How Content Approval & Moderation Works

Trailforks is built as a tool for trail associations, so we try to give control to local associations over the content in their region. This is different from other sites that try and centralize control & moderation. We believe local groups know best not some central authority. Locals know their trails and what should be public, they know the corner cases and different regions have different policy concerning "unsanctioned" trails. So we provide the tools to let each region decide how their content should be represented.

How Moderation & Control works

There are several different ways trails & other content is approved & moderated. Our preferred method is assigning users from a local trail association with moderator permissions over the content in their region. So if a new trail is added in your region, this user would be notified and make the decision to approve, deny or modify it. This takes time to build up this database of local admins, we vet each application for region admin and give preference to directors from trail associations. But also give control to other groups or local users if its ok with the local association or no one steps up.

If a region does not have any local admins, then the content sits in the global approval queue. This is where the power of crowd sourcing comes in. Users can check this pending content and vote to confirm or reject it. If an item gets enough votes in either direction then it is added or rejected. Each user on Trailforks has a "trust score", which is earned by adding confirmed content to the site over time. Users with higher trust score get more weight when they vote to confirm or reject content.

The final way content is moderated is by the Trailforks staff, we periodically go through the global content queue and confirm or reject content ourselves. If we see the content resides in a region where their are local admins setup, we will leave that content for at least 1 week giving the local admins time to review it themselves.