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The Official freeCodeCamp Moderator Onboarding Guide
This guide will help new moderators get up and running with the processes and procedures followed by experienced moderators on the freeCodeCamp community forum and other official communities that we foster.
[!NOTE] If you haven't read The Moderator Handbook yet, you should start there first.
The Forum
First Steps
The first thing you may notice after being given moderator status on the forum is that your interface will look somewhat different, with new admin tools to explore and access to the Mod-Team subforum.
Some of the new tools will appear inside a new menu item that looks like a wrench. Some will appear as new tabs or buttons, or even new enabled options within the forum menus.
To get familiar with the new tools and powers, you can combine one or more of the following methods during your first week with this elevated role:
[!TIP] The first two are the most important.
Become Familiar with the Discourse Admin Tools
The freeCodeCamp forum is actually a Discourse forum and follows many of the same guidelines of other forums built on Discourse. To begin to get familiar with Discourse and the moderation role, start by reading Discourse's new user guide and Discourse's new moderator guide.
Shadow a Mod
All moderator actions can be followed by reviewing the action logs. The actions taken by automated tools like akistmet or system can mostly be ignored until they result in a post that needs to be reviewed. Posts to be reviewed will show up in the Review area of the forum.
For the first week or so you will want to pay attention to what is getting flagged and what is being reviewed, and compare that to the actions being taken upon the flagged posts. You may see the system account flag a post because the user created it too quickly. In many cases, the moderators will unflag the post by clicking on the "Approve Post" button or mark it as "Not Spam" (depending on the flag type).
Commonly, spam flags can also be raised by members or moderators. Common duplicitous behaviour would involve opening an account, making a post that seems harmless, then editing that post later on to add a link to an external site for the purpose of advertising it. In this case, usually the member account is fairly new and has only made this one post thus far, which indicates that the account was opened for the sole purpose of spamming the community. The decision should be made to delete the account after the first offence in this case. The same applies for accounts whose first post is deemed to be spam.
You may notice moderators performing a procedure called 'split topic'. This may be a case where a moderator has split a post that was made erroneously on an existing topic into a new topic, or a moderator merged duplicate topics that a single user has created for the same question. Watching this procedure will highlight different actions and their causes.
Another useful feature that becomes enabled for all moderators is the ability to post a "Canned Reply" which is a pre-written response that was worked out with the mod team in order to quickly respond to some well-known and repetitive scenarios. These include:
- Welcoming a new forum member who has posted code without a question -> "Welcome - remind question"
- Reminding members not to post code solutions but to provide hints and tips instead -> "Solutions Instead of Help"
- Responding to a situation where someone's code works for you but not for them -> "Browser Issues"
- Encouraging members to open GitHub issues when a possible bug is found -> "Bug Report"
There are more, which you can read through to become familiar with their respective uses. You can also find discussion around the templates in the mod-team subforum, and you are welcome to ask questions if you aren't sure how a template should be used.
Read Mod-Team Subforum Posts
The Mod-Team subforum contains a number of posts from past and current moderators discussing the different requirements and/or challenges of moderating the forum.
Reading back through these posts can help to uncover some of the underlying goals and processes that concern forum moderators. Some of the threads may also shed some light on handling of spam and inappropriate content on the forum.
Where to Ask for Help
To get help dealing with a situation that you are either uncomfortable with or unsure of how to handle, discuss with your fellow moderators on either the Mod-Team Subforum or the #mod-chat on Discord.