Moderate your portal

Moderation happens on the portal itself, not in a separate back office. Your team works where your customers already are: every question page has an inline staff toolbar, and a dedicated moderation queue lists everything across the portal in one place. The dashboard is just sign-in, team, analytics, and settings: it doesn’t have a moderation view.

Any team member (owner, admin, or agent) sees a Staff toolbar at the top of a question page whenever they’re signed in, visible only to staff, never to customers. From there they can:

Toggle the question private/public
Close or reopen the question
Pin or unpin the question
Delete the question outright
Delete any reply on the question, not just their own

The toolbar’s safe actions (visibility, status, pin) sit together on the left; Delete question sits on its own at the far right, set apart so it can’t be mistaken for a routine action. Deletes ask for confirmation first, since they can’t be undone. The toolbar itself doesn’t link out to the moderation queue, it’s for acting on the question you’re already looking at, see the next section for the portal-wide view.

The moderation queue

For a bird’s-eye view instead of working question-by-question, open Moderation from the portal header (staff-only link, not from the question toolbar above). It lists every question on the portal, including private ones, with:

A private badge on anything not publicly visible
Status (open / solved / closed)
Vote and reply counts
Filters for status, privacy, and a search box

Click through from the queue to a question’s own page to act on it with the staff toolbar above.

Pinned questions

Any team member can pin a question from its staff toolbar, useful for a welcome post, house rules, or an announcement you want every visitor to see first. Pinned questions render at the top of the portal’s question list, marked with a small pin icon, ahead of everything else regardless of vote score or recency.

Pin as many questions as you like; when there’s more than one, the most recently pinned one sits first. Unpin the same way, from the same toolbar, to send a question back into the regular sort order.

Making a question private or public

Any team member can flip a question’s visibility at any time, independent of which category it’s in:

Private: visible only to the question’s author and your team. It’s removed from public listings, search, and the sitemap.
Public: visible to everyone.

This is separate from private categories (see Organize with categories & tags): a question in a public category can still be marked private on its own, and a question originally created in a private category can be made public once it’s no longer sensitive.

Closing and reopening questions

Closing a question stops new replies from being added, which is useful once an issue is resolved or a thread has run its course.

Close a question from its staff toolbar. It stays visible and searchable (existing replies and votes remain), but no new replies can be posted.
Reopen it the same way if it turns out the discussion needs to continue.

Closing is reversible and doesn’t affect the question’s URL or its solution.

Deleting questions

Team members can delete a question outright. This is permanent: unlike closing, there’s no undo. Use deletion for spam, abuse, or content that shouldn’t exist at all, and closing for anything you’d rather keep as a record.

Bulk-deleting questions

For clearing out spam or a batch of low-quality questions at once, the moderation queue supports deleting more than one question in a single action instead of opening each one individually.

Check the box next to each question you want gone (or the header checkbox to select everything on the current page), then click Delete selected. You’ll be asked to confirm once for the whole batch. It’s all-or-nothing: every selected question is deleted together, and just like a single delete, it’s permanent, there’s no undo.

Solutions

Any reply can be marked as the solution. A solution is pinned directly below the question, above every other reply, and is a strong signal to other customers (and to search engines) that the question is solved.

Marking a solution is fundamentally the asker’s call: whoever asked the question can mark any reply as the solution, whether it came from another customer or from your team. This isn’t a team-only privilege: peer replies are just as eligible as team replies.

Your team can also mark solutions, right from the question page, useful for moderation and curation, for example when the asker never comes back to close out their own question. Team marking uses the exact same mechanism as the asker’s: mark the reply that resolved the thread, and it’s pinned to the top for every future visitor.

Only one solution per question at a time. Marking a different reply as the solution swaps the previous one out automatically; nothing needs to be un-marked manually first. Marking the reply that’s already the solution un-marks it, and the question goes back to open.

Replies and the reply-to indicator

There’s no separate comments layer to moderate: every reply, whether it’s a full answer or a quick follow-up pointing at someone else’s reply (see How your customers sign in, ask & vote), is the same kind of row and gets the same moderation treatment. Customers can delete their own replies; your team can delete any reply, on any question, using the delete control on that reply, the same “delete any reply” staff privilege described above.