A moderation message is a convenient way for Admins and Moderators to inform community users of news, events, and other important information. You can control where in your community these messages display.
📝 NOTE: Moderation Messages do not display on Layout Editor pages. Instead, use a Call to Action ("CTA") widget on those pages to display a "site-wide" message to your users.
Message examples
You can add basic HTML to these messages, including bold, links, and images.
📝 NOTE: Before a moderation message is rendered, any included HTML is filtered. This is done to fix any malformed elements, and to protect your site against any potential security issues. If you include more complex HTML code, it may be removed and not display in the rendered message.
Required permissions
To manage moderation messages, a user must belong to a Role with the following permissions:
Garden > Community > Manage Garden > Moderation > Manage
To learn how to access and manage your Roles and permissions, see:
Manage your moderation messages
To access your moderation messages:
- Access your Dashboard.
- Navigate to Moderation > Site > Messages.
Here, you can enable/disable, edit, and delete your existing moderation messages.
Create a message
- Click Add Message.
- Configure the fields below, and then click Save.
Configuration options
- Appearance: Select one of four appearance options: Casual, Information, Alert, or Warning. Each has a unique colour (set in your base theme) and distinct CSS classes that you can override in your Custom Theme.
- Message: Type or paste the message text. You can include basic HTML but no JavaScript. (If you need that for ad code, check out Pockets.)
- Page: Select where in your community your message will display. You can have it display on all pages or just a specific page.
- Position: Your moderation message can display above content or on the sidebar.
- Category: You can choose to have your message display in a specific Category or in all Categories. You can also check the Include Subcategories box.
- Dismissable: If toggled on, logged-in users can dismiss the message (it will no longer display for them). It will continue to display for Guests and users who don't dismiss it.
✔️ TIP: When a moderation message has been dismissed by a logged-in user, it will never display to that user again. Because of this, we recommend not making important messages dismissible.
- Enabled: Use this toggle to set the message as visible (or not) in your community.
Communication is key, but don't overdo it
While these messages are a great way to communicate important information to your community, numerous messages in a short span of time will likely frustrate your users. With this in mind:
- Make sure your community managers are working together and have a schedule for what messages to display (and when).
- Have a community manager regularly review your messages and keep only the most recent/important ones.
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
