You can turn on message moderation to have messages approved or blocked before they’re sent to the rest of the group.
Turn message moderation on or off
- Sign in to Google Groups.
- Click the name of a group.
- On the left, click Group settings.
-
Select your moderation options. For:
- Message moderation—Choose a review option: Moderate all messages, Moderate messages from non-members, or No moderation.
- New member restrictions—To review messages from new members, select New member posts are moderated.
-
(Optional) To send a notification when a moderated message is rejected, for Rejected message notification, click On.
- (Optional) To send a message with the notification, check the box
write your default message in the text field.
- Click Save.
Approve or reject pending messages
Requires the Who can moderate content permission.
Content moderators get an email spam report that includes spam messages from the moderation queue. The report is sent weekly on Tuesday and Friday in the Pacific time zone, which might be Wednesday and Saturday in other time zones.
Messages that aren’t approved are automatically deleted after 14 days. Messages marked as spam are automatically deleted after 7 days.
- Sign in to Google Groups.
- Click the name of a group.
- On the left, for Conversations, click Pending.
- (Optional) To read a message, click it.
- (Optional) To approve or reject a single message, in the message entry, click Approve message
or Reject message
.
- (Optional) To perform an action on multiple messages:
- Check the boxes next to the messages.
- At the top, choose an option:
- To approve the messages, click Approve messages
- To reject the messages, click Reject messages
- To approve the messages and automatically approve all future posts by those authors, click Approve author
.
This option allows the author to post directly to the group in the future and supersedes group level moderation and posting permissions.
- To ban the authors from the conversation and report the messages as spam, click Reject author
.
- To approve the messages, click Approve messages
Troubleshoot unexpected moderation behavior
If message moderation isn’t working the way you expect, check these explanations to help understand or fix the issue.
| Issue | What to check | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| The Moderate messages from non-members setting always reverts to No moderation. | Who can post setting:
|
With any of these options selected, non-members can’t post, so there’s nothing to moderate. |
| Messages appear on the Pending messages page, even though I’ve chosen No moderation. | Spam message handling setting:
|
Either of these spam handling options routes messages to the pending list, regardless of the message moderation setting. |
| Messages from a new member aren’t going through moderation, even though I’ve chosen New member posts are moderated. | Where the member was added | The New member posts are moderated setting applies only to members added in Google Groups. For work or school accounts, if an administrator adds a member in the Google Admin console or Groups API, messages from that member are always approved. To resolve this issue, remove the member from the group and add them in Google Groups. |