Community Moderation

The Moderator Votes page allows administrators to view all pending votes from Answers. Since admins can decide to pass or fail any vote, this page makes it easy to quickly go through and approve or deny pending votes.

If you're an administrator, you have the authority to decide whether a vote passes or fails. Sometimes it is hard to determine whether or not to pass a vote. A post may have some signs of spam within it, but also contain valuable information, making 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, but another option could also be to edit the post, remove the spam, and send the poster a message regarding spam.

For more information, check out the Moderating Answers page.

Once a question or answer has been flagged, it will appear under Pending Votes on the Moderator Votes page. This gives you information about how many people have voted on the post, what the vote is for (check out Moderating Answers for the different types of votes), and when the last vote was. It also provides you with a few other options.

Clicking on the link next to "Post" will take you to the exact question or comment that is being voted on. This allows you to view the questionable post in its full context before deciding whether you want to Pass or Fail the vote.

Clicking on any of the profile links next to "Voters" will take you to the profile of someone who voted for the action. This can be useful in evaluating how much weight their vote holds. A vote from someone with a lot of Reputation may hold more weight than someone with only minimal rep.

If the vote is to change something within a post or move the post to a new location, the Target Post option will appear. It allows you to view the entire proposed new post location.

Clicking the "Show Details" link will take you to a full breakdown of the post, its context, and its votes.

This shows only the context of the post without going to a separate page.

When a vote is to change something on a post or move a post, there will be an option to show the target context. This option will show you the context of the new target destination.

You can also decide to pass or fail a vote directly from the Moderator Votes page by simply clicking on the "Pass link" or the "Fail link". Be sure that you want to approve or deny a flag before doing so, because it may cost someone reputation.

The two sections below Pending Votes display all votes that have either passed or failed. They detail what action was taken, when it happened, who voted for it, what the post was, and whether or not it was forced by an admin. You cannot edit anything under these sections since they have already passed or failed.

Go back to the Help Index