Help > Forum > Topics & Posts > Approving and declining posts

Approving and declining posts

The Post Approval feature allows you to approve posts before they are displayed on your forum. You can choose to approve all posts or only the first few posts made by a user. Choosing to approve the first few posts made by a user is a useful way to stop spammers who create accounts for the sole purpose of posting spam. After the first valid post by the user, you would know that it is not an account created by a spammer.

You can also optionally only approve the posts that contain links. For example, if it is the user's first post and it also contains a link to a website.

Please be sure to enable post approval before attempting to review pending posts. Posts that are suspected of being spam will require your approval even if the Approve Posts option is off.

Once post approval has been enabled, you can approve or decline posts in your forum by following the instructions below:

1. Log in to your forum account. (Must be a moderator or administrator account.)
2. On mobile devices and in some themes, click the (main menu) icon located towards the top left corner of the page. Skip this step if you don't see the icon.
3. Click the Categories link.
4. Click the icon located towards the top-right of the page.
5. Click the Approve/Decline icon next to the post.

You can also be sent an email notification when users create a new post or topic in your forum.

If you're concerned about the nature of the content that may be posted, consider using the inappropriate content filter to automatically detect and reject or require approval of posts containing toxicity, insults, profanity, identity attacks, flirtatious or sexually explicit content, or threats using machine learning.

If you still need help, please contact us.