The Manage your Automation Rules article teaches you everything you need to know about Automation Rules, including:
This article focuses solely on a subset of Automation Rules dedicated to report escalations, which are a part of the Community Management Dashboard. It assumes you're familiar with the fundamentals listed above.
Why use Escalation Automation Rules?
These Escalation Automation Rules are created and managed on a unique admin page and exist for a singular purpose: to create an automated process for flagging specific community content into the Escalations Dashboard for review.
⭐️ EXAMPLE: In large and busy communities, you may only be concerned with posts once they have been reported three to five times. In other words, rather than spending time evaluating every single report, you can limit your focus to those that land in the Escalations Dashboard, as these may truly be an issue in your community.
While not a complete replacement for moderator involvement throughout the community, these rules can help streamline the process and reduce workload.
Example of an escalation process flow
Let's take a look at one example of how you can use escalation Automation Rules to flag your community content for review.
⭐️ Goal
Our organization wants to use an escalation Automation Rule to track posts that receive 3 reports with the Report Reason as spam and/or inappropriate. This will help our community remain free of content our users feel is spam or inappropriate.
Rule configuration
With this goal in mind, we'll create the Rule as follows:
- Rule Trigger to
Post received reports. - Number of Reports to
3. - Report Reason to
Spam and Inappropriate. - Rule Action to
Create Escalation.
✔️ TIP: The Category and Assign Moderator options allow you to inject an important level of nuance to this process. For example, we can create multiple Rules as outlined above but target each one to a specific Category in our community. Then, we can assign a specific moderator the responsibility of monitoring the escalations in each Category. In this way, we could create a flow where John monitors escalations in the We Love Dogs Category, while Mary monitors escalations in the Cats are the Best Category. Users can elect to receive notifications each time an escalation is assigned to them (refer to the Escalation notifications section below to learn more).
Additional escalation flow example
- You could leverage Higher Logic Vanilla's sentiment-analysis feature to track community posts that include negative sentiment around keywords your organization is tracking.
Escalation notifications
As mentioned above, users can be assigned to monitor escalations triggered by your Escalation Automation Rules. To help ensure these users are aware of new escalations, they can enable the following notification in their profile's Notification Preferences page:
- Notify me of Escalations that have been assigned to me
✅ TIP: Individual escalations can also be assigned to specific users when managing them from the Escalations Dashboard. These assignments will also trigger a notification.
Access Escalation Automation Rules
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Moderation > Settings > Escalation Rules.
📝 NOTE: While you can technically create and manage escalation-based Rules from the "main" Settings > Automation > Automation Rules page, the purpose of the Escalation Rules page is to silo these Rules into their own page for easier management.
Escalation Rule Triggers and Actions
As a refresher:
- A Rule Trigger is the "prompt" that causes a Rule to run.
- A Rule Action is what happens when the Rule is triggered.
Let's take a look at the available escalation-based Triggers and Actions.
Escalation-based Triggers
- Post received reports
- Post receives a minimum number of points
- Sentiment of the post
- Time since post has had no activity
- Time since post has had no comments
- Time since question has been unanswered
- Votes on an idea
Escalation-based Actions
- Create an Escalation
- Escalate to Github
- Escalate to Zendesk
📝 NOTE: The Zendesk and Github actions are only available for communities leveraging those integrations.
Escalations Dashboard
As its name suggests, the Escalations Dashboard lists all reported content that has been flagged as "escalated," indicating this content likely requires special attention.
This is where community content will go once triggered by your Escalation Automation Rules (along with any content manually flagged by moderators).
To learn more about the Escalations Dashboard, check out the article below.
