Granicus provides a moderation service to ensure your site remains safe for all community members. Moderation occurs within two hours of submission, regardless of whether the participant is registered, unverified, anonymous, or an admin.
The moderation policy enforced by the moderation team is publicly available in your site’s footer and in our moderation policy template. Admins can also preview it by going to Site Management > Static Pages > Forum Etiquette & Moderation and selecting the eye icon.
Excepting the Stories tool, which you can choose to moderate yourself, moderation is independent of the site owner. This helps eliminate bias, promote trust, and ensures your community can express themselves in a safe environment.
As an independent solution, we are unable to provide reports of what has been moderated. You and your community members can report comments or appeal moderation decisions by contacting our support team through chat or by emailing support@engagementhq.com.
How Tools are Moderated
The moderation depends on the tool, and there are slight differences as to what is moderated:
Tool | Is it moderated? | What is moderated? |
Forums | Always moderated | All comments and topics are moderated. |
Places | Always moderated | All comments and images are moderated. |
Ideas | Always moderated | All posts, comments, and images are moderated. |
Stories | Sometimes moderated | Our team moderates stories when the Granicus Moderated setting in the tool’s Settings tab is enabled.
When this setting is off, your administrators can accept or decline stories in the Manage stories tab. |
Guestbook | Always moderated | Comments are all moderated, but admins can choose to Post comment only after moderation, which means it’s moderated before it’s publicly available. If this setting is off, comments are moderated after publication. |
Q&A | Not moderated | Admins manage all questions and can choose to respond privately or publicly. |
Newsfeed | Sometimes moderated | Only moderated if you Allow comments in the article’s Settings. If commenting is off, no moderation is necessary as your team writes the articles. |
Surveys | Not moderated | No content is shown on the public-facing site. |
Quick Polls | Not moderated | No content is shown on the public-facing site. |
The Moderation Process
If a contribution is deemed threatening to your organization or an individual, our moderation team will flag it internally, and we will contact you to ensure you’re aware of the threat.
The moderation process is:
A participant submits a contribution (comment, post, image, etc.).
The contribution passes through an automatic filter, which screens for:
Bad language, including offensive words or parts of words.
Known spammers, through a service called Akismet - unverified or anonymous contributions only.
Copy and pasted content – checks to see if the user submitted more than 10 contributions in 10 minutes.
If the contribution passes these filters, it will be published on your site.
If a contribution is flagged, our moderators receive a notification to review it.
The moderator logs into the moderation portal to read the contribution and made one of the following decisions:
Accept the contribution – the contribution is or remains live
Elevate the contribution – if the moderator is unsure, it is elevated to a senior moderator.
Delete the contribution – the moderator removes or blocks the contribution from the site.
If a contribution is deleted, an email is sent to the participant alerting them that it was removed and the reasons for its removal. They are invited to contribute again and adhere to the moderation rules.
Repeated breaches of the moderation policy may result in the participant being suspended or blocked. Our team will communicate the particulars with you, and you can block the participant.
Admins are not notified when a contribution is removed, unless it is deemed a specific threat to the organization or an individual. Admins can see and edit moderation emails in the Site Settings.
Participants and admins can use the Report link found on comments and posts to elevate the contribution to our moderation team. The Report function is available for:
Places submissions
Stories comments
Newsfeed comments
Ideas posts and comments
Forum comments
If you have further concerns about contributions to your site, you can either get in touch with us via chat or send us an email at support@engagementhq.com.