation policy is crucial to the success of your community. Give your loyal users the community they deserve.
