Moderating Your Google+ Posts

By Jesse Stay from Google+ For Dummies, Portable Edition

It won't be long before you get a spammer or troll commenting on your Google+ posts. The bigger Google+ gets, the more spammers you'll start to see. This is especially true on public posts — spammers see this as an opportunity to generate links back to their websites, increasing search engine rankings.

Moderation is the process of managing these spammers or trolls on your posts, and you have a number of options for moderating your posts.

Editing your posts

Make a mistake? Here's how you can edit your posts:

Click the triangle located in the upper-right corner of your post.

A drop-down menu appears.
Choose Edit This Post and edit the post as you want.
Click Save.

Your edited post appears. The post is marked as edited so that people know it's not the original post.

Deleting your posts

Deleting your post is easy. Just click the little triangle in the upper-right corner of the post and select Delete This Post. You may be prompted to confirm your choice. Once you confirm, the post is gone!

Muting your posts

You may have a post you don't want to see anymore. Maybe it's offensive. Maybe you're just not interested. Maybe the comments notifications are getting irritating. Whatever the case, to mute a post, click the little triangle in the upper-right corner of the post and select Mute This Post, and it disappears from your stream, never to be seen again.

Deleting comments

You can delete two types of comments: your own comments and comments to your posts by other users. For your comments, just click the Edit link below your comment and then click the Delete Comment button in the resulting dialog box.

Deleting someone else's comment is a little more complicated. Follow these steps:

Click the little arrow in the upper-right corner of the post with the comment you want to delete.
Click Report or Remove Comments.

Little "x" buttons and flag buttons appear next to each comment.
Click the "x" next to the comment you want to delete.

The comment disappears!

Disabling comments or reshares

You can also disable comments on your posts. This can be a great way to prevent a controversial topic from getting out of hand. Or maybe you don't want your post to be shared by anyone else. To do either, you start by clicking the little triangle icon in the upper-right corner of your post. Then, you either select Disable Comments or Disable Reshare.

You can actually create a make-shift poll by disabling comments on your post! To do so, just ask a multiple-choice question, add each potential answer as a separate comment, and then disable comments. Ask your audience to +1 their favorite answer, and now you have a way to get your audience voting on your posts just like a poll question!