Lists, Committees, and Moderation

NOTE: Due to changes in industry practices, Discussion lists that are mentioned in this article are no longer available in MatrixMaxx. 

Lists, Committees, and Moderation —————————————

Lists, especially those with a mailing list component, have some of the most detailed setting options in all of MatrixMaxx. To help you get started, here is a summary of those settings:

INDIVIDUAL LISTS

When you create a new Individual List in the Communications module, you have the option to also create an attached email list using our built-in list serve functionality.

When creating an email list, you may set the list to be either 1) moderated or 2) NOT moderated. If you chose to have your email list moderated, any email that is sent will trigger your list administrator(s) to get the moderation message. Your administrator(s) and may then make a choice to approve/reject/discard the message. This allows your administrators to safeguard the list against spam, unapproved users, or any other inappropriate messages.

Whether or not you choose to have your email lists moderated, here are a few important notes to keep in mind:

•  Sometimes, even if a list is NOT moderated, a messages will be held for approval. This can be caused by a few circumstances, many of which are fairly common. Causes for an otherwise acceptable message to be held in moderation include: an individual posting from an email address that is not the one attached to them in MatrixMaxx (this is common when uses post from their smartphones, which often has a personal email account set as a default ‘from’ address), a member trying to post in the incorrect list, or a message that is too big due to attachments or a particularly large email body. Please look at the administration reason for moderation (located in the moderation notification to administrators) carefully before contacting Matrix to report this as a ‘bug.’

•  There are 2 levels of moderation in MatrixMaxx:
  •  HIGHEST moderation forces ALL messages to be approved, even if the sender is an administrator. This is a failsafe and all new MatrixMaxx implementations are set to the highest level as a default.
  • LOWER moderation allows admins and designated staff posters to bypass moderation. This makes sending messages faster, but also introduces the likelihood that someday a mistaken email may happen.

• Bypassing Moderation (this must be done by Matrix staff via a request in writing):
  • If you set-up your list to bypass moderation, you have two options to allow staff to bypass the moderation
  • Option 1: set the list to “All Staff” and this adds all association staff to the list. Any message sent to the list from one of these staff people will bypass moderation.
  • Option 2: set the list to “Designated Staff.” This option allows you to manually add whomever you would like to have set as Designated Staff who will bypass moderation. Those on this list will be able to send messages directly to the list without moderation.

• Please note that Matrix must receive a request in writing (i.e., a formal work request) to change these moderation settings.

COMMITTEES and LISTS

Any staff member with rights to the Communication module can create a list and an email list based on a Committee roster! However, as some larger organizations don’t give all committee staff access to the Communication module, the Committees are set up to generate an email list automatically.

These auto-generated committee list settings are determined during your initial MatrixMaxx implementation. The two main questions you need to consider during setup are:

• Should your lists be Broadcast (all staff can post) or Discussion (members of the committee can post)?
• Do you want your lists to be Moderated or Non-moderated?

These settings impact ALL committees, so we instruct staff to choose the default setting based on how they want the MAJORITY of the committee lists to function. However, you may have one or two lists (often the Board list) that you or your staff want to function differently from the bulk of your committee lists. Currently, there is no way to override this default on a per-committee basis, but there is an easy way to create a second list.

You may manually create a second committee list in the Communication list area, with the settings you want, using the first list (Ex. your Board list) as the criteria.

Example: The company NAFC wants the majority of their lists, and hence their default committee list setup, to be Broadcast/Non-moderated. However,they want the Board list to be Discussion/Non-moderated. So:

1.  They setup the Board Committee, and create the default list which they name ‘Board-Broadcast’
2. They go to the Communications module and create a new list named ‘Board-Discussion’ and they give it the setup and moderation properties they want it to have.
3. They use an inclusion criteria to add members to the second ‘Board-Discussion’ list. The inclusion criteria is  that anyone on the first list, ‘Board-Broadcast’ will be added to this new list. (Inclusion Criterion –> Include new criterion –> List Membership –> search for ‘Board-Broadcast’)
4. Then, when members are added/removed from the original committee, the auto-generated second Board-Broadcast list will be updated, and automatic the nightly list sync will update the manually created second ‘Board-discussion’ list! (Or, staff may manually go to this list and ‘update’ using the update link, if they need to send anything to that list immediately.)

Confused as to why you don’t see anything about Organization lists here? Organization lists do NOT have mailing lists attached, and therefore do not have moderation settings.