Moderating Your Lists

The moderation interface allows you to moderate lists using the web interface. The landing page has a list selection area at the top. Unlike the other list selection areas that show the lists for which the logged-in user is the owner, this one only shows the lists for which the user is designated as a moderator.

If you are a moderator to more than one list, select the list you want to moderate. If there are no messages for you to moderate, the only action possible is to "Refresh", which looks for new messages to moderate for the selected list.

Overview

If there are messages to moderate, the main area of the screen contains a table, showing all the messages that were sent to the logged-in email address for moderation.

The first column contains checkboxes, one per message. The second column shows the "Subject" of the message. The third column shows the "From" email address that sent the message. The fourth column shows the "Date" in the message (not necessarily when the message was received). When "All Moderators" is checked, two extra columns are displayed showing whether your account received the moderation request or other accounts did. If the "Moderator=" keyword is set to "All" with multiple moderators, both columns will be checked for all messages.

If you can tell at a glance which messages to approve or reject, simply check all the boxes corresponding to the messages you want to act upon. Next, click either "Approve" or "Reject". Site administrators will have an additional "Reject and Serve Off" button, which will not only reject the message but also serve off the email addresses, blocking the users from sending any future messages to this LISTSERV site. Because this action blocks future email messages not just to the list in question but to all lists on the entire LISTSERV server, this action should only be used as a last resort to exclude spammers or abusive users.

Message View

Sometimes you cannot immediately tell whether a message should be accepted or rejected without reading the contents of the message. To open the message, click on the subject line of the message in the table.

On this page, you see the first part of the message. If the message is multi-part, the part displayed is determined by your Preferences. The main mail headers of the message are also displayed. Located at the bottom of the screen are the same "Approve" and "Reject" buttons. On this page, the selection applies to the current message only. If you wish to approve or reject the message, simply click the appropriate button.

Subscriber Settings

If the logged-in email address is an owner of the list, and if the "From" address of the message is subscribed to the list, then the email address will be a link. This link leads to a screen for viewing and changing the user's subscription settings.

These links are convenient for lists that have "Default-Options= REVIEW", with a policy of changing the subscription to "NOREVIEW" after the first on-topic posting to the list. The moderator or owner may look at the message, decide that the subscriber may be removed from moderation, change the subscription settings to "NOREVIEW", and then approve the message. Be sure to change the settings first because the message will no longer be displayed after it has been approved or rejected.

Similarly, if a subscriber has sent inappropriate material to the list, the moderator or owner may want to delete the subscriber.

After using the subscriber settings interface, always use the "Back" link in the "hamburger" menu in the top-right corner to return to the moderation interface, and not the "Back" feature of the browser. The "Back" feature of the browser may cause past approve/reject commands to be repeated, and errors will be displayed, complaining that the "cookies" do not correspond to any existing messages awaiting moderation (since these were already approved or rejected). This does not do any harm at all to your list but may cause confusion.

All Moderated Lists

The server administrator can check this box to view all the moderated lists on the server. If the logged-in user is explicitly listed as a moderator on some lists, then the default behavior is to only show these lists.

After checking or unchecking this box, click the "Refresh" button.

This checkbox is only shown if the logged-in user is a server administrator.

All Moderators

The list owner may check this box to view all the messages awaiting moderation for the list. This setting is useful for lists with round-robin moderation, where each moderator only receives a subset of messages to moderate. If some of the moderators are unable to perform their duties, the list owner may step in and approve or reject messages that were received previously.

If the list owner checks this box on a list where the list owner is also a moderator and all messages are sent to all the moderators, there may be duplicates in the report: one line for each of the messages that was sent directly to the owner's address for moderation, and one line for each message that was sent to other moderators (these appear only once, even if there are two or more other moderators besides the owner). It is only necessary to accept or reject a message once, but checking both boxes for the same message on the main view will not cause any problems.

After checking or unchecking this box, click the "Refresh" button.

This checkbox is only shown if the logged-in user is an owner of the list.

Actions

First, check the boxes representing the messages you want to approve or reject.

Then, click on one of the following buttons depending on the action you want to perform:

• Approve: Approve all messages whose boxes have been checked.
• Reject: Reject all messages whose boxes have been checked.
• Reject and Serve Off: Reject all messages whose boxes have been checked and serve off the senders, which bans future postings from their email addresses.
• Refresh: Refresh the display without accepting or rejecting any messages.

Lines per Page

This parameter controls how many messages will be displayed on a single page. If you want to break the table of messages into pages of 10 messages, type 10 in the box and click the "Update" button. The default is 50.

Lists per Page

This parameter controls how many lists will be displayed on a single page in the table of contents. If you want to break the table of messages into pages of 5 lists, type 5 in the box and click "Update". The default is 50.