The Adventures of Modbot 2: Facebook pages as group admins
Over a month ago I added a page as a moderator in a Facebook group, with some unexpected and hilarious results. While the beginning was rocky, our admin “Modbot” has become a valuable part of the team.
Any of the mods can operate as “Modbot” so it gives us a voice that isn’t tied to just one of us, which can be useful when dealing with moderation issues.
Right now I use Modbot for a couple of chores:
Posting weekly meta posts or announcements: We have a meme Monday and I post that as Modbot so I don’t get deluged with memes when I’m not in the mood for it. Woohoo!
Modbot has also made a couple of announcements to remind people about various rules.
Adding members: we are a secret group, so adding people can be complicated. In the past people messaged the mods individually, and the messages ended up in the “other” inbox frequently. Or maybe they’d message a mod on vacation or someone who used to be a mod. Now they can just message ModBot and all the current mods get notified.
Being a scapegoat: Moderation can be hard, and sometimes we have to do things that aren’t popular. When we do this, it’s nice to be able to “become” ModBot so it becomes less about individual moderators. Or maybe we simply need to add a moderation comment and don’t want a hundred notifications as a result.
Also I won’t lie I like pretending to be a robot. 🤖
But ModBot has some err..issues still. It’s *still* hard to switch between ModBot and yourself, especially on iOS. I had to remove one moderator from ModBot because she uses an Ipad and couldn’t switch out of ModBot.
Sometimes even I forget or have trouble. The user interface for switching could use improvement.
Another issue is ModBot can’t message people that haven’t messaged it before, because it is a page. So we still often have to message people from our personal accounts for moderation issues.
I also would like to add more actual bot functionality but don’t want to have to deal with the Facebook Bot approval process for tool that’s used by less than a hundred people.
Overall, while it’s a little rough around the edges, I really think pages as mods will become an ever more useful feature on Groups.
