Moderate a Community

When you create a community, you are the owner. You can let other people moderate the community, or you can add another owner. You can also decide which members’ posts to moderate. You must be a moderator for two weeks before you can be made an owner.

A community owner can:

• Invite people to join the community
• Approve requests to join
• Ban or remove people
• Edit information about the community
• Moderate posts and comments, for example, pinning posts to feature them or removing offensive posts
• Move posts into different categories
• Make other members community moderators or owners
• Remove other members as moderators or owners
• Delete the community
• Step down as an owner and become a moderator or member

A community moderator can:

• Moderate posts and comments, for example, pinning posts to feature them or removing offensive posts
• Move posts into different categories
• Invite people to join the community
• Approve requests to join
• Ban or remove people
• Edit information about the community
• Step down as a moderator and become a member

Note: Owners and moderators may not be able to perform some of these functions if members of the community are suspended. For example, an owner can not step down as the owner of a community with no members.

Add or remove someone as moderator or owner

1. On your computer, open Currents.
2. Click Menu Communities.
3. Click the community you want.
4. At the bottom of the community’s banner, click the photos of the community members.
5. Next to the person you want to promote, click More .
6. Choose Promote from member to moderator or Promote from moderator to owner.
   • To make someone an owner, you first have to make them a moderator.
7. To remove someone as moderator or owner, follow steps 1-5 above, then choose Demote to moderator or Demote to member.

Hold member posts for moderation

When the Hold posts for review community setting is turned on, some members may be listed as limited members. Posts from limited members will not be visible in the community until they’re approved by a moderator or owner.

To turn this off for individual members, promote them from limited member to member. To turn off limited membership for the whole community,  turn off the Hold posts for review community setting.

Remove or ban someone

Owners and moderators can remove or ban people from a community.

When you remove someone:

• They leave the community, but can join again.
• Their posts and comments are not removed from the community.

When you ban someone:

• They leave the community, but can’t join again unless you un-ban them.
• Their posts and comments are not removed from the community.

To remove or ban someone:

1. On your computer, open Currents.
2. Click Menu Communities.
3. Click the community you want to remove or ban someone from.
4. At the bottom of the community’s banner, click the photos of the community members.
5. Next to the person you want to remove or ban, click More .
6. Click Ban from community or Remove from community.

Remove, report, and ban someone all at once

If you choose this option, the member can't join the community again, and is reported to Currents.

1. On your computer, open Currents.
2. Click Menu Communities.
3. Click the community you want.
4. Click a post or comment.
5. In the top right, click More   Remove, report, and ban. Clicking this will:
   • Remove the post or comment from the community
   • Report the post or comment to Google
   • Ban the author from the community
6. To also remove the member's recent posts and comments from the community, check the box next to "Remove other recent content by this user."
7. Click Ban user.

Add or remove stronger filters to content

You can turn on more aggressive filtering to reduce the amount of spam or inappropriate content that reaches your community’s stream. If your community already has this content control on, you can turn it off:

1. On your computer, open Currents.
2. Click Menu Communities.
3. Click the community you want to adjust filters on.
4. Click More .
5. Click Edit community.
6. Switch on or off "Content controls."
7. Click Done.

Note: When this setting is on, Currents content filter is more likely to flag posts that are questionable, so fewer of them will show up in your community. You can see these blocked posts in your moderator queue.

See how your community is performing

Owners and moderators can see data about their community, including: 

• Total number of members
• Number of new members
• Number of active members
• Number of posts
• Number of comments
• Number of likes on posts and comments

1. On your computer, open Currents.
2. Click Menu Communities.
3. Click the community you want to see data for.
4. Click Manage  Insights.
5. To change the date range, in the top right, click the Down arrow .
6. To see what a number means, point to the number.