Moderation is critical in ensuring that the content on the site remains organised and relevant to the discussions. Hence praja has moderators who have the right to edit, move or delete comments suitably. As we allow these rights to various users, it also become important that there is as little subjectivity in the decision to edit/delete/move and comment as possible.
This page gives a set of guidelines to ensure objective comment moderation and uniformity in the moderation decision. As a moderator, you are required to adhere to these guidelines.
Who is a moderator?
If you have 200+ Praja points, (you can see your tally on your profile page), you can contact admins (via contact page) and request to be a moderator. Moderators of community have these extra rights on the website:
- Edit/delete a comment
- Move the comments across threads
- Move the posts to front page of a city
- And few more, this list could change as we add more features
Moderating comments
- 'I Do not agree with you' is not a reason to moderate a comment.
- Essentially, moderate a comment if it violates comment guidelines.
- Edit a comment if you find non-parliamentary language and leave a note below as a moderator (on the same comment)
- Delete a comment only if it is a 'spam', or has nothing else but a personal attack and extreme offensive language or pure promotion from a business. Otherwise, only editing is good. We dont want to shut people's mouth forcefully, just make them aware of allowed etiquette on praja.
- If someone has linked a flickr image, edit the comment to make the image embedded.
Moving comments:
- If a comment is posted on a wrong thread and you think it belongs elsewhere, move it to the relevant post (see help below)
- If a comment is substantially interesting, promote it as an independent blog or a forum post
- If a forum post (or a comment you just promoted) is 'frontpage worthy', leave a PM to 'admin' indicating so. We would like the moderators to be able to promote posts to the front page but there are some technical problems with that. We have to live with this for now.
Help on moving comments:
Below every comment you should see a link named 'Prune'. (You won't see it if you are not a moderator). Click the Prune link if you want to move or promote a comment. After the comment has been pruned, you will be see a new 'block' on your left sidebar asking what do you want to do with that comment.
- To move a comment to different thread, go to the target thread and below the main post and each comment you will see a 'Graft' link. Clicking the link will 'graft' the 'pruned' comment to the new place.
- To promote a comment as a forum/blog, select appropriate option from the comment mover block on the left sidebar.
- Moving a comment also moves all the comments that were posted as 'replies' to the originial comment. You may need to carefully pick these comments again and move them back to original post.
And finally
Moderation is a privilege you have earned by being an active member of the community. As they say, with power comes responsibility. We hope you will use this power judiciously and ethically.
We understand that you are spending your valuable time to make praja.in a better place and we would like to thank you for that on behalf of all members. Happy moderating!