Ability to silence users in chat

We have a need for more moderation capabilities—in this case, the ability to silencer a user in chat, directly from that chat/channel.

Beyond the obvious value to a community manager/moderator for easy access to these moderation capabilities, it’s also a need for some legal teams to know that we have fast controls to disable conversations on platforms that we own.

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Agreed though it should maybe be a silence in chat/chat channel vs the standard site silence? This could also maybe be extended to Category Moderators to Silence a user from a category that uses category moderation.

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Yes, absolutely! Although there should probably be both options:

  • Silence in chat
  • Silence site-wide

If you have a rampant user doing awful things in chat, chances are they may not stop there.

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Well admins & full mods should maintain the site wide options if course

This would just extend cat mods to have a silence option for their category. Which Chats are also linked to categories so it could that way also allow a pocket community to silence a user in their controlled chat channel(s)

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I could see a case for an option to give category mods that power, too. We host events, so during our conference we may temporarily give Marketing the ability to be a category moderator where that event is. In the event that there is a user that needs dealt with, I’d want them to be able to silence them sitewide if needed, to protect the whole site.

But I wouldn’t want them to have the ability to moderate other things outside of that category.

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Can’t that be done already?

Flag message → select a reason → “Take Action” → “Silence”:

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There is this plugin might help if self hosted.

Category mods have limited options managing a flag. Iirc it is agree, disagree and maybe defer

No option to silence or suspend. Those are reserved for admin & full mods

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I believe you may have introduced that element to the feature request, which may be a separate request (or if @jordan-violet is happy with the existing functionality of the Take Action button he may choose to repurpose this one :slight_smile:)

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Maybe in part though he mentioned giving certain powers to groups. Which is why I posted the plugin. To which there is a link to a feature quest as Sam had suggested improving existing Category Mod options. Which maybe that FR could include extending to chats as well. :thinking: :wink:

Hey, confirming that the plugin doesn’t allow category moderators to silence or suspend.

We are working on checking if we can provide some predefined actions as “silence for 1h” and “silence for 24h” to category moderators as a way to allow them to be able to make small punitive actions against users who disrupt discussions while the actual forum moderators have time to see and act on more long term actions… but it’s something that takes time as we need to see if it’s even possible in the first place and we are doing this in our spare time (after work and family).

This would all be easier if we had a proper ACL in Discourse and the possibility to create custom roles as well.

I have also opened a feature request for the same things the plugin does, so that it might be included in the core functionalities.

It seems absurd to me that TL4 users have more power than category moderators, which is what made me start to think of a plugin to remedy that.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Allowing category moderators to have access to the full extents of moderation tools in their own category