After the controversial changes made to LinkedIn groups with the introduction of the new interface at the end of June 2010, LinkedIn have responded by introducing a new moderation system for group owners and managers.

As part of the new group interface, the 'News' section was merged with 'Discussions', which left some group mangers complaining that it became more difficult to monitor group discussions as RSS feeds that were previously being fed to 'News' were now coming up and flooding the group discussions.

This negative feedback members gave has prompted a response from LinkedIn who have announced some new moderation features that will hopefully solve the group moderation issues currently faced by group managers since the new interface was introduced.

One of the most important features added is the email alerts you can receive for every new discussion. You can then delete posts directly from the email you receive. You can set up these email alerts in 'My Settings' under the 'More' tab, which will bring up this screen:

This seems like a helpful new feature for group owners and managers, however having to action more emails in an already over-flowing inbox may not be an ideal solution.

It has now been made simple to delete entire discussion threads, just be going to More > Delete from the top toolbar.

There also seems to be more emphasis on group moderation by members with the development of 'Promtions' and the 'Flagging' system.

You can now promote group members (who you sincerely trust) to moderators of your group, so they can help you moderate your group, which will save you time. However they must be members you can trust who understand your group to moderate it in the way you would like.

Members can also 'flag' discussions and comments as inappropriate, which will be seen by group moderators in the group 'moderation queue'. From there they can then either delete the post, clear the flag(s) or 'Remove Member, Block & Delete contributions.' You can find the 'moderation queue' when you go into 'Manage' in your group.

You can also set a flag limit that will mean posts can be deleted automatically when they receive a certain number of flags from members. The default setting is 10 flags, but you can change it to whatever number you would like. Again this can be found from 'Manage' in the top menu and go to 'Edit Group Settings' from the toolbar on the left.

These changes will hopefully make managing groups on LinkedIn easier, however it seems to me that these new moderation features have only been implemented to compensate for the difficulties caused in moderating groups in the first place with the merging of 'News' and 'Discussions' as part of the new group interface.

Have you found it easier to monitor your LinkedIn group?