Moderators for @iheartquotes

First, quickly, for people who follow this blog but aren’t quote enthusiasts, I want to share something that I learned from my friend Ben at Fluther. If you have a passionate community and you ask them for help, they will help you. The @iheartquotes twitter account has had a half-hearted update policy for years because I never was willing to ask for help. Then one day I said, hey, what the hell, I’m going to ask if anyone wants to be a moderator. It turns out that lots of people wanted to help out and now almost every day we have a lot of community submitted, moderator-vetted quotes.

Organizing the moderators is a whole different ballgame, which is actually why I wanted to get this post up. As moderators drop out we need to replace them and people always ask, “What does a moderator do?” So I wanted to post somewhere so people could make a decision before I set them up with all of the accounts (we use Google Groups and CoTweet).

Hello moderators,

We have a pretty simple goal–we’re taking user submitting quotes and republishing them for our wider quote-loving audience. Here are instructions for how to participate.

1. If you are a new moderator, you should introduce yourself. Let everyone know who you are and why you love quotes.

2. You will be responsible for a day of the week. You should sign up for one of the open days on the schedule page. Then, every week, when that day rolls around, you will be responsible for checking for new quotes and scheduling them to be republished on the @iheartquotes twitter account. There are a lot of people who have asked to help moderate, so if you can’t check reliably on your day, you should bow out. If skipping your day becomes a habit you will be quietly replaced.

3. To check and republish quotes, you should sign into the CoTweet.com program and:

3A. Check the scheduled outbox to see if there are any tweets already scheduled. Your goal will be to pick up from wherever the scheduled quotes leave off and then make sure there are quotes scheduled for the three days following your day.

3B. Go through the Inbox Messages.

3B. If a message is a RT of one of our quotes, check it off so that it’s archived and no longer in the inbox. Most quotes will be Retweets of quotes we’ve posted.

3C. If the message is a quote that’s reasonably good then you should schedule it for retweeting by clicking the RT button.

3D. We try to format quotes in the style below so that they are clear and while taking a minimum number of characters. Notice that it allows us to skip quotes, some whitespace, and punctuation.
I’m learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma~Eartha Kitt | RT @somebody

4. The process should take about 30 minutes.