4.0 - Moderation Part 1: Setting up moderators

IPS News · February 25, 2014

Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suite 4.0.

Part 1: Setting up moderators

Part 2: Approval Queue (New Feature)

Part 3: Reports

Part 4: Effective Moderation

Part 5: Warnings

Up until now, each application has been responsible for managing it's own moderator permissions (for example, you go and set up a moderator in the forums app, then in the gallery app, etc.) and there's been a concept of "global" or "super" moderators who can perform all moderator actions in all applications.

In IPS Community Suite 4.0, we're centralising the creation and assigning of moderator permissions, and are doing this separate from groups (so you can now make just a member a moderator without putting them in a special "moderator" group). It works very similar to Admin Restrictions in 3.x.

Here is the Moderators page:

(In this screenshot I've given moderator controls to everyone in the groups Administrators or Moderators, and to the user "Brandon")

When editing a moderator you see all of the permissions available across all applications.

This screenshot shows global moderator permissions which apply across all applications:

If you do not want to allow any of these globally, you can make them available only to certain areas - when any option is toggled off, the equivalent option will show under each application tab, along with an option to select which areas of that application it can be done in. For example, if I disable the "Can edit all content?" option, a "Downloads" tab appears with the following options:

This allows me to choose what the moderator can edit, and in which categories they can do it. A similar tab appears for each application I have installed, or additional options appear on the tabs.

Also when editing a moderator I can control permissions not related to content, for example, how they can use the warning system:

Member management permissions:

And more.

When editing a moderator, I also have the option to "Give All Permissions" which makes them akin to "global" or "super" moderators in 3.x.

When editing a member which has been given all permissions, I will see a message reminding me that if I remove any permissions they will no longer be a global moderator: