Discourse allows staff members to send a warning message to a user, but there aren’t any automated actions connected to warnings. Staff members can see any warning messages that have been sent to a user by clicking the “warning” link on a user’s profile page. Looking at previous warnings can be useful when trying to decide how to deal with a user.
Another thing to look at is the User Notes plugin. This allows staff to attach notes to a user. These notes can only be seen by other staff users. The big difference between staff notes and warnings is that staff notes don’t cause a message to be sent to the user.
A couple of concepts that may be specific to Discourse are the automated Trust Level system and the community moderation system.
The Trust Level system is outlined here: Understanding Discourse Trust Levels. Essentially, as users spend more time using the forum, they progress from Trust Level 0 to Trust Level 3. Each increase in trust level grants the user more rights on the forum. For example, a Trust Level 0 user cannot flag posts on the site. A Trust Level 1 user can flag posts, but their flags are given less weight than flags cast by Trust Level 3 users.
The community moderation system allows Trust Level 1 and above users to flag posts. Those flags are then handled manually by staff members from the site’s Review Queue. For example, the post in the screenshot below was flagged by a user (in this case me) as being “off topic.” A staff member will need to manually deal with the flag. If they agree that the flag is legitimate, they’re shown a list of options for how to deal with the post and the user.
Depending on the Trust Level of the user(s) who flag the post, it’s possible for flags to automatically hide a post, or silence a user. Even in these cases, I believe that staff members are still given the opportunity to review the hidden post or silenced user from the review queue and override the automatic action.
See What happens when you flag a post for more details about flagging.
Unless I’m missing something, there is still a lack of documentation about how the Review Queue works. For example, it gives staff members access to a “Reviewable Scoring” modal which I believe is used to determine whether or not a post is automatically hidden by community flags:
It would be great if there was some documentation about how the score is calculated and applied.
The Review Queue page’s search functionality could also use some documentation.
I’ve only ever been a moderator on an easy to manage Discourse forum (this one.) Moderation mostly consisted of recategorizing topics, moving posts, etc. It would be great to hear about how some more contentious Discourse sites handle the moderation work flow.