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Moderate your community

Moderation happens inside the forum, not buried in a settings screen. This guide covers what your moderators and administrators can do to keep discussions healthy. Who can do what is controlled by groups and permissions.

Any logged-in member can report a post they think breaks the rules (there’s a Report action on each post; they give a reason). Reports land in a queue for staff.

  1. In the management area open Reports (or Unread reports for the fresh ones).
  2. Review the reported post in context.
  3. Take action on the content (below), then mark the report read or delete it.

The Reports overview and the management Overview dashboard are visible to moderators as well as administrators.

From within a topic, staff with the right permission can:

  • Lock / unlock a topic — locking stops new replies.
  • Move a topic to another forum.
  • Highlight a topic (mark it important so it stands out) or trivialise it (the opposite).
  • Edit or delete posts and topics. Deleting a topic is a soft delete; deleting the first post of a topic removes the whole topic.
  • Mark a post as the answer in Question-type topics.

Edits to posts are versioned, so a post’s history is preserved when it is changed.

To manage a busy board, open Forums → edit for that forum and use the bulk tools to lock, unlock, highlight, trivialise, move, or delete several topics at once.

Assignments let staff track who is handling what. A moderator can assign a topic or post to a member or a role, mark it complete, or delete the assignment. Members can see the assignments given to them on their own Assignments page. This is handy for triaging a suggestions board or coordinating a moderation team.

When moderation of content isn’t enough, an administrator can ban a member from Users → ban (and lift it from Banned users). See Members, groups & permissions.

On Pro and above, a moderator can turn a forum topic into a tracked support ticket — useful when a public thread turns into a support case that needs follow-up. See Run a help desk.