Admin Assist: what it automates, and what it costs you

What it is

Admin Assist is Facebook’s built-in automation for group admins. You give it criteria and it acts on them: approving or declining people who ask to join, holding or removing posts, muting members who break a rule you have described. It runs whether or not you are looking, which is the point of it.

For most of what it does, this is straightforwardly good. Declining requests from accounts created last week, holding posts containing links, muting somebody who has been warned twice. All of that is admin work you would otherwise do by hand, done for free by the platform.

The criterion that costs you something

This is worth stating plainly because the two features look unrelated in the interface. Participation questions are in one settings area, Admin Assist is in another, and nothing in either warns you that switching on auto-approval quietly ends your ability to keep what the questions collect.

What it can and cannot check

Its criteria have changed over the years and are worth reading in your own group rather than trusting any list. Broadly, though, the shape is consistent.

The distinction in the first row is the important one. “All questions were answered” is a checkbox test. It tells you somebody typed something, not whether what they typed was an email address, a refusal, or the word “yes”.

How to tell whether it is costing you

The symptom is a mismatch. Your member count climbs, your stored answers do not, and there is no error anywhere because nothing failed. The requests were handled, just not by you.

1. 1

   Open Admin Assist in your group's admin tools

   It lists the criteria you have set and how many actions it has taken recently, usually over the past seven days.

2. 2

   Read the activity count against your own records

   If it reports twenty-five actions this week and you have five new stored rows, the gap is the answer.

3. 3

   Check which criteria approve rather than decline

   Declining and moderating cost you nothing. It is only approval that removes a card you have not read.

4. 4

   Switch off auto-approval, keep the rest

   This is not all-or-nothing. The moderation criteria are worth keeping running.

5. 5

   Re-check in a week

   The count should now be the actions you actually wanted it taking.

Using it alongside something that keeps the answers

The two are only in conflict over one criterion. A workable arrangement looks like this:

• Let Admin Assist decline. Brand-new accounts, no mutual anything, rule-breakers. Those requests have nothing you want to keep.
• Let Admin Assist moderate. Posts and comments are a separate problem from the join queue and it handles them well.
• Do not let it approve. Approval is the destructive act, and it should belong to whatever is reading and storing the answers first.

That leaves the approving to you, or to something doing it in the right order, reading the card, storing the answers, confirming they stored, and only then clicking. The guide on auto-approving members covers pacing that safely, and seeing member answers covers what is actually visible before you do.

One thing it is genuinely good at

Requiring that questions were answered before anybody is approved is a filter worth having on regardless. It does not keep the answers, but it does mean the requests reaching your queue are from people who at least engaged with the door. Combined with something that reads the card, it raises the quality of what gets stored rather than competing with it.