Building a moderation team that doesn’t clock off

When we opened publishing on Framer, I expected the hard part to be technology. The hard part was a scheduling spreadsheet.

With the new Framer Community, we removed the review queue. Anything a creator makes goes live in seconds. Before, nothing went public until someone on the team checked it first. Now there’s no gate. That’s the point, and it’s why we needed people watching in shifts through the day.

The least glamorous part of open publishing is also the most important: someone watching after you hit publish.

Moderation became the front line

Moderation used to be something we did between other things. A report came in, and someone got to it when they could. That worked when publishing was gated because the gate caught most problems before they went public.

Open publishing changes that. The report queue now stands between the Community and whatever someone posted a second ago. We triage around 120 reports a day, with roughly 10 sitting open at any given moment.

Reports don’t keep office hours. One that lands while your part of the world is asleep is just as real, and it’s the one most likely to sit unseen.

Coverage became the problem: who’s watching, and when.

Coverage from the team we already had

We had enough people. We needed them in the right timezones.

We already had contractors handling reviews, spread around the world. We lacked a schedule that used that spread. The job was reshuffling the people we had: keep the queue watched for as much of the day as we could, without three people piling onto the same hours.

That turned into a scheduling puzzle. Timezones came first. Seniority came next: the people who’d done this longest kept their hours, and newer folks filled the gaps around them. Then a cap on overlap, so we weren’t burning two or three people on one quiet hour while another stretch of the day sat empty.

The result is a relay. Someone opens the day from Asia, hands off to Europe, and on to the US, who now carries it into the evening. It keeps the queue watched far longer than any single timezone could.

Response targets, and a pause button

We set response targets, so “we’ll get to it” turned into something we could measure: a first response within half an hour. Round-the-clock coverage is the goal that makes that reachable at any hour, not only the busy ones.

One detail I didn’t expect to care about: pausing the clock for certain cases. A copyright dispute often has a legally required waiting window. Rushing it helps no one, so the timer shouldn’t tick against us there. It was small to set up and saved a lot of confusion later.

What a shift looks like

A shift has two modes.

Reactive mode is the report queue, oldest first, so nothing rots at the bottom. Each report comes down to three calls: dismiss it if it’s fine, message the owner if something needs fixing, or follow up if it’s unclear.

Proactive mode surprised me. You browse the Community: what’s new, what’s drawing attention, and you catch what no one reported. Only about a third of the reports we act on come from the community. We surface the rest ourselves, close to half from a moderator browsing with the right eyes and the remainder from our automated checks. A real chunk of what we handle would never have reached us through a report.

The thing I didn’t expect

I assumed moderation would be dramatic, full of big takedowns and clear villains. Most of it isn’t.

Most of it is small calls, made fast, over and over. Is this a copy or a fair remix? Does a report come from a real concern, or a rival who’s annoyed?

Much of the job is being there. No single decision carries the value. At almost any hour, someone is looking.

Open publishing gets the headline: anyone can publish. The thing that makes it safe stays invisible: a handful of people, spread across enough of the map that the queue is never sitting unwatched.

Few people see this layer. I’m glad we built it.