Orange chat rooms

When you are the UK's ISP of choice, in its days as Freeserve, and then Wanadoo before re-branding as Orange, chat was a key feature of the web experience offered to its audience by Orange. And every day for almost seven years until their closure in 2009, the chat rooms for both grown up and teens were patrolled by us at Chat Moderators throughout the day and most of the night. Human moderation was, and still is, the only way for any brand with a responsible attitude towards visitors to uphold brand values and maintain a high quality user experience. The teen and young adult audience in particular needed careful moderation in order to protect against child exploitation, bullying, and sexual predation. So all of our moderators were Criminal Record Bureau checked to enhanced level, as well as being trained on the laws relating to children and sexual offences. The teen area on Orange chat even had a ‘moderator room’, which was constantly staffed and enabled distressed users to report problems easily, and enabled us to action solutions quickly.

An interesting aspect to our work with Orange was the fact that we took over from an established volunteer moderation force. Why would Orange pay for something that they were apparently enjoying, and apparently enjoying for free? There were two key reasons;

• changes in employment legislation meant that even volunteer staff became entitled to pay
• a large force of volunteers proved more difficult and time consuming to pin down, and to manage, than dealing with an agency as professional as Chat Moderators

There were, of course, handover issues to be conquered from a few disgruntled ex-moderators, but our even-handed approach to the content they posted saw these issues dissolve.