On the Microsoft forums, someone asked how moderated disucssion boards work in SharePoint. I thought I’d do a quick little walk-through to help anyone else out there who might be wondering the same thing.

To require discussion threads to go through an approval process before they go live, take the following steps.

  1. Navigate to your Discussion board. Click on the List tab in the ribbon.
    List Tab
  2. Click on the button on the far right of the ribbon, that says List Settings.
    List Settings Button
  3. You’re now on the List Settings page. Click on the Versioning Settings link under the General Settings heading. This will take you to the following page:
    Versioning Settings
  4. Next to the Content Approval heading, under the question “Require content approval for submitted items?”, select the “Yes” radio button. Save your changes.
  5. Now, when you go back to the Discussion board, you will see several new Views available to you from the Views drop down menu.
    View Drop Down
  6. If you click on the “Approve/reject Items” view, you’ll now see posts that are waiting for approval, like this:
    Pending Approval

From here, if you’re the moderator, you can approve the comments. If you’re a user of the site, you can choose the “My submissions” view and you’ll see a similar view, except it will only show you the items that you yourself have posted to the discussion board.