# Assigning Category Moderator Role Without Admin Access

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/assigning-category-moderator-role-without-admin-access/361929
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [April 15, 2025, 5:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/assigning-category-moderator-role-without-admin-access/361929 "2025-04-15T17:29:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![FordX](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/fordx/32/498748_2.png) [@FordX](https://meta.discourse.org/u/FordX)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2025, 5:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/assigning-category-moderator-role-without-admin-access/361929/1 "2025-04-15T17:29:17Z")

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Hi everyone 👋

I’m currently managing a Discourse forum and working on organizing our staff roles. My goal is to assign **moderators to specific categories only** , with the ability to perform basic moderation tasks **without giving them full moderator or admin permissions**.

### ✅ What I’m trying to achieve:

I’d like certain trusted users to be able to:

- Edit or delete topics and replies within a specific category
- Close, open, pin, or unpin topics
- Move topics between categories

All **without giving them access to the admin dashboard or global moderation powers**.

### 🔍 What I’ve tried:

- I created a group and gave it permissions on specific categories (`See / Create / Reply`) but couldn’t find any option that grants actual moderation rights like deleting or moving posts.

- I saw mentions of a `Moderate` permission in some sources, but it doesn’t seem to exist in the current Discourse UI.

- I don’t want to use the global `Moderator` role, as it gives broad access across the entire forum.

- Are there any plans to support this kind of role natively in Discourse core?

I’d really appreciate any feedback or insights from those who’ve handled similar use cases.  
Happy to share our full setup if it’s helpful to others!

Thanks in advance 🙏

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### Author: ![Jagster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jagster/32/192154_2.png) [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [April 15, 2025, 7:38pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/assigning-category-moderator-role-without-admin-access/361929/4 "2025-04-15T19:38:34Z")

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You may want similar than what category moderators are, or TL4 users.

Could you get some ideas from this topic:

> [@What are all the things a category moderator can do?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-all-the-things-a-category-moderator-can-do/308745/):
>
> We are looking to add some community moderation to our site and are trying to determine the best way to go about it. We initially thought about trust levels (TL4) but 1) some users are already TL3 so the operating window is very small and 2) this would give them some site-wide privileges that we don’t want. We are instead looking to create moderation user groups and grant them moderation privileges in select sub-categories. This begs the question: What can they do in those categories?