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How to Moderate Questions

Introduction

This guide demonstrates how to moderate questions on the Answers forum.

Who Can Moderate Questions?

The Answers forum is a community-based forum that invites all community members with 20 reputation to participate in the voting process for moderating the answers to posted questions.

Before action is taken, each option for moderation requires a certain number of votes from individual users in the community.

However, if necessary, Moderators or Admins can override pending votes and make an immediate moderation decision.

  1. How to Moderate Questions, Open a Question: step 1, image 1 of 1

    • Navigate to the question that needs moderation and click the Options link in the top-right corner.

    • Select Moderate from the drop-down menu.

    • This option will only be available to users with reputation over 20 points, as well as privileged site users.

  2. How to Moderate Questions, Remove as Spam/Offensive: step 2, image 1 of 1

    • Five community user votes are required for the question to be removed as spam/offensive.

    • This deletes the post and docks the author's reputation 100 points.

    • This should be used as a last resort. Reputation is too hard to come by to punish someone for a one-time or innocent mistake.

  3. How to Moderate Questions, Remove as Not Related: step 3, image 1 of 1

    • Five community user votes are required for the question to be removed as not related.

    • This deletes the question, but it does not remove reputation from the asker. If a new question is off-topic, just vote to remove it.

    • It is best to get these out of the way of relevant questions as quickly as possible.

  5. How to Moderate Questions, Archive as Not Answerable: step 4, image 1 of 1

    • Three community user votes are required for the question to be archived as not answerable.

    • Archived questions do not show up on any index page, but they do appear on a member's profile. If the question is edited, it will be reopened.

  6. How to Moderate Questions, Merge as a Duplicate: step 5, image 1 of 2 How to Moderate Questions, Merge as a Duplicate: step 5, image 2 of 2

    • Three community user votes are required for the question to be merged as a duplicates.

    • Duplicate questions are questions that ask the same thing that has been asked before and, logically, have the exact same answer.

    • Often two questions are very similar (if not exactly the same), but the person asking the second question has not searched for or found the first question.

    • The second person has a valid question, so we don't want to attack them for not understanding the system.

    • Marking the second question as a duplicate automatically gives it all the answers from the first question.

    • In this case, you must be able to accurately judge whether a question is truly an exact duplicate.

    • You'll need to find the original question in the forum that the answers will be pulled from to address this duplicate. Open that thread in a different tab, copy the URL, and paste in provided field.

    • Click Submit.

  7. How to Moderate Questions: step 6, image 1 of 1

    • Three community user votes are required for the question to be migrated to Meta.

    • Where Answers is the forum about repair, Meta is the forum about the Answers repair forum. Not confusing at all.

  8. How to Moderate Questions, Forcing a Vote to Pass: step 7, image 1 of 1

    • If you have Moderator or Administrator privileges for the site, you will see the Force vote to pass? under the moderation options.

    • Checking this box means that you are using your privileges to bypass additional votes required to complete your moderation selection.

Conclusion

For more information about our Answers Forum, head over to our Answers Overview Page or to learn more about moderation, head to Answers Moderation Guidelines Wiki.

Author

with 5 other contributors

Amber Taus

Member since: 01/10/22

11 Guides authored

Team

iFixit Member of iFixit

2 Members

66 Guides authored

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