Key Tips
- Post approvals allow you to decide what posts appear in your group.
- Depending on the type of group you run, post approvals may help group conversations stay on track.
- If you are going to use post approvals, be sure to review pending posts quickly to let members feel heard.
Post approvals can be turned on or off as needed. Admins and moderators use them to temporarily manage conflict.
All posts from group members appear in your group by default unless you turn on the post approval option. With post approvals, admins can review all pending posts within a group and must approve them before they appear. Experienced admins tell us there are different reasons to use post approvals:
- You're on holiday and you can't moderate posts effectively.
- An inflammatory topic is taking the group away from its intended purpose.
- People post about the same thing over and over again.
Admins agree that whether or not you use post approvals can depend on the nature of the group. A supportive group, where members need to talk immediately and freely, might not want to use post approvals. A small family or friend's group may not want to limit member participation in any way. A group that is about one specific topic may use post approvals as a way to prevent members from posting about something off-topic and unrelated.
On the rare occasions when group conflict occurs, admins recommend temporarily turning on post approvals until tensions have eased as a way to manage member conflict.
Audio transcript
"Post approval is something that I only set up if I see a behavior forming in the group. I'll turn on post approvals, so that way I can prevent all of those posts from happening. I don't use it on a daily basis like a lot of other admins do, but I do use it when situations arise where members are acting unruly. I can turn that on and just stop everything and then clear everything out. And then when I turn it back off, it's like it never happened." - Dwayne, Group Admin
