Now that Discourse for Teams is starting to attract larger teams, it would be useful to be able to assign category moderators who can do all of the things they can do already plus be able to create and manage sub-categories, without having to give them full on moderator privileges for all categories they have access to. I can see this being useful for other discourse sites as well. Has this idea ever been looked into and would it be feasible to add it?
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Building on the above, I would like to suggest a couple of improvements.
Disclaimer: we are using discourse for teams. Some of our use case are very different than for an open community.
You can configure discourse to allow moderators to create categories and manage groups.
This is quite useful because:
- we want to limit the number of admins
- we want to allow many people in the organisation to create categories, which can be achieved with the above. The reason for this is that we are creating categories for teams or projects.
- It’s also useful to have many people that have moderator perms like splitting topics.
However there is one specific issue: moderators can manage ANY group, which means they can add themselves to a group giving access to a restricted category. For instance, we have a leadership category and don’t want a moderator to add himself to the leadership group. It would be logged but that’s not enough.
It would be incredibly useful to split this setting into two:
- Allow moderators to create categories
- Allow moderators to manage groups
Alternatively, maybe there could be some restriction on which group can be managed by whom, so that a moderator can’t manage ANY groups but a specific list. I am not sure how it would work in details.
Thank you 
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I moved these posts into a separate feature topic because I’d like to find out if other site owners are interested in it, and if so how it might best be implemented.
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This Feature Request would be very interesting for our “Discurse as a social intranet” approach, so count me in.
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Thanks, Ralf! Can you tell us some more about your community and how you are using Discourse, and how categories and category moderators fit into it? Feel free to PM me if you prefer not to share sensitive info about a private community.
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Hi, I think it is just basic security practice. If I want to appoint someone to create categories and moderate those categories, that’s a ton of trust. But it’s not so much trust that I want this person to have the capacity to manage ANY group in the community.
Consider Facebook. You can create a group/category (they are kind of identical), and manage it, but that’s it. Same with Reddit. You can create a subreddit, but it only gives you moderation privileges for that subreddit.
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Hello,
In addition to all the moderator features given to the “Category Moderator” feature (which is great by the way, thanks !), I would love to be able to give the ability to Category moderators to moderate (and manage) their category AND sub-categories.
I’ve already read a thread mentioning that big communities (> X thousands of members) should probably split their discourse forum into multiple forums. However in the case of our community (a sport related one) we want multiple small entities (“clubs”) to have access to their own top level category and be able to moderate its content, but also manage their own sub-categories. We don’t want to give full-instance moderator rights to those “club owners” as it gives a lot of privileges that we prefer to keep for a limited set of people in that community.
I’ve also read a comment (can’t find the discussion now, sorry) about “trusting moderators”, which I agree with, but in the community we are trying to build we have pretty independent entities (each “club”) which work well by their own, have existing identified responsible owners, but we also have transversal work groups (which span across multiple “club”), thus the need for a unified Discourse instance.
Is there any chance to add the possibility for those Category moderators to create sub-categories?
Many thanks for your help and for the amazing work done in Discourse software 
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I’m juggling a similar thing. We have a Spanish language category with several sub-categories. My Spanish moderators are in a group so they can only manage those categories. The way the “About” page is set up, they are listed six times for every category I’ve granted the group moderation ability for. Not a huge deal but it looks weird.
I recently read that a moderator of a main category inherits moderation privileges for sub categories, so I removed group permissions from the subcategories but left them as moderators for the main “Discussion in Spanish” category.
One of the mods had their first post in a sub category thrown into the main moderator “review” queue. They reported they no longer have the mod-wrench in the sub categories. I impersonated to verify and they have the timeline mod wrench on the main category but not in the subs. They have a mod wrench to “Create Staff Notice” and can edit posts in the main category but not the subs.
The About page looks correct now, but what I read I’ve either misunderstood or isn’t working correctly. I don’t need the Spanish mods to create categories, but I need them to moderate main and sub categories.
I can live with the repeat listings on the About page I suppose - perhaps it might be a better fix to program the About page that lists mods to just not display every sub category if they’re also a mod in the parent category?
Or is there a better way to set them up as category mods that’s not putting them in a group and grant that group mod permission in the category setup? Perhaps I should just give them TL4 and allow them to also submoderate the rest of the board?
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Thanks for this, Hanon. Can you clarify what the problem is that you are seeking to solve? You are mainly concerned about the duplication on the about page?
We recently made changes to the about page, and category moderators are no longer shown at all. Next time you update, you will see the change.
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It’s not a huge fatal issue, but just my OCD tidiness. I’d resigned myself that the Spanish mods were shown multiple times on the about page, and we were considering other foreign-language mods and I didn’t look forward to the FAQ page showing even more repeats. I read something on here that main category mods inherited mod ability on the subcategories so thought “perfect”. I removed their group from the sub category permissions and left their group in the main category “allow groups to mod” setting, and today they’re reporting they can’t mod the sub categories and (this may be a separate thing) one of the regular mods reported one of their posts was delayed since it had to be approved for some reason.
(We’ve been toggling to approve new registration since we’ve had an influx of trash accounts signing up, so that last part may be related to that.)
I saw the update that the About page is getting a re-design, so if that solves most of this I’m happy.
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We are updated to Discourse 3.4.0.beta3-dev and here’s what my About page looks like; our Spanish mods who are in a group set to allow moderation in Category setup in multiple categories:
Again, it’s not causing problems except for my OCD “tidiness” reflex because it makes the About page bigger than it needs to be. I understand if this is not of great concern since it’s cosmetic and I can figure out a new strategy like making them TL4 users instead of putting their group in every category.
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Okay, I finally got the About page to display correctly.
Apparently in the latest update we have offered to us and installed (3.4.0.beta3-dev) it’s still considered an “experimental” feature I had to opt into.
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