Moderator Guidelines

You become a moderator once you hit 1000 karma points.
With power comes great responsibility.
By becoming a moderator you agree to following the Moderator Guidelines.

The guidelines are to help all moderators have a unified way of working together in an effort to improve Unity Answers with the following goals:

• Making authentic questions more visible so they can be answered
• Minimize the amount of commonly asked questions
• Increase the overall quality of users questions
• Make it easier for users to find the information they need

Together we can teach users in what ways Unity Answers can be used as a complement to the Unity Forums, the Learn material and the Documentation. All of these sections exist to provide the information needed to help users with creating their projects in Unity. We want users to make more effort in searching for information in all of these sections as well as contribute to the knowledge-sharing that has become a key part to participating in the community.

Publishing and rejecting in the moderation queue 

It’s not always obvious knowing when to reject or publish a post, especially if you are new to moderation in Unity Answers. We have decided on some general reasons to reject a post in the moderation queue, and this comes with only one rule: you must provide a reason to that user for rejecting the post. As there currently does not exist a drop-down menu function similar to the one we have for closing questions, you can leave a written reason as a comment.

If you add a comment to a post that's in the moderation queue, make sure to publish or reject it immediately. We need to reduce the amount of posts in the queue, and if you’ve had the time to leave a comment that means you have read the question and can make a decision on whether to reject or publish it right away.

Reasons for a question to get rejected in the mod queue
 

• Duplicate question: the question has been asked several time before and there are existing answers available that can be found through a search. Leave a comment that this question already exists if the user were to search, together with a link to a similar question.
  
  
• Question is not specific enough: user is asking for a script, there are no suggestions on what the user has already tried, question is more suitable for the forums (subjective or requires discussions), multiple questions in one post or not providing enough context (no code snippets, screenshots, etc).
  
  
• Badly formatted question: code provided by user is unformatted or it’s unclear what the user is asking. Reject immediately. If the post is not in English, edit the question and insert a Google translation into English for others to understand.
  
  
• Debugging questions: general coding questions or game development questions where the answer requires a more extensive discussion around programming basics, user has followed a tutorial but is stuck or user is asking others to debug their code. Leave a comment with a link to the Learn section as a good place to start when one is new to Unity or game development.
  
  
• Posts that include a compiler error or NullReferenceException: all of these compiler errors (such as BCE0001) are included as tags, and there are multiple questions already. These new posts need to be tagged and then rejected.
  
  
• Non-Unity question: we want to strictly keep Unity Answers for Unity-related content.

Reasons for an answer to get rejected in the mod queue

• Replies to very old questions or commonly asked questions: these do not necessarily always have to be rejected, as revealing these helps with housekeeping of the content. Allowing certain replies to be published helps us discover questions that either need to be cleaned up and closed, or bumped up because they are providing good answers.

• If a user accidentally posts comments as answers: these should be converted into comments to the original question and either published or rejected.

Closing published questions

When it comes to closing posts that have already been published, use the same reasons you would for rejecting a post in the moderation queue. If you choose “Other” as the reason from the drop-down menu, make sure to provide the user with a written reason.

Managing tags (now called topics)

Make sure the question is tagged with proper tags/topics that are actually related to the content of the question. Tags/topics such as “help” or “unity” are not telling of what that question is about, so please remove these types of tags/topics. If required, attach tags/topics that you think are relevant to the question which are not attached by the OP.

Promote good behaviour from users

Last but not least, as moderators you can lead the way for other users. Make sure to promote the type of behaviour we want in our community to increase the experience of participating:

• Encourage upvoting of good, detailed questions and answers
  
  
• Encourage OP’s to accept helpful answers to their questions

Instructions for how to use the moderation queue

Clicking the "publish" button will submit the post to the site, and clicking the "reject" button will prevent the post from being submitted. If you are rejecting a post, please leave a comment stating the reason why it's being rejected. It's currently not possible to leave a comment directly through the moderation queue.

The way to leave a comment to an OP:

Commenting in the individual post (after opening it) - If you open the post form the mod queue list, leave a comment through clicking the “add new comment” button.

If you comment on a post, you must immediately either publish or reject it.

The OP will then see these comments on their posts in their activity panel on their Unity Answers profile page, even if the post is rejected.

Converting an answer to a comment 
Users will sometimes leave an answer when they intend to leave a comment. Convert that answer to a comment using the “convert to comment” button. You can currently not perform this action through the moderation queue, but have to open up the Answer in a separate tab.