by the Planetside Crew in conversation with Elizabeth Bear, CB Droege, Christine Hanolsy, and Leo Otherland
Editor’s note: This article is part of the SFWA Presents: Get to Know… series, which includes informational pieces about SFWA programs, committees, and initiatives, and also interviews with the SFWA volunteers who work to support their fellow writers in the industry.
SFWA’s Moderation Team is a group of dedicated volunteers who help keep our online spaces welcoming, respectful, and supportive of the professional community. They work behind the scenes to uphold SFWA’s new moderation policy and ensure conversations stay constructive. We chatted with Elizabeth Bear, CB Droege, Christine Hanolsy, and Leo Otherland to learn more.
How would you describe what the SFWA Moderation Team is and what you do? What does moderation mean in the context of a creative professional community like ours?
CB: Moderating a community like SFWA differs from others I’ve worked with because of SFWA itself. Most online communities start either as a discussion group for a fandom or hobby, or as a group of friends that builds momentum. SWFA’s social community is instead built from a dues-paying professional organization, and people come and go based on the value they find in the organization itself.
In this case, the job of curator becomes more important than in other communities. While social clubs and fandoms can be more freewheeling, SFWA has a specific mission, and it becomes part of the moderator’s job to guide the community to those goals. Rather than just making sure everyone plays nice, we also try to nudge people to be more professional with one another and to foster relationships beneficial to the membership.
However, we also must be more careful with the authority granted to us, as we can be seen as representatives of the organization as a whole, which is itself a governing body for the people in the profession. Many livelihoods depend on SFWA being a strong force for good in the industry, and the community we manage is one arm of that effort.
What drew each of you to volunteer as moderators for SFWA?
CB: I had recently joined the SFWA Discord, and the existing Mod Team sent out a call for members of affinity groups to join. I’m in two affinity groups (LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent) and have experience moderating online communities.
I’ve been building online communities since the late ’80s. At eight, I built my first PC, found local BBSs, and soon after set up my own with money from my paper route. It only handled one connection at a time, but I spent nights hosting chats and creating a safe space. At its peak, 50 people joined, with 10 logging in daily.
As a shy kid, online communities gave me and other misfits a place to belong. Over the years, I’ve helped run everything from BBSs, ICQ servers, listservs, and MUDs to AOL, Yahoo! Groups, forums, Slack, and Discord communities. Their value has only grown, and the need for empathic and knowledgeable leaders has become stark in contrast to social media. Private spaces let people collaborate, grouse, celebrate, find support, and share their lives without corporate exploitation or public exposure. They’re not just for misfits. They’re vital to the mental health of a global, commercialized internet society.
So, when SFWA, an organization important to me and which I’m proud to be a member of, asked for help running their newish Discord server, it wasn’t really a decision. I stepped forward and was immediately welcomed into one of the kindest, most capable, and smoothly functioning mod teams I’ve ever been part of.
EB: For me, it was seeing a call for people to volunteer in a role I felt I was suited for. When the SFWA chat room transitioned from Slack to a more formal presence on Discord, there was a call for volunteers, and I signed up. My previous SFWA volunteer activity had been number crunching, which I’m terrible at (dyscalculia), so it was exciting to find a way to give back to the community that didn’t feel like I was making more work for someone else.
CH: When I received my first newsletter as a new member, it included a call for moderators for SFWA’s Discord server. This sounded like a simple way to help and get to know the organization and its members. I’m online a lot, I moderate a couple other servers, and I have a burning desire to be helpful and answer questions (which, to be fair, sometimes backfires). I also have thick skin—which is useful as a writer—so it’s easy for me to step into difficult situations to smooth things over or negotiate a resolution. Later on, when the Forums were also looking for mods, it seemed natural to help out there as well.
The new policy mentions that moderation decisions are usually made as a group. Can you walk us through how that process works?
CB: It’s an ongoing dialog. The Mod Team has a private room on the server just for us, and we are in frequent contact about the server activity. We have different interests and live in different time zones, so we see different corners of the community, and if we spot something that might need watching, we bring it up. We compare notes on how the conversation makes us feel and where we think it’s heading. We grow accustomed to the types of contributions that certain members make, and where likely pain points could arise between them. Most of the time, we only observe and then decide that the community has mediated or avoided the conflict successfully on its own.
If it looks like it’s heading in a direction that will create a hostile or uncomfortable situation, one of us will step in with a brief statement, reminding people to be courteous, or to keep the conversation on topic, or whatever is needed. If it’s a complex or sensitive topic, we might draft a response together, helping each other find the right tone for de-escalation. By the time a mod has posted in a channel as a community leader, they’ve already been discussing the issue with the rest of the team, and their words are representative of the team’s philosophy of empathy and community curation.
EB: I find that working with the mod community is really rewarding, collaborative, and yes, even fun. We don’t always agree on what should be done or where the lines should be drawn on courteous behavior, but we’re always able to meet each other in good faith and come to a compromise when there’s an argument over what’s appropriate. We want to create a space where people can be frank and open with each other, but we also want to control microaggressions and gaslighting behavior, as well as trolling and bullying. It’s nice to work with a team that has the experience to recognize the less obvious disingenuous argument tactics, such as goalpost shift or sealion!
CH: I can’t even describe what a positive experience it has been working with the other mods. Everyone sincerely has the best interests of our fellow writers and SFWA members at heart, and I hope that shows when we have to make moderation calls.
I also want to highlight that Discord mods are the people behind the discord@sfwa.org email address. When a SFWA member or a Nebula conference attendee requests to join, it’s an actual human being who answers that email. We do use boilerplate to communicate all the necessary information, but by keeping this a manual process, it allows us to welcome new members and to act as a personal point of contact for questions or troubleshooting. I honestly love the process of letting folks in and answering their questions as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
How do you balance empathy with accountability when moderating difficult situations?
CB: I think the most important thing is to remember what the role of a moderator is. It can be tempting to think of moderators as the police of the community. Some rookie moderators fall into that trap. But that’s not what a community needs from a moderator. It doesn’t need police because police don’t work for the community, broadly speaking. It needs firewatchers and adjudicators: people who can spot brewing trouble and know how to mitigate disasters (or call for those who know). It needs people who can step in to help members of the community resolve disputes in a healthy way. A community moderator is all of these things, as well as a curator of whatever specific experience that community is intended to achieve. If a mod keeps these roles in mind when interacting with the community, the balance finds itself.
EB: In general, we try very hard to engage with the personal experience of everybody we’re moderating. The community is an entity, and the mod’s role is to help keep it healthy. We do that by facilitating discourse, trying to make people feel safe, supporting respectful engagement, and allowing people to feel heard. Obviously, there’s no contentious circumstance in which everybody can walk away happy, but we’ve chosen as a team to have flexible policies and responses applied with judgment.
Our goal is never to be punitive or “hold people accountable.” It’s to create a space where writers can exchange professionally useful information and find community. We occasionally have to step in and ask people not to engage in certain behaviors, but honestly, most errors we encounter are due to thoughtlessness and not malice.
And it turns out, if you limit bullying or gaslighting behaviors, the bullies and gaslighters will usually find someplace else to be.
CH: I think it helps that, as a group, the mods have a broad range of experience both within SFWA and the writing community. Empathy is generally the easy part—we’re all writers, we’ve all had “those days,” and even if our lived experiences aren’t the same, we acknowledge and appreciate other perspectives. As CB said, we’re not here to police anything. We’re here to ensure that our community spaces are welcoming, accessible, and beneficial to everyone who wants to be here.
I’d also like to acknowledge the work of M. L. Clark and Misha Grifka Wander, SFWA’s office staff. They’re always available to the Mod Team for support, sympathy, advice, and more. Knowing that the organization has its volunteers’ backs is important.
What tools or strategies do you use to de-escalate situations before they require formal action?
CB: The first and most important tool of a successful mod team is their presence. A community with combative mods that throw their weight around will become a community where combative weight-throwing is the norm and the mods step into almost every conversation. A community with mods who show empathy and understanding rarely needs any action, as the community becomes good at de-escalating its own drama.
When action is necessary, it rarely needs to be formal. A quick reminder is often enough to cool heads or help people rethink their approach to a situation. In the case a party feels aggrieved, the right tool is listening—making people feel heard is often enough to help them pull back from an aggravating situation. It may feel intuitive to mediate a conflict directly, especially if there are two obvious parties, but often, putting two head-butting parties together in a room to hash it out, even with compassionate help, just makes them feel more at odds, so the first strategy is to speak to each individually to make sure their concerns are represented and, if needed, addressed. If the mods decide that one party was at fault, they might privately ask them to take more care in the future.
Formal action should be reserved for repeated or intractable situations or suspected bad actors. The Mod Team refers a situation to the SFWA Board if we feel that formal disciplinary action may be required.
One of the most difficult parts of a moderator’s job is telling the difference between a member who is in crisis and needs support, and one who is malicious and must be removed. Getting that call wrong, in either direction, can be one of the worst mistakes a mod can make, so great care should be taken with such decisions.
CH: I’ll just reiterate that mod decisions are almost always collaborative. We discuss and come to a consensus. When things get tough, it helps to know we’re not individually responsible for any one decision. On the rare urgent occasion when a quick decision needs to be made for community safety, we alert the team and discuss it as soon as we can get people online together.
Sometimes, what a member needs is to vent or explain themselves. Frustrations often arise from a sense that nobody is listening or that the organization is too rigid to address a problem. I’m always happy to be a listening ear with as much empathy as I can muster. I know that my fellow mods are there for moral support, either in private or in public, if I need it.
The new moderation policy feels more growth-oriented and less punitive than older versions. What inspired that shift?
CB: I only gave input on the new policy and didn’t have a hand in drafting it, but my own hard-won philosophy of moderation has been thus for many years, no matter what the official policy might say.
CH: The new policy was inspired by the values of the moderation team as we have evolved and grown into our work. It codifies the way we already approach our moderation responsibilities: with empathy, with the intention to help, with the community in mind.
How do you hope this updated approach will influence member behavior or the overall tone of SFWA spaces?
CB: The new policy reflects how we’ve already been doing things, but I do hope that, with more visibility for the humanist approach we take, people will feel more free to be themselves, to engage with the community, and to come to their mods for support when they need it, not just when they have a complaint.
CH: Organizations as large as SFWA gradually gain a reputation for being rules-oriented and inflexible. The new policy feels more human-oriented to me. In an age when moderation is often turned over to AI, it is important to create spaces people want to be in. Hopefully, our members will find value in spending time here and come to think of SFWA as a supportive place to be, which will allow the community to grow.
What do you wish more members understood about the work you do behind the scenes?
CH: Mainly, I want folks to know that we take our jobs seriously, even if we have fun doing it. We are also part of the community, not just overseeing it. But we are human beings; we do make mistakes, just like everyone else, which is why the collaborative approach is so important. I hope our members understand that no decision is made in a vacuum, and that every decision is made with the best intentions and with the success of the community and its individual members in mind.
If you could change one thing about how online communities function in genre spaces, what would it be?
CB: I think genre discussion spaces, on and offline, have a gatekeeper problem. There is a lot of bad-faith arguing, zero-sum debating, and other problematic conversations. We’re fortunate that the SFWA community is mostly not about that, but we occasionally see newcomers arrive with their gloves up, expecting every conversation to be a fight. It’s nice to watch them settle in and discover that ours is a safe place to discuss and even disagree. If I could make all discussion spaces so safe, I would.
EB: I come in as a moderator with the philosophy that there are diverse opinions and experiences that deserve to be heard, but also that marginalized people need to have their experience and existence respected. My goal is to help create a space where community and communication can flourish, and professionals can find and learn from each other.
CH: To add to what Bear said, I would like to encourage SFWA members with diverse backgrounds to join the Mod Team. We have wonderful affinity spaces for various marginalized groups, but we don’t have representation on the Mod Team from all those groups, which makes it difficult to provide proper support and resources.
Are there any upcoming initiatives or improvements you’re excited about in terms of moderation or community building?
CH: There are new initiatives already that I’m excited about. We’re trying hard to make Discord feel like a real community space and provide members with more opportunities to connect with each other and with the organization itself. For example, the “SFWA Goes To…” channels are all about connecting In Real Life (or virtually!) with other con goers. We have a new channel for promoting and celebrating crowdfunding projects, a great way to see what people are up to. Discord also allows us to react quickly with new channels to highlight and discuss current issues that impact writers, such as the 2025 Anthropic settlement.
We’re grateful to the Moderation Team for sharing their insights and for the work they do every day to uphold SFWA’s values. If you’re inspired by their mission or curious about getting involved, please visit our Moderation Policy page.
Explore more articles from SFWA Presents: Get to Know…
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories. She’s been a volunteer moderator in assorted online communities since the WWIV-net days.
CB Droege (he/they) is a short-form SFF author, audiobook performer, and English teacher. Raised in Cincinnati, he now makes his home in Munich. He is the author of Ichabod Crane and the Magic Lamp and Other Stories, and his fiction has appeared in Nature Futures, Amazing Stories, and other speculative venues. He produces Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, a weekly digest of tiny audiobooks. He is a member of SFWA. Learn more at cbdroege.taplink.ws.
Christine Hanolsy is a Nebula award nominated science fiction and fantasy writer who cannot resist stories about love in all its forms and flavors. Her speculative flash fiction and short stories have been published by EDGE Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing, Atthis Arts, Small Wonders, Worlds of Possibilities, Solarpunk Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She has worn many hats over the years, including editor-in-chief of an online writing community, Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her wife, their two children, and a pair of very vocal cats, all of whom have been extremely patient with her. You can find her full publication list at: christinehanolsy.com.