How Forum Admin & Moderation Work

[Nilac]

Currently I am the only Forum Admin, but in fact, my intervention is not needed except for changing the forum structure. The actual moderation works differently and I will explain here how.

Each registered User can be part of one or more User Groups. In the bottom part of the home page there is a "Legend" with all those groups. You can click on a group to see its members.

Each User Group has a Group Moderator, which has the right to add or remove members. The forum admin has to assign this moderator among the members of that group, but the principle is simple. The Assembly group has the President of the Assembly as moderator and so on. This means that adding or removing members in the groups can be done by the group moderators, without the intervention of the forum admin, after that moderator has been assigned (after elections). Some of the groups, like the "Associate Members", "Assembly Members", or "Trade Union Members" are "open groups", which means that users can go the group's page and click the "Request to join" button. The group moderator will then be notified and decide by accessing the same page, where they will see a list of pending requests.

Each Forum, regardless of its place in the structure (the structure has no influence, is purely aesthetic), has read, write and moderate permissions assigned for each User Group (there are also many more specialized permissions like "post special messages", "members can edit their own posts", "make polls" and so on, but I set up all those as expected). I tried to include this information in the description of the forums. The moderation group assigned to the forum can be seen bellow the description in the "Moderators" line. Forum Moderators can close polls prematurely, edit and delete posts, move them in other forums if they are not placed appropriately (for instance I moved several posts from the specialized "Codex" or "Executive Orders" sections, which should include only actual proposals with official polls, to the parent "discussions" forum corresponding to that institution). Again, this works as expected. The User Group "President of the Assembly" is assigned as moderator to all Assembly forums, and so on, as you can see for yourselves.

In conclusion, the Group Moderators and Forum Moderators can do most of the daily administration without the intervention of the Admin, which only needs to set up the forums and groups once, and then assign Group Moderators after each elections.