Moderation isn’t just about responding to individual flags; it’s about managing the entire flow of community health throughout the day. From the moment you log into the dashboard, you’re balancing priorities: reviewing unprocessed items, filtering for what matters most, checking context, applying the right actions, and documenting your decisions for the rest of the team.
In this lesson, we’ll walk through a realistic, start-to-finish scenario to show how all the tools you’ve learned about come together in a moderator’s daily workflow.
Starting the Day in the Dashboard
Every moderator’s workflow begins with the dashboard. This is your command center, showing the overall health of the community at a glance.
Today, you log in and immediately head to the overview tab and notice:
- 10 unreviewed items waiting in the moderation queue.
- A spike in user reports compared to yesterday.
This high-level overview helps you prioritize where to start. The queue becomes your first stop.
Diving into the Queue
The moderation queue is your main workspace. Here, you see flagged items collected from both AI detection and user reports.
Instead of tackling them randomly, you use filters to focus:
- First, you filter to review the most urgent items.
- Next, you switch to content type to group similar issues, such as text-only reports.
- Finally, you apply a date filter to ensure the oldest unreviewed items don’t fall through the cracks.
Within minutes, you’ve turned a messy backlog into a clear set of priorities.
Reviewing Context
You open the first flagged message. On its own, it looks like a minor insult. But by clicking on the message or using Channel Explorer, you can see the surrounding conversation. The context reveals:
- The same user has been targeting another player repeatedly.
- Other community members are beginning to chime in.
- Moderator notes from the past week indicate a prior warning.
Context transforms what looked like a small violation into a clear case of harassment.
Taking Action
Armed with the full picture, you apply the right moderation action:
- You delete the flagged message to remove the immediate harm.
- You apply a temporary ban to stop the repeat offender.
Documenting with Notes
To keep your team aligned, you leave a moderator note:
“Deleted message and issued 24-hour ban. This user has a history of harassment toward the same individual — see prior note from 3/12. Escalated for admin review if behavior continues.”
Notes create transparency and ensure that the next moderator knows the background without starting from scratch.
Closing the Loop
Before moving on, you make sure the case is fully resolved:
- The queue item is marked as closed.
- The admin team is notified of the escalation.
Now, you return to the queue and move on to the next set of items, confident that nothing slipped through the cracks.
The Bigger Picture
By the end of the session, you’ve:
- Cleared the 10 flagged items from the queue.
- Used filters to work efficiently.
- Reviewed context to make fair, informed decisions.
- Applied actions that protected the community.
- Left notes that strengthen consistency across the team.
This holistic process, from the dashboard overview to closing the loop, shows how moderation is more than handling individual violations. It’s about using the right tools in the right sequence to keep your community safe, healthy, and consistent.