In a discussion about category moderator capabilities on Discourse, putty and jordan-violet explore granting selective moderation privileges to community members without giving them full site-wide powers. They aim to allow editing topics, posts, tags, and marking solutions — confirming the first three are possible and questioning whether marking solutions (#4) is supported. Moin clarifies that category moderators are necessary for actions beyond trust levels (like reviewing flags) and for restricting moderation to specific categories. HamMan2118 provides a detailed list: category moderators can edit, move, pin, archive, delete, merge, unlist topics, make wikis, add staff notices, review flags, and edit category descriptions — but cannot change posts to PMs, lock posts, manage users, access the admin dashboard, or reset bump dates. jordan-violet sees potential for a plugin to extend these capabilities. satonotdead questions why resetting bump dates is disabled, noting it’s useful for title edits. HAWK responds it’s rarely requested. JammyDodger links to a feature request and a community plugin that enhances category moderator tools. The thread highlights the need for clearer documentation and potential feature expansion for category moderators.
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?
To add to this (on @putty’s behalf): We are attempting to give community members the ability to moderate the community they are in every day. We want to be very, very careful about what we give them, though. For example, we don’t want to give them the ability to edit all topics, because we wouldn’t want them editing announcements, security topics, etc.
We did read this topic:
We weren’t sure what the value of TL in the Category Moderator column meant. I read that the TL = Trust level dependent, but that doesn’t quite make sense. If a person is of a trust level, and that trust level is enabled to do that thing…then why do they need to be made a category moderator?
Because of the things their trust level cannot allow them (e.g. reviewing flags), or because you want them to be able to do things only in a special category, like editing posts only in a specific category while a higher trust level would allow them to do that everywhere.
I’m onboarding a new developer on my team and we’re having them develop on Discourse. I’ve been thinking of low-to-medium (I hope) things for them to work on, so this could be a good idea.
A plugin to extend the functionality of category moderators, potentially.
No particular reason, other than it hasn’t been asked for. It’s not something that many people heavily use, I don’t believe. Why do title edits require a bump date reset, in your workflow?
