Abby from the Chiari Malformation Community put together these terrific guidelines for Moderators. Hope you enjoy. If you can improve upon them, then please leave a comment at http://moderators.bensfriends.org/page/best-practices
Helpful Tips and Practices:
1. Approve and welcome new members within one week of them joining the community.
For guidelines on approving new members please read this discussion.
For the welcome you can send an email/message that is something like the one below. Also see this discussion.
You have come to the right place! This site is for people stuggling with [add your site], our goal is to connect you with others so you don't feel alone or don't want to overwhelm your family. Or as I put it VENT!! Read others discussions, blogs and comments, start your own discussion or blog and give your input. Everyone makes a difference! The Chat Room is open, just send a message to have someone meet you there, its Live! A pop up window for Chat appears if you click on middle tab in bottom right corner. You also have the option to not be seen online by clicking the green button in bottom right corner. This site is built for the patients, spouses, parents, siblings and friends, Please no use of any vulgarity or hate, and please only add tasteful photos. Have Fun! :)
Here are some quick tips for using the site:
1. Make sure to fill out your bio on MY PAGE. You can customize your page by looking under your photo and click MANAGE MY PAGE and there you can change the look of your bio page. Also download your picture of yourself so we know what you look like otherwise you will get the generic purple photo and under picture you have twitter and hit share and you can share to the most popular sites like Facebook.
2. To go to a members bio page just click on picture of the member and you will be relocated to their bio page, where you can read their bio or leave them a comment.
3.To become a friend go to members bio page and under their photo click on FRIEND REQUEST and you can send a message also at that time if you wish. Once someone sends you a friend request please click OK and they will show up on your bio page under My Friends.
4. To join a group click on group icon then click add or join a group. Some of the Tabs you click at top of front page have 2 choices, when it shows click on it to go to page. When entering a Link for a website, before you paste it click on HTML, then paste it. For just text click on Rich Text. To upload a video from YouTube, copy the embed code of video and paste it in box when you click add video then click save.
This site was built for you, make yourself at home :)
Please keep content in english only, (use the translate function on your computer), all nationalities are welcome.
Welcome,
[Signature]
2. Email members that haven't been to the site in a while (we recommend more than 1 or 2 months)
3. Police for Spammers and take action. For rules about Spammers see the FAQ page or this discussion.
4. Find new members for your community through Facebook, Twitter, Google searches, Google Alerts, posting notes on related sites, etc.
5. Share your experiences with the other moderators on this site. If you did something that was helpful to someone, if you received a nice comment from a member, if you developed a best practice you would like to share... Please post it to the discussion board of this site so we can share the knowledge with all our moderators.
6. If you get stuck with something, don't be afraid to ask for help. We are all here to support each other.
7. Another important best practices is to remind people that we are not doctors and that they should not recommend treatments or medication. We don't want patients hurting themselves and there is also some liability that comes with us. Discussion is fine, but when you see people telling others to adjust their medication or things like that, please ask them politely not to do that.
8. Monitor content and delete when necessary. For guidance about deleting content see the FAQ page or this discussion.