Content that appears in the moderation queue is not published directly to your Help Center. You must approve or reject it. Content from end-users you've previously approved is also sent to the moderation queue.
You must be a Guide Manager to enable content moderation. Content moderation is available on Guide Professional and Enterprise. Content moderation is also available if you have Guide Lite and Gather Professional.
Enabling content moderation for your Help Center
When you enable content moderation for your Help Center, you can choose to have all end-user posts and comments sent to the moderation queue or only select posts and comments based on words. You must then approve or reject posts that are sent to the moderation queue.
To enable content moderation
- In Guide, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar. - Select the Content moderation option.
- Choose to either Moderate words or Moderate all content.
If you choose to moderate all content, then all new and edited end-user posts and comments will be sent to a moderation queue. If you choose to moderate content based on words, only new and edited posts and comments that contains the words you've specified will be sent to the moderation queue.
- If you choose to moderate based on words, enter the words that must appear in a post or comment for it to be sent to the moderation queue.
The keyword list has a limit of 15000 characters. Use commas to separate multiple words.
- Click Update.
Receiving notifications for content in the moderation queue
You can subscribe to the content moderation queue so that you are alerted when there are posts or comments in the queue. The queue is checked every four hours, and if there is content in the queue, you will receive an email notification.
To receive notifications for the content moderation queue
- In Guide, click the Moderate content (
) icon in the sidebar.
The User content tab opens by default.
- Click Follow in the upper-right corner.
You will now receive a notification if there are posts or comments in the content moderation queue when it is checked every four hours. You will also receive notifications for the spam queue, if it's enabled.
Reviewing user content in the content moderation queue
- When the end user leaves a comment, they see a tag to show that the comment is pending approval.
- When the end-user adds a new post, they see a banner to show the post is pending approval.
You can approve posts and comments in the queue that you want published in your Help Center, and you can reject or mark as spam posts and comments that you do not want published. You must be a Guide Manager to moderate user content in the content moderation queue.
To moderate user content in the queue
- In Guide, click the Moderate content () icon in the sidebar.
The User content tab opens by default.
- To take action on a post or comment, select the check box next to it and click one of the following:
- Approve to publish the post
- Reject to delete the post
- Mark as spam to move the post to your spam queue (this option is available if you've enabled the spam filter)
To manage your spam queue, click Spam in the side panel (see Managing your spam queue).
34 Comments
Why create a moderation process if no dashboard notifications or emails are sent to notify Agents or Admins of posts to moderate??
Without the laborious task of Subscribing to each Forum (of which there can be many), Moderators are completely unaware of posts being submitted.
I find it difficult to believe that you have such a well padded out message board system without these basic features in place! When can we hope to see this feature implemented?
Thank you.
Please create a way for agents to get notified when a customer submits an article for approval in help center. It would help speed up our content moderation process.
Hey Ron!
Can you clarify this a little bit for me? Help Center is set up so that only agents can write articles...I'd like to understand your workflow better so I can maybe make some suggestions.
The help center contains FAQ/knowledge base and community. Users can comment on both, but it is the community that I am referring to. We have seen a large influx of spam. We are using the Spam filter/service that Zendesk provides as well as the content moderation feature. This issue is that no one gets a notification when a user submits an comment for moderation. So our agents have to login and check periodically through out the day. It would be nice if we could set up a notification to be sent to a specific agent or group when a user submits a comment.
Hey Ron,
Thanks for clarifying that for me. We actually have a thread about this in our Product Feedback forum, which you can find here:
No doubt you'll notice that the thread is a bit old, and it hasn't seen any new comments in quite some time. All the same, I would encourage you to add your vote and use case to the thread. Our Product Managers see each of those comments, and take customer feedback into consideration when planning our roadmap.
The way I handle this particular challenge is to set up a notification on my calendar to remind me several times per day to check our Spam queue. If you have any kind of team calendar or a way to send automatic reminder emails, that could help ensure that your team is keeping an eye on the queue on a regular enough basis that nothing sits for too long.
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Feedback submitted Max.. agents need to be alerted to incoming comments as they happen - moderated or not.
Also, in ticket #1365374, I was instructed to follow the articles so I could get emails when comments happened.
Apparently that was bad advice, as the emails only come when non-moderated comments happen.
I agree, we must have notifications when users add comments/input to our help page. It is impossible for us to keep checking the manage page for new content to review. This is very important or we will miss comments and/or delay responses to our customers!
PLEASE Zendesk, add in notifications of the moderation queue or at least add in the ability to whitelist a user and then we only have to moderate the user and not each and every post. It's ridiculous that a company that is focused on customer support would give us the advice to set up a group calendar with reminders to go into the moderation queue. Why wasn't this created from the get go. The Web Portal had the ability to whitelist a user and now the only option we have is to moderate each and every post without notifications to do it? This request has been asked of Zendesk since at least 2013... when will notifications be added to the moderation queue. This is a step back in customer support, not a step forward.
So disappointed in Zendesk! We are going to be researching other forum providers as this is not acceptable for support.
Why a ticketing system is important: So we can track customer contacts, assign it to an owner to respond in a timely manner, and not lose track of our responsibilities to respond to customers. Zendesk is a good ticketing system.
Why Zendesk Help Center's design has not been useful to us from day one: customer contacts through help center are not integrated with the ticketing system. Email notification and tracking of the responsibility to respond are essential requirements.
We've given this feedback to Zendesk several times in written form and to account managers. Zendesk's velocity in delivering features for customers dropped dramatically as they became a public company, and we've lost hope after 3 years of little/no progress.
We're seeking alternatives to Zendesk which can provide both private ticket and "public" ticket (public forum or public Q&A) functionality in one integrated product where everything that might need human response on our part has a ticket associated.
If anyone at Zendesk ever wants to get serious about this, we'd be happy to provide input and beta testing.
Hi Bernie!
I know this can be frustrating; I have the same challenges myself as Community Support Manager here at Zendesk. Our Product team in Copenhagen is committed to making moderation of Help Center content better, although I don't have any timeline available for those features.
If it's helpful, one of our Community members created an app that will convert Help Center contributions into tickets automatically - it's currently in beta. You can find information about it here: Help Center to Support.
This app wasn't built by Zendesk and we don't support it, so any questions or issues will have to go through Kiryl and his team. But they've been very responsive to me so far.
Hi Jessie - Thank you for your thoughtful reply! The "help center to support" app looks like exactly the kind of functionality we need - they were clearly struggling with the same issues -- we'll give it a try. I'm hopeful the ticket integration it provides will be enough to let us to adopt the Help Center and Community features (and switch away from a Zendesk competitor that we've been using for that). Thanks!
No problem! Keep me posted on how it goes for you. :)
Is there a way to moderate all comments to posts, and not just those of end-users. For example, light agents commenting on articles?
I totally missed the ability to 'follow' the moderation queue until I saw it mentioned elsewhere. That should help a lot.
I think it might be good to have this as the default setting that at least one admin is automatically subscribed.
Hi Jessie - As it turns out the "help center to support" 3rd party application never was able to get working, and they've had to suspend development.
I'm sorry, but this really needs to be a 1st party feature from a company that does ticketing systems. Zendesk has hundreds of users who have been frustrated for years over this issue of not taking a "ticketing philosophy" to publicly visible support (help center).
If you're on the Team Zendesk Pricing Plan, is there no option to moderate comments on Help Center articles?
Hey Nate -
I'm sorry, I was mistaken in my initial response. Content Moderation is available only on Guide professional, so if you're on Team Support and have Guide Lite, you will not have moderation capabilities.
Is there a way for a help center manager to moderate article comments from our agents similar to the moderation end-user content?
I just stumbled on an article comment from an Agent. The comment is not private (it's viewable by anonymous users), there was no notification that it was made, nor does it appear in the moderation queue.
Hi Tony!
Agent comments in your Help Center and Community will always be public, just like any other users. Can you give me some more context on this situation? Are you moderating all content, or just specific keywords, or nothing at all? What about that agent's post should have been moderated?
Hi.
Is there a way to restrict access to who can post? I'd like everyone to be able to read, but only registered users to be able to post in the community. This is standard I know.
I'd like two things:
1. All posts to be moderated, except from certain members (not agent, Joe Public).
2. Registered users to be able to post unmoderated (full stop) but non-registered to be able to post moderated.
Any help on this?
Thanks!
Hi Ross -
Those definitely sound like handy features! However, the community content moderation features are effectively all-or-none, aside from keyword moderation. There's no native functionality to manage content on a per-user basis such as the ways that you're suggesting.
I have a few things I wish the Community feature did, can you tell me if these are true or not?
Our using the community and essentially upgrading depends on whether or not these features are available yet.
Thanks in advance!
Hi Jenni -
You can control the content moderation so that posts from signed-in users will not be moderated. Go into your Guide settings and de-select content moderation.
Users who are not signed in cannot post.
To be notified of a new post, simply click "follow" on your topics and that will send you a notification email whenever a new post or comment is made.
Hi! I have a few questions.
1. Are you able to recover rejected comments?
2. Is it possible to have a comment reject upon opening of a ticket?
3. When a comment is replied to, is the end user notified?
Thank you!
Hi Renee -
To clarify, are you asking about comments on Community posts, KB articles, or in tickets?
+1 on ability to moderate agent-submitted comments (particularly useful for internal Help Centers)
It would be useful if the notifications went out immediately when something was in the moderation queue or at least more frequently than 4 hours.
Hi Reshma!
Thank you for sharing your feedback on this. If you don't mind, it would be great if you could cross-post over to this thread in our Product Feedback topic. There's not a whole lot of input on it yet, but your detailed use case would be really helpful!
Hello,
I think substring matching might be a bit too strict. I enabled the word moderation with the recommended sample list of restricted words. It includes the word "hell", but comments from users using the word "hello" are getting flagged.
Thanks for the feedback, James. It's a known issue with the moderation tool; we run into this here in our own community as well. However, it's not something that's been high priority for a fix as of yet.
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