Moderation for room owners

As the owner of a room you decide who may do what. Everything below is in Room settings, which you open from the room’s name at the top of the sidebar.

Roles and permissions

Under Roles you create roles such as “Moderator”, give them a colour, choose whether they appear separately in the member list and whether people may mention them, and switch their permissions on or off. Roles higher in the list weigh more. You can only grant permissions you have yourself, and @everyone, the role every member has, can never get management permissions.

The role editor in the room settings with the Moderator role selected: name, colour, show separately and the permission switches. — Roles and permissions: hierarchy, colour, show separately in the member list, and fine-grained permission switches.

Category and channel permissions

Permissions come in layers. Roles give the base. A category can change a role’s permissions for all its channels, and a channel can change them again for itself; the channel wins. A switch left at ”–” takes the value from the layer below, which is shown in grey, together with where it comes from: the roles, the category, or @everyone in the same layer (an @everyone override applies before a role’s own). Reset to category removes a channel’s own changes. Members only see the channels they may view.

Room settings, Channels: the permissions of the category Raids for the role Night Owl beside the channel tree, every permission left neutral with its inherited value in grey: Read history from before joining denied by @everyone here, View channel, Add reactions and the others allowed or denied by the roles. — A permission left neutral shows in grey what it inherits: from the roles, the category, or @everyone in the same layer.

Viewing the room as a role

To check what a role really gets, choose Roles → View room as this role. The room then looks the way it looks for a member with only that role (or only @everyone; you can add further roles and a join date): the channels they see, what they may do in each, the menus and the settings. A banner “Viewing as …” with Exit preview stays on every page of the room. The preview runs only on your device and changes nothing: sending, voice, uploads and every other change are switched off while it lasts. In encrypted channels the history a new member with that role would not get is cut off at “History for this role starts here”.

The room Night Owls Gaming previewed as the role Night Owl: a banner Viewing as Night Owl with Exit preview above the channel general, the private channel officers missing from the channel list and the files channel shared-files marked read only for the role, the conversation and the composer as a member with that role sees them. — View the room as a role: room settings show what a member with only that role sees and may do, read-only on your device.

Keeping order

Open a member’s menu to remove (kick), ban or time out someone, mute them in voice, or move them to another voice channel. Timeouts last from minutes up to 28 days. You cannot act against someone whose highest role is not below yours. Bans can name a single address or a whole domain, with a reason.

Slowmode limits how often each member may write in a channel. Bulk delete removes many messages at once after showing a preview.

Reports

Members report messages, people or a whole room from the menus. Members with the permission to moderate members find the reports under Reports, where they assign, resolve or dismiss them and act directly. The reported person is never told who reported them, but reports are not anonymous to moderators.

Nobody but the members can read an encrypted message. The person who reports it may choose to share its text, and moderators see it marked as “released by the reporter – not verified”.

The reports inbox of the room settings, seen by a moderator: one open spam report with the reporter, the category, the note and the reported message as evidence, and actions such as a timeout. — Reports go to the room's moderators with the evidence the reporter chose to share, even from encrypted channels.

Node admins see every report of their node under Administration → Reports. When a report is about someone with an account on another node, only that node’s admins can act on the account, so the admin can forward the report to the person’s home node. Before anything is sent, a confirmation says what leaves the node: the category, the reporter’s text and the reported message. The reporter’s address does not; the other node only sees a pseudonym. Reports that other nodes forwarded are marked with the node they came from.

The Reports tab of the node administration: every report of the node, filtered by status and by who handles it, with the spam report about a message of Kai Brennan in Night Owls Gaming opened: the reporter, the note, the message text the reporter released and the moderation actions. — Node admins see every report of the node; reports about accounts of other nodes can be forwarded to their home node.

Auto-moderation

Auto-moderation blocks or removes messages with words or links you list, with exceptions for roles and channels. It only works in channels without encryption, because the node cannot read encrypted ones. The node’s own protection against message floods applies everywhere.

The audit log

The Audit log records what moderators and admins did, with their reasons. It helps a team see what happened and why.

Handing over a room

Room settings → Overview → Transfer ownership gives the room to another member of the same node. The overview also sets how long messages are kept, and members who reset their security key can ask you to restore their encrypted history under History requests.