AMA Moderation (Adults) Questions Asked!
Hi everyone! Thank you to all those who attended our first ever AMA Moderation session. There were many great questions asked and as promised, here's a summary of questions and their answers for those who couldn’t make it.
What do chat room moderators do?
Chat room moderators are listeners trained in de-escalation and are here to help maintain the safe and supportive environment in chat rooms. Some examples of a moderator’s duties would be engaging in supportive conversations with community members in chat rooms, and enforcing chat room rules when necessary.
What are the different types of moderators?
There are three types of moderators, community mod, global mod and community centered mod. Community mods are paid moderators who have scheduled shifts to ensure there’s mod coverage in all the rooms 24/7. They’re also here to back up volunteer mods and help out room supporters in de-escalation when needed. (Community mod schedule: here) A global mod is someone who is a mod in all the member group chat rooms. While a community mod is only mod in the rooms listed under their sub-community.
How do I become a chat room moderator?
To become a chat room moderator, you must be a listener and have been a room supporter for at least 2 weeks. You can find more information about it here. If becoming a moderator is something that interests you, but you have questions regarding the application process, feel free to reach out to a group support quality mentor. We’re here to support you.
What’s the onboarding / training process like? I noticed the training schedule posted is a bit out of date.
At the moment, we don’t have live training sessions for moderation. We’re doing form based training. This means that once your application is accepted, you will be contacted by a mentor with training material and quiz form. Once you pass the quiz form, you will be on-boarded as a group chat moderator.
Where can we have political discussions?
Political discussions are off limits completely in all rooms as it’s a topic that’s highly debatable which may lead to unwanted arguments and conflict. (refer to chat room rule #8)
What’s the purpose of the current events room?
Current events room is a place intended for members to chat about current events that’s happening around the world. Some examples would be Covid19, or in the past Black Lives Matter movement.
There’s often no mod around when incidents occur. How can we alert the mod team they’re needed in certain rooms?
Unfortunately, moderators are unable to stay in rooms all the time. Please use ER mod request form is attached in chat room rules #14 to alert the mod team. (ER mod request from link: here)
How can I report / review a moderator?
You can use the mod review form found in chat room rules #15. This form can be used for both positive and negative feedback you have about listeners, room supporters, and moderators. (Review form: here)
Note: This post contains only the generic questions that were asked. There were also questions asked that specifically only apply to current moderators and/or community leaders. These will be posted in a follow up comment on this thread soon.
Back again with the remainder of notes! As mentioned in the previous post, this section will be dedicated to questions that were specifically asked by mods and leaders of this platform regarding things that affected them.
The current crisis management system for mods is through email notification alerts. As we all know, that can be slow and a bit unreliable at times. Is it possible to get the notification system integrated into our dashboards so mods are more aware and can respond to situations that arise in rooms?
It’s our hope that in the near future we may get a queue similar to what we currently have for a general request queue for chats. But it’s going to take a bit of time to develop and reach that level.
Can something please be done about the location of ‘X’ to delete messages? It’s too close to the heart button and moderators would never intend to unfairly delete messages. I know many moderators who have been avoiding the heart button due to fear of accidentally deleting messages so it’s not just me.
That’s a good point, and this suggestion has been passed onto the tech team.
I’m having trouble getting pop-up rooms opened on time for events as doorkeepers are hard to find and access.
Apologies about the past inconvenience, a post was recently made to make doorkeepers aware of how to set up their notification system so hopefully that will help resolve the issue. (link to post: here)
The community calendar is overwhelmed with recurring events from Sharing Circle sessions in a way that it’s difficult to find events that are being led by smaller sub-communities. Would it be possible to add a feature such as filter events by tags?
That is a great suggestion! I [Obs] will see what I can do and keep you all posted on the progress.
I had to DM several com mods just to figure out the standard procedure on how to deal with members claiming to have multiple accounts because each gave their own response. Can the standardized procedure for this be added to mod training please?
The standard protocol is when we know that a member has multiple accounts, you can circumvent them, but only when we are 100% sure they are multiple. If there is a single doubt, then let com mod know OR use the regular procedure to mute them. We also recently created a chat room scenario form for room supporters and moderators. (link to form: here) You’re encouraged to submit scenarios you have faced in chat rooms and how you’ve handled the situation. We’ll be working on putting together a group support protocol document.
And that’s a wrap to the notes summary of all the questions that were asked during our AMA - Moderation session. If you have questions that weren’t answered, feel free to DM me or comment below. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
