Run a community People and access

Moderation

Admins and people with the Moderate permission (usually through a “Moderators” role) look after the community from Moderation in the sidebar.

The moderation page: someone asking to join with a note, and a reported spam message with buttons to delete it or dismiss the report.
Someone asking to join, and a reported message. Sideporch 0.7.0

Reports

Anyone can report a message from its menu, with a reason. Moderators see the reports under Moderation, and either delete the message or dismiss the report.

People who asked to join

When sign-up is set to Ask to join, their requests wait under Moderation with the note they wrote. Let them in, or Decline.

Time-outs

A time-out stops someone from posting or reacting for 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week, while they can still read. Give one from their profile; Moderation lists who is timed out, and the profile ends a time-out early.

Bans

A time-out pauses someone; a ban keeps them out. New in 0.6.0. Moderators ban from the person’s profile, which shows the addresses they used in the last 30 days, and other accounts that used the same ones. Ban there:

  • deactivates the account and signs it out everywhere,
  • optionally bans those addresses, so nobody from them can use the server at all, not even to sign up again,
  • optionally bans their email address, so it can’t be used for a new account,
  • optionally removes all their messages, reactions and votes, for spammers.

Under Moderation → Bans, moderators also ban addresses directly (203.0.113.7), ranges (203.0.113.0/24, 2001:db8::/48), email addresses, and whole email domains (@spam.example, which covers its subdomains too). Bans last a day, a week, 30 days, or until someone lifts them. Nobody can ban an admin, or an address range that includes their own address.

Addresses are personal data. Sideporch notes each account’s address at most once a day while it’s signed in, keeps them for 30 days, and shows them only to admins and moderators. Behind a reverse proxy, set --client-ip-header, or every visitor looks like the proxy.

Also moderators’ work

  • Delete anyone’s message.
  • New members can only send a few messages a minute (6 by default), which slows down spam while a moderator steps in.
  • Nobody but admins can send the same message (of 12 characters or more) a third time within ten minutes, which stops copy-and-paste spam across channels.
  • When two different people report messages of someone at trust level 0, that person is timed out for a day, so a spammer stops even before a moderator is around. The reports wait under Moderation as usual; end the time-out from their profile if it was a mistake.