We change the rules

Life of a moderator
June 15, 2020

We are doing this together, moderating I mean. We like to improve ourselves and our communities.
At the moment moderating seems like an endless job. It's overwhelming how many posts want to join our communities. I ask myself why because the subject of the content has nothing to do with the topic of the community. The community Diaries is not the place to post your recipes.
I start thinking most writers simply click on the first 50 communities they see on the list.
Please, don't do this. You will not get rewarded for it and your post doesn't look any better if the first part contains a long list of communities. If I need to scroll too many times to find what is written I lost my interest.


The use of communities.
The idea behind a community is to add content with the same topic.
By now we already know that a part of the communities accepts every post without reading. They even approve what is clearly plagiarism. I wonder why. What is the idea behind this?

Writer.
What you should know.
- You only will be rewarded if you leave a good comment. A good comment means what you write has to do with the article, a certain question, statement, idea, or issue brought up in it. This means you need to read it first.
- You will only receive points if your comment is written in a community. "Article" is not a community.
- If people leave you to comment to be so polite to answer. If your post is added to 50 communities you need to visit each of them to see all comments given!
With so many communities you have a problem. Most likely you will only see a few tabs above the comment field. I have no idea how this is shown on a computer screen but I can only see two at most three tabs. This means there's no way to choose the community I like to leave my comment behind (I cannot find it, scroll through all tabs above the comment field) or reply to all comments.
For me as a moderator, it's even more difficult. My list of notifications shows mainly "moderate ... please" and this message is shown each time a writer wants me to add his/her post to a community.
- Note: If you go to your list of articles comments given are not shown! Check your notifications or open your own post (my articles) to see (a part of) them.

Moderators.
- Please, check your community and remove every post that is nonexclusive and/or plagiarism. Take your moderating job seriously.
- You can approve content via the link in your notifications or by visiting your community directly. The last option is the best one if you only want to moderate one community instead of all. Via notifications - moderate... it's not possible to skip a page.
- Your community will be on the first page as soon as one post is added.
- You can not find back your community in the endless list? Click on the name in a post that used it.

We are busy and change the rules.
Yes, we are updating or if you're upgrading our rules. With such a high amount of content, it's good to approve only what adds something good to the community.
For most communities, we ask a minimum of words (words not characters). In nearly all cases this is 250+ or 500+ words.

The communities:
- Introduce Yourself
- (short) Stories / Tales and
- Freewriting is an exception.

This doesn't mean we accept bad grammar, text written in bold only, "five ways too", plagiarism, nonexclusive posts and you only need to drop a few lines. We still expect to read something valuable.
If your English is not good enough write in your own language. If you like you can add an English translation underneath.

Check up.
We decided to give our communities an extra check. Each post will be carefully read. What does not fit or is against the rules will be removed. Some articles are added with the request to edit and use Grammarly. If this is ignored it will be removed too.