Moderate a Google Group

As a Google Group owner, want to protect your members from spam and ensure relevant discussions? Follow these steps to effectively moderate messages, set permissions, and keep your Google Group inbox clean and focused.

Google Group owners are able to moderate the messages sent to their members to protect them from junk mail. Moderation is not active by default and should be set up as appropriate by the group owner. Owners and managers are generally granted permission to determine which messages should be allowed to be sent to group members. Messages held for moderation will appear in the “Pending Messages” queue until a decision is made about their distribution.

MODERATION OPTIONS:
  • Moderate no messages (all messages get sent to members) (Sewanee Default)
  • Moderate all messages (all messages are placed in pending until approval)
  • Moderate messages from non-members (messages from members are sent through but messages from non-members are held pending)

Note: Any message that Google suspects might be spam will also be held in “Pending Messages”.

REJECTED MESSAGE SETTINGS:

The Rejected Author notification setting determines whether or not the sender of the rejected message receives a message notifying them that their message did not go through. Options include:

  • Do not notify (Sewanee Default)
  • Default rejection message
  • Custom rejection message
MODERATION SETTINGS AND EXECUTION

Turn on message moderation:

  1. Sign in to Google Groups
  2. Click My Groups and choose the desired group
  3. On the left side menu, select Group Settings
  4. Scroll to the “Message Moderation” section and choose the appropriate level of moderation
  5. Click [Save changes]
Approve or deny pending messages

To approve or deny pending messages, you must have a role with “Moderate content” permissions. Content moderators also get a “Moderator’s spam report” email that includes any messages held as spam. All Owners and Managers are assigned this role by default for the Sewanee Groups.

To approve or deny pending messages:

  1. Sign in to Google Groups
  2. Click My Groups and choose the desired group.
  3. On the left side menu, see the Conversations > Pending
  4. To read a message, click on the title
  5. To approve or deny a single message click the appropriate icon at the end of the message row.
    • Approve this message
    • Reject this message
  6. To approve or deny multiple messages, select all messages that you with to moderate
  7. At the top of the message list select one of the following options:
    • Post and always allow future messages from author(s)
    • Report spam and ban author(s) from this forum
    • Approve selected messages (check mark): approves the message
    • Reject selected messages (⊗): blocks the message