# Encouraging expertise **URL:** \ **Category:** Community Building\ **Created:** [February 16, 2021, 11:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/encouraging-expertise/179961 "2021-02-16T23:29:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 2
**Author:** ![simon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/simon/32/339122_2.png) [@simon](https://meta.discourse.org/u/simon)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2021, 11:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/encouraging-expertise/179961/2 "2021-02-16T23:58:40Z")
> [@sujato](#): > > So I’m wondering whether there could be something like an Expert Mode ™. This would assigned as a badge or something. For example, a doctor on a medical forum, or a qualified mechanic on a car forum. It would grant the holder the right to apply an “Expert Mode” on posts. > > Perhaps that would work something like this. By default, all replies would have to be pre-moderated by the Expert. If something is off the point, low quality, or ill-informed, they can reply by PM to the poster, but it’s not part of the thread. It is _almost_ possible to accomplish this now by using category moderators. Category moderators are members of a custom group that are granted moderation rights in a category. The group is added to the category from its Moderation settings section. The way I was imagining this would would would be that you would add your Experts to a custom Discourse group, then add that group as category moderators, then select the category option to “Require moderator approval of all new replies.” This works very well when non-group-members reply to any topics in the category. The experts category moderators group members receive a notification about the new reply. They can approve or reject the reply from the review queue. They could also chose to message the user who posted the reply. Where the approach falls apart is that when I test it, when a member of the custom moderator group attempts to reply to the topic, their posts also get added to the review queue. I was not expecting that to happen. What is odd is that the category moderator can actually go to the review queue and _approve their own post_. Something seems a little off here. I’m going to look at it some more. Another way to accomplish what you are looking to do would be to use category security permissions to allow everyone (non-experts) to view topics in the category, but only allow members of your experts group to create and reply to topics. I realize that this doesn’t meet the criteria of allowing non-experts to participate in the conversation though. Edit: the issue with category moderator’s posts needing to be approved has been fixed. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/encouraging-expertise/179961)._