Forum moderation options for the future

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There are two user status options that are planned to be implemented in the Discourse software this forum runs on, but which aren’t included, yet:

  • Group leaders who can add more users to their group, or kick users out of their group
  • Category moderators who have moderation rights for a specific category

Currently, the moderator status is global which is far from ideal for our “fractal” community structure in which we effectively have project leaders who are de facto responsible for organizing their own project within the Fractal Future Forum.

As far as I can judge from the discussion about the proposed status options it could take about a year until they are actually implemented.

So, the question is what to do in the meantime. I think, project leaders should be responsible enough to be granted global moderator rights with the understanding that they must not actually abuse those global moderation rights, especially not outside of their own project! This means that I will grant project leaders global moderator rights, but only after I have talked with them about this issue, and only if they actually want to have that power and responsibility!

Do you think this is the right way to go, or do you have other ideas?

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Ok, I haven’t read any disagreeing voices, so the policy is now this:

  • Project leaders and engaged trusted members will be granted (global) moderator rights, if they ask for them.
  • I will notify project leaders of this policy, so that they can decide whether they want those rights or not (with both options being fine).
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It seems that this feature has been added to the Discourse software recently. :smile:

If this feature is already integrated, I’m not able to find it. So, I think it’s not implemented yet, but the developers seem to be working on this one. :smile:

This is what I love about Discourse: It’s great and it’s getting better all the time! :fast_forward:

It’s not like we totally needed those features right now, since there’s not very much need for moderation and administration, but they add some scalability to the forum.