Moderate your portal

Day-to-day moderation happens on the portal itself, right where your team is already reading and replying: every question page has an inline staff toolbar for acting on the question in front of you. For a bird’s-eye view across every question on the portal, including bulk actions, use the Questions page on your dashboard instead, under Content in the sidebar.

Any team member (owner, admin, or agent) sees a Staff toolbar at the top of a question page whenever they’re signed in, visible only to staff, never to customers. From there they can:

Toggle the question private/public
Close or reopen the question
Pin or unpin the question
Delete the question outright
Delete any reply on the question, not just their own

The toolbar’s safe actions (visibility, status, pin) sit together on the left; Delete question sits on its own at the far right, set apart so it can’t be mistaken for a routine action. Deletes ask for confirmation first, since they can’t be undone. The toolbar itself doesn’t link out to the moderation queue, it’s for acting on the question you’re already looking at, see the next section for the portal-wide view.

The Questions page (dashboard)

For a bird’s-eye view instead of working question-by-question, open Questions on your dashboard (Content group in the sidebar). It lists every question on the portal, including private ones, with:

A private badge on anything not publicly visible
Status (open / solved / closed)
Vote and reply counts
Filters for status, privacy, and a search box

Clicking a question’s title opens it on the portal, where you act on it with the staff toolbar described above; the Questions page itself is for finding and bulk-managing questions, not for replying. You’re signed in automatically when you arrive this way, even if you’ve never opened that portal in this browser before, so the staff toolbar is there right away.

Pinned questions

Any team member can pin a question from its staff toolbar, useful for a welcome post, house rules, or an announcement you want every visitor to see first. Pinned questions render at the top of the portal’s question list, marked with a small pin icon, ahead of everything else regardless of vote score or recency.

Pin as many questions as you like; when there’s more than one, the most recently pinned one sits first. Unpin the same way, from the same toolbar, to send a question back into the regular sort order.

Making a question private or public

Any team member can flip a question’s visibility at any time, independent of which category it’s in:

Private: visible only to the question’s author and your team. It’s removed from public listings, search, and the sitemap.
Public: visible to everyone.

This is separate from private categories (see Organize with categories & tags): a question in a public category can still be marked private on its own, and a question originally created in a private category can be made public once it’s no longer sensitive.

Closing and reopening questions

Closing a question stops new replies from being added, which is useful once an issue is resolved or a thread has run its course.

Close a question from its staff toolbar. It stays visible and searchable (existing replies and votes remain), but no new replies can be posted.
Reopen it the same way if it turns out the discussion needs to continue. On a closed question, the “no new replies” notice at the bottom of the thread also carries a Reopen button for team members, so you can act right there without scrolling back up to the toolbar.

Closing is reversible and doesn’t affect the question’s URL or its solution.

Deleting questions

Team members can delete a question outright. This is permanent: unlike closing, there’s no undo. Use deletion for spam, abuse, or content that shouldn’t exist at all, and closing for anything you’d rather keep as a record.

Bulk-managing questions

For acting on a batch of questions at once instead of opening each one individually, the dashboard’s Questions page supports five bulk actions from its multi-select action bar: Close, Reopen, Make private, Make public, and Delete.

Check the box next to each question you want to act on (or the header checkbox to select everything on the current page), then click an action. Every selected question in the batch is affected together (all-or-nothing): if any selected question can’t be found, nothing in the batch changes.

Close/Reopen and Make private/Make public are true inverse pairs: every one of these four actions applies immediately, no confirmation needed, and every one is reversible with its opposite, either in another bulk action or from a single question’s staff toolbar on the portal.
There’s no bulk mark as solved. A question becomes solved by accepting an answer on its own thread, not by flipping a status, because solved is what tells visitors a real solution exists there (see Solutions below); open the question from the queue and accept the answer that resolved it.
Delete works exactly like the single-question delete: it asks you to type a confirmation word once for the whole batch. It’s permanent, unlike the other four, there’s no undo, so it’s set apart on its own at the end of the action bar.

Solutions

Any reply can be marked as the solution. A solution is pinned directly below the question, above every other reply, and is a strong signal to other customers (and to search engines) that the question is solved.

Marking a solution is fundamentally the asker’s call: whoever asked the question can mark any reply as the solution, whether it came from another customer or from your team. This isn’t a team-only privilege: peer replies are just as eligible as team replies.

Your team can also mark solutions, right from the question page, useful for moderation and curation, for example when the asker never comes back to close out their own question. Team marking uses the exact same mechanism as the asker’s: mark the reply that resolved the thread, and it’s pinned to the top for every future visitor.

Only one solution per question at a time. Marking a different reply as the solution swaps the previous one out automatically; nothing needs to be un-marked manually first. Marking the reply that’s already the solution un-marks it, and the question goes back to open.

Replies and the reply-to indicator

There’s no separate comments layer to moderate: every reply, whether it’s a full answer or a quick follow-up pointing at someone else’s reply (see How your customers sign in, ask & vote), is the same kind of row and gets the same moderation treatment. Customers can delete their own replies; your team can delete any reply, on any question, using the delete control on that reply, the same “delete any reply” staff privilege described above.