Back in 2010, Anthony Mann, who helps moderate the Windows forums, migrated the TechNet/MSDN Forums Moderation Guide to TechNet Wiki.

It's worthy of an ebook. So he broke it up into different articles.

Here is the TOC (it's so big that we broke it into sections)...

Forum Moderation

Forum Moderation Overview Audience Terminology Roles and Affiliations Optimizing Your Profile Responsibility Moderation Approach

Moderation Tasks

General Guidelines Etiquette PII Escalation Signatures Avatars Banning Users

Managing Posts and Threads

General Guidelines Managing Abusive Threads Deleting Posts and Threads Managing Thread Types Managing Thread Titles Quoting Marking Answers Locking Threads Moving Threads Move Threads Between Different Language Forums Merging Threads Splitting Threads Duplicate Postings Linking Managing Language Managing Trolls Escalation

The top MSDN/TechNet forum owners at Microsoft got together to discuss the best practices and guidelines laid out. While we agreed with them, we found that they were a little light and fluffy. We wanted harder guidelines for moderators to follow.

So, specifically, we dug into this article:

• Forum Moderation Guide: Managing Posts and Threads: Marking Answers

.

And we hammered out some solid guidelines. Next time, we'll dig into those guidelines!

In the meantime, I'll assume you haven't read the plethora of articles above, and I'll leave you to it!

 

May the Forums be with you! (Don't be a rogue one.)

- Ninja Ed

 

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This post is part of conversation in this series of blog posts:

• Forum Moderators Best Practices Part 1 – Behold the Forum Moderation Guide!!!
• Forum Moderation Best Practices Part 2 – Propose an answer and then mark it 7 days later
• Forum Moderation Best Practices Part 3 – Are you marking a third-party solution as the answer? Use caution!
• Forum Moderation Best Practices Part 4 – Ask the OPs to mark their own answers
• Forum Moderation Best Practices Part 5 – Mark other peoples’ answers as much as possible!!!
• Forum Moderation Best Practices Part 6 – Let your Vote be Heard! (I wonder what it’s saying.)