Create your own online discussion in an easy, democratic way.
Moderator allows any YouTube user to collect commentary, questions, or ideas on your YouTube Channel and watch the best ones rise to the top. It's easy - you bring a group of people together on a topic of your choice, and leverage their collective wisdom to vote on the best video and text submissions. You can respond to individual submissions, or the entire conversation, in a one-to-many dialogue.
How do I get started?
First, decide the topic or question you want your Moderator series to focus on. Do you want to collect questions for an online interview, ideas for a topic you're thinking about, or feedback on a video you've created? The sky's the limit. Just be sure to clearly define what you're asking for, and be ready to respond to the top-voted submissions that come in.
In the past, Moderator has been used to:
- Collect questions for a YouTube Interview with President Obama.
- Gather money saving tips from the community to help ease budgets during the recession.
- Engage foreign leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos.
How do I set up Moderator?
Once you've got a topic for your Moderator series, go to your Channel page and in the "Edit Channel" bar, click on the "Modules" tab.
Click on the checkbox next to "Moderator" to enable the Moderator module on your Channel and click "Save".Then, find the Moderator module on your Channel and click on the "Edit" link in the top right-hand corner.
Give your Moderator series a title and description. If you like, upload a YouTube video to help your audience understand exactly what your particular Moderator is about - you can add the YouTube URL to the "video" field in the admin panel, and it will show up on the right side of your Moderator.
You can also decide whether to allow people to submit questions or ideas - and you can set a timer to show your community the deadline for submissions.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you see a question, idea or suggestion that's been submitted to a Moderator, you can vote to push it towards the top of the page. To do so, simply click the thumbs-up button. You can also click the thumb-down button if you'd like to vote against an existing submission. When you mouse over the bars, you'll see the number of votes that have already been submitted.
All you need is a Google account that's linked to a YouTube account. If you're signed in, you're set to go - if not, the login flow will direct you to sign in before submitting.
Moderator ranks questions based on a simple statistical algorithm, with the goal of discovering the most popular questions. That algorithm is the ratio of positive votes to total votes for a submission, which is scaled by the total number of votes for the submission.
The "popular" filter measures the overall popularity of a question, as explained above. "Hot" submissions are recently-submitted and have inspired lots of early voting. We default to showing the "hot" filter to encourage voting on a broad number of questions as opposed to solidifying the most-popular submissions.
If you'd like to remove a submission that you posted, just click the "Remove" link next to your submission. It will be removed and will no longer be associated with your account.
When a submission in a Moderator is reported to the owner, it means that someone participating in this Moderator series has marked the submission as inappropriate. The Channel owner can then decide whether the submission is inappropriate or not. If he/she agrees, this submission will no longer appear in the Moderator series.
You can moderate your series by clicking on the "Reports to Review" link on the right-hand side of the Moderator module. You'll be taken to a list of submissions that other members of the community have "reported to owner". Next to each reported submission there are two options: you can "agree" or "disagree" with the user(s) that have reported the submission. By "agreeing", you delete the submission from the Moderator series altogether. By "disagreeing", you decide to allow the submission remain in the Moderator series, and it will not show up in the "Reports to Review" queue again.
Click on the "edit" link in the top right-hand corner of the Moderator module. Here you'll be able to edit your existing Moderator series, create a new Moderator series, or you can select an existing Moderator series to display on your Channel.
No, you can only have one Moderator on your YouTube Channel at a time.
Yes. The Moderator series and submissions you create on your YouTube Channel will appear on Google Moderator, will be accessible via the Google Moderator API and will be associated with to the Google account you've connect to your YouTube account.
Yes, you can embed Moderator on your site by i-framing the Moderator series you create on www.google.com/Moderator. However, embedding requires an additional parameter to avoid authentication issues with IE and Safari browsers when users have to login.
In order to embed a Moderator series into a website the embed URL template is:
http://www.google.com/Moderator?embed=#
As an example, for the Google Moderator series: "Ask a Google engineer" (regular URL: http://www.google.com/Moderator/#16/e=c9 ), the series information is 16/e=c9, which is the text after the # symbol. (It will be different for your series).
If we want to embed this Google Moderator series into the webpage
http://www.example.com/questions, then the final embed URL would be:
http://www.google.com/Moderator?embed=https://web.archive.org/web/20130422185554id_/http://www.example.com/questions#16/e=c9
If you're the owner of a Moderator series, you can post comments in response to any submission. Just click the "Post a Response" link next to a particular submission, and you can share your thoughts on that submission.
If you have any feedback, please let us know.
