How to Moderate Answers
Moderating Answers
Of course, not every question asked or every solution suggested on the Answers Forum is perfect. Sometimes the questions aren’t related to repair, they don’t have enough information, or they’ve been answered on the site before.
And sometimes, our Answers Forum gets attacked by evil spammers.
Our site is moderated by two groups.
The first are our moderators who are basically repair superheroes. They help answer questions, clean up the forums, delete bad questions, and vanquish nefarious spammers.
Our second, and much larger line of defense are our community members! As you gain reputation on the site, you'll unlock your own set of powers to help update, improve, and moderate the community.
Collaboration strengthens site moderation.
Question Moderation
Off-topic questions should be removed, while weak but relevant questions should be edited by the community to increase their pertinence. If questions are voted on as soon as they come in, it increases the likelihood of a positive result for the poster and prevents backlogs.
If a new question does not have enough information to be answerable, do something about it! Try asking the poster for more information. If that doesn't work, the community should vote to take appropriate action.
Follow the guide below to learn how to moderate questions:
Answers Moderation
Just like users from the community can submit votes on questions, users can also submit moderations votes on the Answers forum.
The original poster of the question has supreme power for moderating their question. The OP can bypass community voting to moderate answers submitted for their question, and they can select the chosen solution for their problem or question.
Moderators and administrators can accept answers on behalf of the original poster, but this should almost never be done.
In the past, we have seen votes to accept answers where it was not clear that the answer solved the poster's question. You should be cautious when forcing an answer to be accepted because it has a very specific meaning.
Questions are easily cleared out of the unresolved queue by up-ticking answers. You should only force accept answers when it is clear that the poster's issue has been resolved, and that person did not understand that they needed to click "accept."
Follow the guide below to learn how to moderate Answers:
Community Moderation
The Moderator Votes page allows administrators to view all pending votes from the Answers forum. Since admins can decide to pass or fail any vote, this page makes it easy and efficient to review and approve or deny pending votes.
Should I Decide to Pass or Fail a Vote?
As a community member, it is up to you to decide whether to vote to passes or fail a something that's been flagged. Different types of moderation options carry different repercussions for the user in question. Our moderation wiki goes into the nitty-gritty details of those options.
Sometimes it is hard to determine whether or not to pass a vote. A post may have some signs of spam within it, but it may also contain valuable information. This makes it unclear whether the poster was trying to spam or not. In this case, removing a post as spam would fine the author 100 reputation points.
In this case, you have a few choices. You can:
- Make your best guess as other community members will need to vote as well (it's okay if there's a disagreement!)
- Leave it alone and watch to see what other (possibly more tenured) community members choose to do.
- Write a post on Meta and ask the opinion of the moderators and iFixit staff. (We've seen a lot of spam in our day and we're pretty good at identifying it.)
