Public content moderation is the moderation of content created by public District Engage users, such as posting a discussion, idea, question or comment. Moderation ensures that offensive, off-topic or threatening content is not published on the platform.
Public content moderation can be done either internally (by internal users that are members of the project) or externally (through a third-party service).
Moderation of public content is managed on the project level and applies to all participation tools and comments within the project.
Manage project moderation settings
Through the District Engage moderation settings you can manage:
The participation moderation type: This determines who is responsible for moderating public content. Moderation of public content can either be done by the internal District Engage users (Internal moderation) or can be managed by an external party (External moderation)
Participation default status: This determines whether public content gets published automatically without approval (Published), or requires approval prior to being published (Requires approval). When the status âPublishedâ is selected, moderators have the ability to delete or update the content at any time.
To edit the moderation settings within an existing project:
Navigate to the Dashboard.
In the top-level menu bar, click Projects. This will show you a list of all the projects you have access to.
Scroll to the relevant project. On the right-hand side, click the ellipsis menu icon.
Click Edit to be taken directly to the projectâs editing tab.
Scroll down to the Advanced settings section in the right sidebar.
Click Participation settings, and update the participation moderation type or Participation default status by selecting the right option from the drop-down.
Once youâre ready to save, click Save as draft.

Approve or reject public content
There are two ways to view the list of public content that requires approval:
Project pending moderations: To see all public content pending approval for a specific project.
All pending moderations: For an overview of public content that requires approval across all your projects. Depending on your role and permissions, you might only be able to a subset of public content that requires approval.
Project pending moderations
Pending moderations for a specific project can be accessed on the participation tool level, meaning you can get an overview of all pending moderations per participation tool. There is currently no way to view a list of all pending moderations for a specific project across all its participation tools.
In order to review all public content that requires approval for a specific project:
Navigate to the Dashboard.
In the top-level menu bar, click Projects. This will show you a list of all the projects you have access to.
Scroll to the relevant project and click on the project title, you will land on the Project report tab.
In the left-hand menu, click on the relevant participation tool. E.g. click Ideas.
Scroll to the relevant Idea topic, and click on the title of the idea topic. This will bring you to the Idea topic overview page.
Scroll down to the Submissions section of the page to get an overview of all public submissions. In the Status column, you see the moderation status of that specific submission (Published, Requires approval, Rejected).
To update the moderation status of a specific submission, scroll to the specific submission. Either click on its title to open up a modal or on the right-hand side, click the ellipsis menu icon > Edit to be taken directly to the Idea submissions review tab.
Scroll down to the Respond and moderate section. To update the status, select the relevant status from the Status dropdown.
Click Save changes to save the updated status.

The process can be followed to review public content for all other participation tools by selecting the relevant participation tool in the left-hand menu in step 4, and then follow the consecutive steps.
All pending moderations
To access pending moderations for public content across all projects:
Navigate to the Dashboard.
In the top-level menu bar, click Review.
In the left-hand menu, click Moderation. This will bring you to the pending moderation tab, which shows a list of all public content that needs to be reviewed. Per moderation item, you can see the project and moderation status.
To change the status of a pending moderation, scroll down to the relevant title, and click on the title. This will bring you to the Review tab of that specific public content.
In the Respond and moderate section, you can update the status by selecting the relevant status from the Status dropdown.
Click Save changes, to save the status change.
Note: Once an item has been Published or Rejected, it will be removed from the Pending moderation list.
To access the rejected moderation items:
Navigate to the Dashboard.
In the top-level menu bar, click Review.
In the left-hand menu, click Moderation. This will bring you to the pending moderation tab, which shows a list of all public content that needs to be reviewed.
Click the Rejected tab to be brought to a list of all rejected public content items.