Moderator Training

• Daily maintenance. Review and approve posts, monitor comments, and guide community interactions.
• A welcoming environment. Encourage helpful, historically accurate discussion and enforce the Code of Conduct.
• Flagging and reporting. Alert Administrators to repeat offenders or anything that needs escalation.
• Screening members. Screen every membership request individually, and approve or decline each one on its own merits.
• Reviewing the Potential Spam folder. Analyze flagged items and escalate them to your County Administrator, who makes the final decision.

• All membership questions answered. Requests with unanswered questions are declined. This keeps out fake accounts, spammers, and high-risk members.
• Group rules agreed to. Requests that haven't agreed to the rules are declined. Every member must know the rules, so any future enforcement is based on rules they accepted.
• Invited members follow the same process. Invitees must also answer the questions and agree to the rules. Admin Assist declines invited members after an hour and notifies them what to do. This way they know they're being added, and nobody is upset to find themselves in a group without their knowledge.

Wait at least 1½ hours after a request arrives before screening it. That gives Admin Assist time to decline incomplete requests automatically and send the applicant a notification explaining why and how to fix it and reapply.

A personal message to someone who isn't on your friends list goes to their spam folder and is rarely read. The automatic notice is seen.

• Account age: at least 180 days. Newer accounts are declined. Spammers, bots, and hackers create burner accounts and abandon them quickly.
• Locked profiles are declined. The great majority of locked profiles requesting entry are scammers or identity thieves.
• Answers must make sense. Answers like a bare "yes," "Okie," or text that doesn't fit the question may be declined. Remember that at least one question needs a yes or no answer. Mismatched answers usually come from foreign-language accounts reading machine-translated questions.
• Friends list. Decline when the friends list shows signs of a spam or bot network. Many legitimate users hide their friends list, so this won't always apply.
• Suspicious names. Names of celebrities or news personalities, two first names together, or other odd patterns are signs of a fake account and need further screening.
• Prior violations. Check the Moderator Activity Log to make sure the applicant wasn't banned from another KHGN group. Problems in a sister group will follow them into yours.

Admin Assist automatically adds members from other KHGN groups they were already screened into. You won't be notified when this happens, but you can see these additions in the Activity Log under your group's management tab.

This lets screened members join sister groups without being declined again, and it's exactly why every Moderator's screening must be stringent. It takes the combined effort of every group's leadership.

• Decline by selecting the rule that wasn't met. The applicant receives an automatic notice explaining why and what to fix. Don't decline and then try to message them, since your message will likely land in their spam folder.
• Block suspected scam bots. If the request looks like a scam bot, block the profile entirely to protect the community.
• Unsure? Ask the workgroup. Post in the leadership workgroup for an overall opinion. Others may have seen the same account. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

1. First offense (minor): Hide the post if you're unsure, or delete it. Select the rule that was broken so the member receives an automatic notice citing that rule.
2. Second offense: Mute the member or suspend them temporarily, delete the post, and document the violation in the admin notes.
3. Third offense: Permanent ban and removal of their recent posts. Permanent bans are handled by Administrators, so flag the member for escalation.

• Free access. No advertisements, sales, or fees for lookups. Redirect members to free resources like KYGenWeb.
• Copyright. No copy-pasting of premium or paid content. Historical pieces must credit their original authors. When you suspect an item was lifted from a paid site, check that site's Terms of Use: many records are public documents, but the site's terms may limit them to its members' private use. See the Learning Center copyright guide.
• Living people. Private personal information about living individuals is strictly forbidden, even though members often discuss their own.
• Misinformation (optional). Encourage source citations and politely flag unsupported claims. This is difficult to apply consistently, so it's optional.

KHGN removes unavailable accounts regularly. They are removed, not banned, because some members take breaks from Facebook and ask to rejoin later. Banning them would prevent that.

Most unavailable accounts appear because someone, or a bot, has blocked the group's Moderators or Administrators.

Moderators never approve items in the Potential Spam folder. That decision belongs to the County Administrator. Your job is to analyze each item carefully and pass your findings upward, so the County Administrator can analyze it more deeply before deciding.

One exception: obvious scams. You may decline an item yourself when it is clearly a scam, such as a brand-new or empty account posting a link shortener, a lookalike web address, or "share before it's deleted" pressure. After declining it, let your County Administrator know so they can decide whether to remove the account. If there's any doubt at all, it isn't obvious: escalate it.

1. Leave the item in the folder. Never approve it. Decline it only if it's an obvious scam.
2. Analyze it using the steps and checklist below.
3. Escalate it in the leadership workgroup to your County Administrator: name the group, the poster, and when it was posted; say which checks it passed or failed; and give your recommendation (approve as a false positive, decline, or decline and remove the member). If you aren't sure, say so.
4. The County Administrator decides. If they're also uncertain, the item is not approved. It becomes a case for the leadership team to analyze together during hands-on training, and the decision is made by majority.

This gives you real exposure to the folder while keeping final authority with experienced leaders.

The Potential Spam folder is a holding area, not a waiting room. Nothing in it should reach the group until it has been analyzed and a County Administrator has confirmed it follows KHGN's rules. Approving an item without analyzing it causes harm in three ways:

• Violations reach the group. Scams, phishing links, political posts, private information about living people, or copied paid content get published to every member.
• The group itself is put at risk. Facebook holds the admin team responsible. Repeatedly approving content that breaks its standards can lead to the group being unpublished or deleted, along with years of members' research.
• It teaches Facebook's filter the wrong lesson. Facebook's system learns from every decision admins make. Approving something improper tells it that kind of content is acceptable, which helps similar violations slip past the filter, not just in our group but across the platform. Declining real violations, and approving only true false positives, teaches it correctly.

1. Open the item. Never decide from the preview in the list.
2. Run the link inspection checklist below on any link.
3. Check it against the group rules, even if it has no link: modern politics or religious debate, private information about living people, copied paid content, advertising or paid lookups.
4. Look at the poster's profile and history in the group.
5. Only then make your recommendation and escalate it to your County Administrator. A large backlog is a reason to ask for help, never a reason to speed up.

1. Read the visible text. Does the link text match the destination? Watch for odd endings like .xyz, .top, .info, .biz, or .cc; link shorteners like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, rb.gy, or is.gd; and misspelled sites like facbook.com or amaz0n.com.
2. Hover to reveal the real address. On a computer, rest your mouse on the link without clicking and read the address in the bottom-left corner of your browser. It must match the post. (Hovering isn't possible on phones, so skip this step there.)
3. Read the surrounding text. Watch for urgent or emotional pressure ("Click now before it's deleted!"), generic copied phrases that don't fit the group, and strange capitalization or symbols.
4. Inspect the poster's profile. Check their join date (accounts under 30 days old are high risk), their participation history, and whether the profile is missing a picture or locked and empty.

Passes all four steps and the group rules: it's likely a false positive. Escalate it with a recommendation to approve.

Clearly a scam: decline it yourself, then tell your County Administrator so they can decide about the account.

Fails any step or looks suspicious, but isn't clearly a scam: escalate it with a recommendation to decline, and say whether you think the member should be removed.

Unsure: escalate it and say you're unsure. Uncertain items are never approved; safety comes before approval.

Executive leadership runs random weekly audits of the Facebook Activity Log, filtered by action and moderator. Audits look for approvals of members with blank answers, many approvals within seconds of each other, and new members who post spam right after joining. Spam that gets in is traced back to the moderator who approved the account.

The discipline policy is proportional: a first offense brings a verbal warning and retraining; a second brings a written warning and a two-week suspension of admin privileges; a third means removal from the leadership team.

The member queue isn't an inbox that needs to reach zero. If you don't have time to screen properly, tell your Administrator, and we'll find help.

• Blank answers in the Activity Log. A moderator approved someone, but "View Answers" shows empty fields. They clicked Approve from the queue without opening the request.
• New members breaking rules within minutes. A bot or scammer got in because nobody read the profile or answers.
• A pattern of "0 of 3" or "1 of 3" approvals by the same moderator.
• Approvals seconds apart. Dozens of members approved in a single minute means the queue is being bulk-cleared. Nobody can read answers that fast.

• "Clear the queue" thinking: treating requests like an inbox that must hit zero.
• The phone app: answers are buried deeper on mobile, so you must tap into each request card.
• Chasing numbers: believing a bigger group is always better.
• Not knowing where to look: which is what this training fixes.

After this training, you'll moderate alongside a County Administrator mentor. Your hands-on period includes team case reviews, where the leadership team analyzes uncertain Potential Spam items together and decides by majority. When your mentor signs off, you're appointed as a Moderator and receive your Moderator role banner. The training banner below shows you've completed the coursework.