Recent searches
No recent searches
'Community' Forum Moderators
Posted Apr 19, 2011
I realize that we currently have the ability to assign 'agents' to be moderators of our forum, but one of the greatest aspects of a 'community' forum is that the community can help each other out, as well as volunteering to help keep things in order.
It would be fantastic if community members could be set up to moderate the forums, without the need for them to be an 'agent'.
Doing simple things like 'reporting a post' to support staff (agents) for followup, or moving posts from one forum to another, or marking posts as an 'answer' etc.
The ability to elevate community members to such status helps to generate some excitement, and it also increases interest in the company to know that such trust is put on those who spend time helping out.
Ultimately, we want to provide a place where the 'community' aspect of the forum is such that everyone feels they are important to the success of the community, and by allowing some to volunteer their time to do various moderation tasks we're making the community that much stronger.
60
33 comments
Official
Devan La Spisa
Hello everyone,
We want to announce that this product feature is now live and a part of Gather! Thanks to everyone who helped drive us to this launch with your feedback, testing, and suggestions. If you have any feedback on this or features unique to Gather, please feel free to post in our new Gather Product Feedback forum. For more information on this live feature, feel free to look into this article detailing all of the new features and capabilities!
Gather Product Feedback
Announcing Zendesk Gather
Best regards!
Best regards!
0
Adam Goolie Gould
This is key functionality in building community engagement and ownership.
1
Viewpath Support
You have my vote! This is definitely on my roadmap. Our users use our product in so many different ways, it would be great to have Community Moderators for our forums. They often think more "out of the box" than those of us creating the app. Recognition for different levels of moderators would be great too, whether it's a colored star system or personal labels we can apply.
3
Andrew J
All the way TJ!
1
Nina Nikolic
Yes, please! I'd even at least love the ability to give key members of our community some kind of insignia in the forums to let other users know they're important for our community (even if they may not be able to moderate, as such). We were using the Champion functionality in GetSatisfaction for this purpose and it worked great.
3
Eli Winderbaum
This would be fantastic!
In fact, we were going to build it ourselves or use GetSatisfaction as they have this as core to their product. Obviously you can't compare the two, but in my opinion this is the last missing piece in creating a True User Community. Our greatest assets, like Zendesk's, are our amazing customers who truly want to help each other.
For inspiration: http://www.google.com/get/topcontributor/
2
Michael Stone
+1 !!!!
2
Maria Scarpello
yup.
1
Amie B.
+1
2
Ed Giansante
+1
1
Goran
Yeah this would be amazing if implemented! +1
2
Joel Mayer
+1
2
Joris Heuberger
+1
2
Patrick Schmidt
I just sent a ticket into Zendesk to ask about these capabilities. This absolutely should be considered a requirement in order to foster community participation.
Please update us on potential plans to enable some kind of reward, badge, or label system for top contributors to our respective Zendesk communities.
1
Mark Wang
I agree with everyone here. +1
1
Scott
+1
I posted in another thread about this entitled "Introduce a new level of access - Moderator".
1
Pixmeo Support
+1
2
Emily Jarvis
Can someone please pay attention to these requests? This was requested almost 3 years ago and I've found 11 requests that are either identical or are requesting very similar changes to the moderation queue. We are looking to whitelist users and not have to approve every single post. If we do approve every single post, then please set up notifications. Also, the ability to have community moderators would help as well. This is not a small request, please see all the other requests...
1
Andrew J
Hello Emily - just to clarify one point of confusion. As community moderators we do not have any greater power than you do I believe. The community moderator badge are able to be replicated on another site, I think by tagging users and with some mods. We do have access to a private forum and if we see something that needs deleting etc., we leave a message there for the ZD staffers.
I think that what ZD has as community moderators is replicable in any Zendesk instance - excepting the lowest plan.
Also, there have been quite a few changes over the past 3 years with the new 'Help Center' - which gives the options to moderate content that wasn't possible before. That said - an EMAIL when there is new content would be fantastic!
1
Mark Wang
Yes, we've replicated the Community Moderator badge.
But I think people want the moderators to have the ability to lock, delete, and/or edit peoples posts like most other forum software without giving them full access to our Zendesk setup.
Basically an additional role in Zendesk would solve this problem. A permission level between Admin and User.
0
Scott
@Mark Wang - exactly! ZD needs a new role for moderators with the proper permissions you describe.
0
Andrew J
Agreed - it would be good.
However this would pretty much allow you to have STAFF using forums instead of tickets and not having an agent license - probably not something Zendesk want to encourage.
If your moderators are of true value to you, invest in a ZD license - restrict their access to a non-used agent group, but give them forum rights :) You get what you want, and ZD get what they want. If you have light agents (Enterprise) you could use free light agents for this I think.
0
Scott
@Andrew - the problem with your suggestion is that grants Community Moderators the right to edit KB articles which is something we don't want. Community needs to be managed separately from official help center articles.
0
Andrew J
Hello Scott, yeah I see - that makes sense.
Does the advanced role permissions options for the enterprise plan offer any options around this? We're not on enterprise.
I agree this would have some merits - possibly not for us, but highly configurable roles would be tremendous.
0
Christian Colding
HI Scott and Andrew,
I just wanted to let you know that it's not currently possible to get very granular around who can edit what. We basically have one role in Help Center called a Help Center Manager which gives access to everything - also on the Enterprise plan. You can read more about roles in this article.
On the articles side of things, we are planning to change access restrictions so you can specify exactly what can be edited by whom (if anything). Unfortunately I don't yet know when we'll have this ready, but I wanted to mention that is something that we would love to change going forward.
0
Timothy Cambra
ok its been 8 months whats been done in regards to this? I dont think its right to charge a extra Agent license fee just to moderate something.
0
Jon
We're content with paying for community moderators, but not at the full price of a license. If it were $10/month per moderator, that would be tolerable. We'd want explicit permission of moderating the Community, but access to nothing else (including Help Center articles).
0
Maggie St.Clair
This is just one of the many reasons why we are having to look at other software for our Community. It would be wonderful if Zendesk would put some effort into the Community but based on the lack of answers to some very minor enhancements, it does not appear that this is a priority for them. Now that we have started looking at other providers we see just how much the Zendesk Community is lacking, but with a little bit of focus they could quickly be on par with others. It is a shame really, as it would be so great to have our Support Site, Knowledge Base and Community all in one place.
1
Marylou Scott-Smith
How do you duplicate the Community Moderator badge? I would like to be able to identify our moderators on the community pages.
0
Jennifer Rowe
Hi Marylou,
Give this tip a try: How to add cool agent badges in communities
Let us know if that works for you!
0