For public online communities, the time and effort it takes to keep the community clean of offensive content can sometimes be daunting for community managers. Spammers employ creative tactics to gain the attention of your community members and steer clear of automated spam filters (and diligent moderators). One approach to mitigating spam is to require that every comment be screened by a moderator prior to making it public; however, this practice can negatively impact legitimate contributions from community members.

Telligent provides a number of automated moderation tools to help protect against spam. But, what if you could also use crowdsourcing for moderation – leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to guard against spam? With Telligent’s abuse management system, you can save time and deliver a better customer experience by empowering community members to moderate content. And, you can do this while still enabling moderators to have the final decision on what content stays and what content gets removed.

The abuse management system taps into our dynamic reputation engine to determine when to automatically hide content. And, it empowers content authors to moderate content through a comprehensive appeals process. The following four components of the abuse management system, along with existing automatic moderation tools for spam filtering, provide a comprehensive solution to keeping your online community clean and safe for all to benefit from.

1. Crowdsourced Abuse Flagging
   Community members can flag any type of content within the online community as spam or abuse. For example, if a community member sees a comment that is offensive, a forum answer that includes a questionable link or an inappropriate status update, that person can simply flag it as spam. By including members in the process of keeping the community clean, you are more likely to find inappropriate content and quickly.
   
   
   
   
2. Automatic Content Hiding
   Within the reputation engine, three scores determine when to automatically hide potentially offensive content. The engine takes into account how effective the person reporting the content has been at eliminating abusive content from the site (Abuse Reporter), whether the content author has had content hidden in the past (Abuse Creator) and the abuse score of the content itself (Content Abuse) which increases each time someone flags it as abusive.
   
   Depending on these scores, it could take just one community member flagging the content as abusive for it to automatically disappear from public viewing. Community managers can make adjustments to these scores to give more or less emphasis on previous behaviors.
   
   
   
3. Author Appeals Process
   When a question, answer, comment, status update or any other community content is automatically hidden, the content author receives an email. In it, the content author is given a chance to appeal if he or she feels the content was hidden in error. The author then has an opportunity to provide an explanation to the moderator as to why the content should be reinstated within the community.
   
   
4. Moderator Overrides
   The appeals queue lists all flagged content and provides moderators with tools to:

• Review the content in question
• Scan through the history of the content author in order to better understand both the positive and negative contributions that person has made
• Read the appeal from the content author
  
  These tools provide moderators with the ability to either remove the content from the community or make it visible.
  
  Since moderators can be responsible for the entire community or just specific groups, the appeals queue only displays content to moderators that they have access to within the community. For example, a single-group moderator only has access to flagged content within that group, whereas a community-wide moderator can access all groups within the online community.
  
  

While moderating abuse is the least fun aspect of managing an online community, it is essential to community health and vitality. You can learn more about Telligent’s moderation capabilities in our product documentation on Telligent.com.