Category moderation and trust levels

tgxworld · April 15, 2026, 8:27am

This was implemented recently in

FEATURE: Support group based category posting review modes (#38707)

committed 02:41AM - 07 Apr 26 UTC

Category approval was previously a simple boolean toggle per post type (`require…_topic_approval` / `require_reply_approval`). This made it impossible to exempt specific groups from review or to require review only for certain groups. This replaces the boolean model with a four-mode enum on `CategorySetting`: `no_one`, `everyone`, `everyone_except`, and `no_one_except`. The group-based modes pair with `CategoryPostingReviewGroup` join records to determine which groups are included or excluded. The old boolean accessors are preserved as aliases of the enum predicates for backward compatibility. With the mode now living on `CategorySetting`, the per-row `permission` column on `CategoryPostingReviewGroup` is redundant since the join table only needs to track which groups are associated with a category, not what kind of permission they have. The column is made nullable and marked readonly in a pre-deploy migration, then dropped in a post-deploy migration. On the frontend, the approval checkboxes are replaced with `ComboBox` dropdowns for the four modes and a conditional `GroupChooser` for the group-based modes, in both the legacy and simplified category editors. The simplified editor uses FormKit field-level validation to show inline errors when a group-based mode is selected without any groups. The legacy editor relies on server-side validation surfaced through `popupAjaxError`.

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Category moderation and trust levels

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