# What is a staff user on hosted Discourse?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-staff-user-on-hosted-discourse/112219
**Category:** Hosted Customers
**Tags:** explanation
**Created:** [21 maart 2019 om 07:02 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-staff-user-on-hosted-discourse/112219 "2019-03-21T07:02:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

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### Author: ![Discourse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/discourse/32/148734_2.png) [@Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discourse)
#### Post date: [21 maart 2019 om 07:02 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-staff-user-on-hosted-discourse/112219/1 "2019-03-21T07:02:36Z")

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When choosing a [Discourse hosting plan](https://www.discourse.org/pricing), you might notice that each plan has a different Staff limit:

- Starter: 2
- Pro: 5 (also the legacy Basic plan)
- Business: 15
- Enterprise: unlimited

This topic will help outline what a staff member is in relation to your community.

### What counts as a Staff user?

- A staff user is any user that is an admin, a moderator, or both. The list of current staff members can be viewed at `/about` or listed at `/admin/users/list/staff`.

- ⚠ On hosted sites, there are a few special staff accounts that **do not** count against your limits. These include: system, [discobot](https://meta.discourse.org/t/who-is-discobot/69003), bots associated with AI tools, and any Discourse staff accounts.

### How do I add/remove Staff?

- The account you sign up with when you create your trial will be your first staff user since it is an admin account. After that, admin and moderator status must be manually granted/revoked by visiting a user’s admin page. This can be done by visiting the Users section of your admin panel and selecting a user from the list. Once on the user’s admin page, scroll down to the “ **Permissions** ” section and adjust the following settings to your liking:

- For additional details see: [Granting Admin or Moderator Privileges to a User](https://meta.discourse.org/t/grant-admin-or-moderator-privileges-to-a-user/284754)

### What can Staff users do?

- **Admin**

- **Moderators**

### Are there other ways to facilitate moderation outside of staff users?

Yes! I’m glad you asked 🙂

**Trust Level 4 (TL4)** - manually granting a user with this trust level will give them the following privileges without counting against your Staff limits:

- Edit all posts
- Pin/unpin topic
- Close topics
- Archive topics
- Make topics unlisted
- Split and merge topics
- Reset topic bump date
- Make any post a wiki
- Rebuild post HTML
- Reply to closed topics
- Daily like limit increased by 3×
- Any TL4 flag cast on any post immediately takes effect and hides the target post

**Category Group Moderation** - You can assign one or more user groups to manage the review queue of a specific category. They are also granted the following moderation powers:

- Gets a shield icon next to name on posts under their category
- Mark topics as solved
- Edit posts
- Close topics
- Archive topics
- Move posts from a topic
- Edit category descriptions
- Pin/unpin topics
- Add staff notices

Category moderators do not count against your staff limits. See [Category Group Review/Moderation](https://meta.discourse.org/t/category-group-review-moderation/116478/) for more information.

* * *

### Related Topics

> [@Understanding user statuses, roles, and permissions](https://meta.discourse.org/t/description-of-various-user-states-in-discourse/35171):
>
> bookmark This is a guide for understanding the various user statuses, roles, and permissions within Discourse, including how they affect user capabilities and how they are stored in the database. person_raising_hand Required user level: Administrator Discourse has many built-in user statuses, roles, and permissions. These statuses and roles can be seen for a given user when viewing their profile from the users’ section of the admin dashboard: Permi…

> Last edited by @awesomerobot 2026-08-28T02:29:33Z
> 
> > **Check document**
> >
> > Perform check on document:

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