The moderator's guide

docs/moderation-guide.md

For the volunteers who approve first posts, handle reports, and keep threads tidy. Everything here is done in a browser. The board's settings, permissions and machinery belong to whoever administers it — that side is The committee's guide and Running a board — and this page says when to hand something over rather than pretending you can reach it.

What you can do, and where

Moderation happens in two places:

On the thread and forum pages themselves — a Moderator tools panel on each thread you moderate, and tick-boxes beside posts and threads for acting on several at once.
The moderator control panel, at /modcp — the queue, the reports, the log, and an overview of what is waiting for you.

What you may do is not one switch. You are appointed to forums, one at a time, and each appointment carries exactly the rights the committee ticked — approving content, deleting, restoring, locking, pinning, moving, merging and splitting are separate grants. The rules are the administrator's to set; they are described under Permissions and What an appointment grants.

My forums (/modcp/forums) is the page to trust: it lists every forum you are appointed to and exactly what you may do in each. If a right is not in that list, the board will refuse the act; if it is, it will not.

You can open /modcp if you are appointed to at least one forum, or if your group carries the board-wide ModCP access permission. Its sections:

Section	Where	What it holds
Overview	`/modcp`	What is waiting across the forums you moderate — posts held for approval, open reports — and your forums, busiest first.
Approval queue	`/moderation`	Posts and threads held for approval in the forums you moderate.
Reports	`/moderation/reports`	What members have reported, who has picked it up, and what came of it.
My forums	`/modcp/forums`	Where you are appointed, and exactly what you may do in each.
Moderator log	`/modcp/log`	What has been done in your forums, by whom, and when.
Address lookup	`/modcp/ip`	Administrators and super-moderators only. Every lookup is logged.

The approval queue

A post can be held for approval before anybody else sees it. The usual reasons:

The author is new. The board can hold a member's first posts until they have a few to their name — the single most effective spam control it has, because spam accounts post once or twice and never come back. See what each control is worth.
The forum holds everything. A forum can be set to hold all new threads, or all new replies, and the permission matrix can require approval from particular groups.
The author is under a moderate-posting warning — see warnings below. This one holds their posts everywhere, even if they are staff.

Held content lands in the approval queue at /moderation, and the count is the first thing on the /modcp overview. Tick the items and press Approve selected or Reject selected.

Approving makes the post visible and adds it to the forum's and the author's counts.
Rejecting moves it to the deleted state — the same reversible state a moderator's delete produces. Nothing is destroyed; somebody with the restore right can bring it back.

Two rules keep the queue honest, and they are worth knowing so an "empty" queue does not surprise you — see the moderation queue:

A held reply inside a thread that is itself held is not listed. Approving the thread is the decision; the reply is not a separate one.
A held reply whose thread has been deleted is not listed. Restoring the thread brings its held replies back into the queue.

If your selection included something you may not act on, the notice afterwards says so: items in forums you do not moderate are refused, and items another moderator dealt with first are reported as already handled, not silently re-decided.

One more thing: the queue shows you the text as written, without the board's word filter applied. You are judging the words, so you see them — see what the word filter covers.

Reports

Members report things to you with the Report link — for a member whose group may report content, it sits on every post that is not their own, and the same mechanism covers threads, members and private messages. The member says briefly what is wrong; what they write is shown to moderators and never to the person reported. A member reporting the same thing again while their report is open does not create a second report.

Reports arrive at /moderation/reports, and the open count sits on the /modcp overview. Who sees a report depends on what it is about:

A reported post or thread goes to whoever moderates that forum.
A reported member or private message belongs to no forum, so it is visible only to moderators with the board-wide ModCP access permission. A reported private message is shown on the report screen — it is the one place a moderator reads one, and only because a member handed it over.

Handling one:

Take this assigns the report to you, so two moderators do not deal with the same one; Put back returns it to the pool.
Follow the link to the reported thing and act with your ordinary tools — or decide nothing needs doing.
Close it: Resolve when something was done, Dismiss when nothing needed doing. Either way you can leave a note for other moderators; the note is never shown to the reporter.

The reporter is told when their report is closed, whichever way it went. A dismissed report is a report answered, not a report ignored — close them rather than leaving them open.

Tidying threads

The Moderator tools panel on a thread carries the tools you hold in that forum. Each is one press, each is logged, and none of them destroys anything.

Tool	What it does	When it is the right one
Lock / Unlock	Nobody can reply while a thread is locked.	A thread that has run its course, or needs to cool off while you deal with it.
Pin / Unpin	Keeps the thread at the top of its forum's listing.	Rules, sticky announcements-by-thread, anything members should find first. Pinned threads still take replies — a notice nobody should reply to is an announcement, which is the administrator's tool.
Move	Moves the thread, replies and all, to another forum.	A thread posted in the wrong place. You need the move right in the source forum and the destination.
Copy	Makes a copy of the thread in another forum, leaving the original where it is.	Rare — when two forums genuinely both want the thread.
Delete thread	Moves the whole thread, replies included, to the deleted state.	Spam, or a thread that should not stand. Reversible.
Restore	Brings a deleted thread back.	The undo. It is a separate grant from delete, so you may hold one without the other.
Split	Takes posts out of a thread into a new thread, with a title you give it.	A conversation that wandered into a second topic worth its own thread. The opening post cannot be split out, and neither can the whole thread — that is a move.
Merge	Folds one thread into another, by the target thread's number.	Two threads about the same thing. You need the merge right in both threads' forums.

For several things at once, tick the boxes: on a thread page you can approve, delete, restore, or split out selected posts, and on a forum's listing you can lock, unlock, pin, unpin, move, delete, restore or approve selected threads. Anything in the selection you may not act on is refused and counted in the notice, not quietly included.

Two things about editing and deleting posts:

There is no hard delete. Deleting always means the reversible deleted state: the post stays in the database, the log records the act, and restore undoes it. Only somebody with database access can truly destroy content, and no moderation screen offers it.
Editing somebody else's post is never silent. Members get a short grace window to fix their own typos without a Last edited by line; a moderator's edit of another member's post always carries the notice, however fresh the post, and every edit is kept in the revision history — see the silent edit window.

Warnings

A warning is the formal step between a quiet word and a ban. If you hold the may warn members permission, every post carries a Warn link beside its author (and a member's profile has the same), leading to the warning screen with that post cited.

Issuing one:

Pick a reason from the board's preset list — each carries a title, a points value, and possibly an expiry — or choose Something else and set the title and points yourself (1 to 100).
Write what this is for. It is required, kept on the record, and shown to the member — write it to be read by them.
The member is notified of the warning, its points, and any restriction it triggered.

Points add up, and the board's warning levels act on the total. A fresh board's ladder has thresholds at 4, 7 and 10 points; each level either suspends posting, holds the member's posts for approval, or bans, for a set number of days or indefinitely. The restriction applies everywhere and to everyone — a moderator under a moderate-posting warning has their own posts held, including in forums they moderate.

Warnings with an expiry lapse on their own, and the restriction lapses with the points. A warning issued in error can be revoked, with a reason: the points come off and any points-based restriction is recalculated. One exception, deliberately: a ban triggered by a warning level is not lifted by revoking the warning — a ban comes off only when an administrator lifts it, because the heaviest thing the board does to somebody should be undone by a person looking at it.

The same permission lets you lock a member's signature or avatar from their profile, with a reason the member sees — for the signature that breaks the rules while the posts do not.

Bans, and what you can reach

What a ban is: a record with a reason for the staff, a public reason the member is shown, an optional expiry, and the group the member held before — so lifting the ban, or its expiry, puts them back exactly where they were. A banned member cannot sign in; they are told they are banned, and shown the public reason if one was given. See member state and bans.

Banning somebody by hand is not a moderator tool. The ban screen lives in the admin panel, on the member's page under /admin/users — a moderator's route to a ban is the warning ladder, or asking an administrator. The same goes for ban filters, the patterns that block a registration or sign-in before an account exists — see ban filters.

Other things that look like moderation and are not yours to press:

The admin panel (/admin) — settings, permissions, groups, registration. Its access permission is the one thing no moderator or super-moderator bypass opens.
The word filter, thread prefixes, smilies and announcements — all under /admin/content. An announcement is the administrator's tool for a notice nobody can reply to.
The spam controls — the first-post hold threshold, the hourly limits, the registration challenge. If spam is getting past the queue, that is a settings conversation, not more clicking — point the administrator at spam and rate limits.
Closing registration, activating stuck accounts, lifting bans, and anything about a member's account itself.
Warning reasons and the points ladder — the presets and thresholds you choose from are the board's, not yours to edit.

When one of these is what the situation needs, say so to the committee or the administrator with the thread or member in question — that is the system working, not a gap in your permissions.

Keeping it civil

Two things do quiet work beside you, and neither needs anything from you day to day:

The word filter rewrites listed words wherever a post is shown — thread pages, excerpts, feeds, search results — without ever changing what is stored. You see the original in the queue and on the report screens, because you are judging the words. Adding to the filter is the administrator's job, and a change applies everywhere on the next page load.
Reputation lets members rate each other's posts — a thanks button by default, and a rating form if the board allows rating down. New members must post a few times before they may rate, which keeps it out of a spammer's reach. It is the members' tool, not a moderation one: a member whose posts are a problem is a matter for the queue, a warning, or a report — not for votes. What the feature is on your board is a setting: see Reputation.

Most moderation is none of the tools above. It is the early reply that sets a tone, the report answered the same day, and the first post approved quickly enough that a new member feels let in rather than suspected. The tools are for the days that are not like that.