Moderated communities are designed to help stop off-topic or abusive entries in communities. If the moderation feature is enabled for your community, any time a new entry is made, a notification is sent to the community's moderator(s). In the notification, there is a link to a page where the moderators can approve or reject the entry. Until the entry is accepted, it is not visible to the other community members.
If the entry is accepted, a notification will be sent to the poster informing them that it was accepted. If the entry is rejected, the entry will be completely deleted; the poster will receive a notification with the full text of their entry and the reason why the request was rejected, if the moderator chose to give one.
MODERATING A COMMUNITY
To enable the moderation feature on your community, you must go to the Community Management area (
http://www.livejournal.com/community/manage.bml). Next, click the "Settings" link next to the community that you wish to moderate. Under the "Moderation" heading, select the "Moderated" option. Then click the "Update Settings" button. Now, your community is moderated.
Once your community is moderated, the current maintainer of the community will automatically be designated as the community moderator. If there are multiple community maintainers, the maintainer who switched the community to moderated will be designated as the moderator.
You may wish to designate other members as moderators, or remove the maintainer as a moderator. To do this, you must go back to the Community Management area (
http://www.livejournal.com/community/manage.bml). Then, next to the moderated community, go to the "Members" area. You will see a list of all the members in your community. Now, check the "Moderator" checkbox next to the username of each member that you wish to make a moderator. If you wish to remove the maintainer as a moderator, uncheck the "Moderator" checkbox next to the username of the maintainer.
Another option is to give a member Unmoderated status. This means that that member's entries are automatically approved and are visible to the other community members as soon as they are posted. To give a member Unmoderated status, choose the "Unmoderated" checkbox next to that member's username. Once you are finished with all moderation changes in the Community Members area, click the "Update Settings" button. A moderator can also give a user "Unmoderated" status after approving an entry made by this user.
LIMITS
There are limits on the number of posts that can be waiting in a community's moderation queue. If a user tries to post to the community after these limits have been reached, he/she will receive an error message stating "Maximum queued posts for this community+poster combination reached," and the entry will not be sent to the moderation queue or to the community. The maintainer will need to approve or reject moderated posts in order for the user to be able to post more entries to the community. The FAQ on LiveJournal's data limitations (
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=148) describes these limits.
TROUBLESHOOTING
If you receive an error that reads "The entry has not been posted due to this protocol error: Client error: Don't have access to requested journal" when approving an entry in the moderation queue, it indicates that the author of the entry no longer has posting access to the community you are moderating. This usually occurs because they leave the community after posting the entry but before it is approved.
If you want the entry to be posted, you may contact the user and ask them to rejoin the community, and approve the entry again after they rejoin. If you are also a maintainer of the community, you can instead change the community's settings temporarily to allow non-members to post, approve the entry, then restore the previous settings. Or, if you just want to remove the entry from the moderation queue without waiting for the member to rejoin or changing the community's settings, you will need to reject the entry.
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