Moderator / Editor - Orientation and Guide

A potentially important role for the TMGA and the TMGA website is that of moderator.  Although Steve Sliwa (the current webmaster) works diligently to upgrade and improve our website, it doesn't really become a community until there is active engagement hosted by the website.  The best online communities tend to be ones with active exchanges and member takes turns serving as moderators, facilitators, and editors.  To help with the on-boarding of moderators this article is being written and maintained.  The goal is that this article might help people come up to speed faster and encourage others to help.

Moderator Goals

Moderators serve an important role in the TMGA community.  It is expected that most moderators will take on certain 'channels' of information, perhaps associated with a particular type of motorglider.  In the future we might have moderators associated with training, maintenance, soaring, weather, or etc.  Perhaps a moderator might host a blog (herein referred to as newsletters).

Generally, here are the tentative goals for a TMGA moderator:

1. Encourage the participation of others by insuring that dialogs get nurtured.
2. Help to organize the data as untended contributions tend toward chaos (perhaps a demonstration of the laws on entropy).
3. Tidy up typos or make obvious corrections to entries (especially in articles).
4. Help to manage particular forum channels.
5. Add content to our TMGwiki, File Exchange, and other content areas.
6. Help to move content from the Legacy database to the appropriate section in the Library.
7. Add or correct Guides in the Help Section of the website.
8. Adding Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions to posts so they are more easily discovered.
9. Other ...

Volunteers generally ask to take on specific channels of information.  The current options could be one or more from the following list:

1. Moderate/Facilitate/Edit Information related to a specific TMG Model (e.g., Phoenix)
2. Moderate/Facilitate/Edit Information related to specific topic (e.g., training, safety, maintenance, etc.)
3. Author a Blog/Newsletter contributing periodic posts.
4. Fly-In management

Moderator / Editor Permissions

Once a person volunteers to be a moderator or an editor, the website Administrator will add that person to the special user groups in the website that will open up more permissions.  Extra feature and capabilities will appear that will allow editing on 80% of the content.  (The good news is that the website is backed up daily and the files are saved in rolling fashion for several days.  So if a mistake happens, as long as it is reported soon after it occurs, we an recover fairly easily.)

The term moderator generally comes from online forums and community software like this started originally as forum software.  In many forums one can not add posts unless the moderator has reviewed it and approved it.  The prime purpose of such moderation is to increase civility, reduce vulgarity, and to improve the quality of interactions.  In cases where such moderation is engaged, moderators would be notified that there is material to be moderated and it is being held until reviewed.  BTW our website software would permit those with higher reputation (complicated formula) can post immediately and those with low reputation or newbies are held.  Fortunately, we don't tend to have these problems on this website so such moderation has not been engaged (holding tanks).

Forums

At the top of each forum topic moderators will now see a new 'Moderation Actions' menu as picture below (shown with mouse holding the menu down):

Note that the options are:

• Feature -- There is a special section where featured topics are posted to gather more interest.
• Pin -- Means to float the topic to the top of the forum.
• Hide -- Don't let the topic be seen but don't delete it.
• Lock -- Stop further replies to the topic.  Some forums on other websites have automatic locks after a few days.
• Move -- This allows the moderator to move the topic to another forum that is more appropriate.  For example, some posts a generic question about fuel costs in a certain region in a model specific forum.  It might be better to move it to hangar flying so everyone sees it and has a chance to comment.
• Merge -- Perhaps a topic would be better served if it were merged with another one of similar content.  This features allows them to be combined and merged via date order of the posts.  Note that the URL of the other topic is needed.
• Delete -- Allows the full delete of a topic.

Another place in forums that additional options appear is at the bottom of each reply within a topic.  One menu option is 'Edit' which permits the full edit of post.  The other menu is 'Options' which includes the following:

• Hide -- Leave the post in the topic but hide it from view but leave the option to turn it back on later (perhaps after editing.)
• Split -- Move this particular post and either use it to start a new topic or to merge it into another topic.  This is a pretty common moderator task.
• Delete -- Remove this post completely.

Articles

The TMGA website is configured to use the 'Pages' module in the IPS software to create a TMGwiki.  Everyone registered is allowed to edit pages, the concept being that 'crowdsourcing' the content will make it better, much like wikipedia.  However, moderators / editors have extra functions to perform, much like in the forum.  In this case they are called 'Article Actions,' as show below:

As shown they have virtually the same list of possible moderation actions:

• Feature -- There is a special section where featured articles show in this and in other sections.  Used to highlight special articles.
• Pin -- Means to float the topic to the top of the forum.
• Hide -- Don't let the topic be seen but don't delete it.
• Lock -- Stop further replies to the topic.  Some forums on other websites have automatic locks after a few days.
• Move -- This allows the moderator to move the topic to another forum that is more appropriate.  For example, some posts a generic question about fuel costs in a certain region in a model specific forum.  It might be better to move it to hangar flying so everyone sees it and has a chance to comment.
• Delete -- Allows the full delete of a topic.

Gallery

The photo entries in the Gallery are also up for moderating / editing as shown below:

In this case the moderation / edit functions are called 'Manage Image" and the options include:

• Feature -- There is a special section where featured images show in the Gallery and in other sections.  Used to highlight special pictures.
• Pin -- Means to float the topic to the top of the forum.
• Hide -- Don't let the topic be seen but don't delete it.
• Lock -- Stop further replies to the topic.  Some forums on other websites have automatic locks after a few days.
• Move -- This allows the moderator to move the topic to another forum that is more appropriate.  For example, some posts a generic question about fuel costs in a certain region in a model specific forum.  It might be better to move it to hangar flying so everyone sees it and has a chance to comment.
• Delete -- Allows the full delete of a topic.

Website Pages

One powerful features moderators & editors will have is the ability actually edit content pages on the website.  Many pages will now have an "Easy Edit" slider arrow on the left side of the page as shown below:

Clicking on this arrow will open up the page so it looks like this:

This is now quite powerful.  Neophyte moderators show avoid the temptation to move blocks around.  It is expected that moving blocks around in an uncoordinated fashion might be frowned upon the by the webmaster.  However, moderators / editors could click on the edit function for any WYSIWYG Editor block and go in tune the material.

Suggested Orientation Tasks

The is a lot to learn about the website.  Fortunately, trial and error is a good way to proceed as almost anything can be recovered.  Probably the first step of being a good moderator / editor is start working toward being a power user of the website.  Here is a suggested checklist in that direction:

1. Review the guides, tutorials, and FAQs in the Help section of the website.
2. Navigate through each Navbar, Link, and Sub-Link item in the website to understand all of the current content and the structure.
3. Make sure profile information, photo, background image, and signature are up-to-date and tuned.
4. Make sure you understand what every button does on the WYSIWYG editor.
5. Review and practice adding topic to a forum, responding to a topic in a forum, adding an image to the gallery, adding an article to the TMGwiki, and adding a file to the File Exchange.
6. Visit IPS to see their online library for administrators. [link]
7. Generate a list of questions and review with the webmaster(s) perhaps via online video conference (so screens can be shared).

Steering Council

Once experience has been gathered, the community vision is that the moderators and editors will come together and discuss website structure and policies for organizing the data together with the webmaster(s).  As content grows, it will be critical to make it easy for users to find/use content and is also easy for the contributors to add data without detracting from community goals.