Moderating the forum
How platform roles control moderation, categories and announcements.
The forum has no roles of its own. What someone can do comes from their platform role (Admin, Platform roles), and from the rules of each category. Roles that belong to an experience, such as its owner or Administrator, give no forum powers.
| Permission | Allows |
|---|---|
forum.moderate | Hide and restore replies, delete and restore topics, lock, pin and feature, move topics, mute members, review reports, read the staff-only categories. |
forum.manage | Create, edit, reorder, archive and delete categories, and set who can read, start topics and reply in each. |
forum.announce | Start topics in official categories, including drafts and scheduled posts. |
Super administrators have all of them. Give only what a role needs: the role editor lists them under Forum.
Ranks
Moderators can only hide, restore, edit or mute content and accounts of people below their own platform role. They can always act on their own posts, and nobody can mute themselves. Locking, pinning, featuring and moving are not limited by rank.
Categories
Each category has three rules: who can read, who can start topics and who can reply. A rule is anyone, signed-in members, or a platform permission. A subcategory can only make its parent's rules stricter. You can only require a permission you hold yourself. Categories can be archived (read only) and deleted once empty.
Pausing posting
Under Admin, Community server, Forum posting (needs forum.manage) you can limit what people may add: Open, Replies only (no new topics) or Read only (no topics or replies). Set it for the whole forum, for single categories, or both. The stricter setting wins, and a subcategory also follows its parent. Visitors see a notice, with your own message if you wrote one. Reading, editing, likes and reports keep working, nothing is deleted, and people who manage the forum can still post. Set it back to Open to resume.
Discord channels
On the same page, Forum and support channels send new forum activity to the RoWarden Discord server: new topics in official categories to the announcements channel, new topics in the other public categories to the topics channel, and each first report on a post to a reports channel meant for staff. Topics from categories that signed-out visitors cannot read are never posted.
Word filter and slow mode
Under Manage, the word filter lists words and phrases the forum refuses in titles, posts, edits and tags. The message to the author does not say which word matched. Matching ignores case and accents, treats look-alike characters (n1gg@) as letters, and tolerates spaces, dots and repeated letters inside a word. Tick Whole word only for short words that appear inside harmless ones. The list starts with a few common slurs; add or remove as you need. Changes are audited. The filter applies to everyone, moderators included.
Each category can also have slow mode: members wait that many seconds between posts there (moderators are exempt). A subcategory inherits its parent's slow mode.
Review
On any post that was edited, moderators can open Edit history to read earlier versions. Review lists reports with the post, and a history of every moderation action (who, what and when). Hiding or restoring a post, locking a topic, muting someone and changing a category are all recorded in the platform audit log, which you can also see under Admin, Audit log.
Muting stops someone posting for a number of hours; they can still read the forum. Lifting a mute, or the end of the time, restores posting at once.