Community Roles and Moderators
Free & ProYour community has three roles that decide who can help run it - member, moderator, and admin - sitting below you, the site administrator. Members take part, moderators keep things tidy across the whole community, and admins help you run it. Appointing a couple of trusted people is how a growing community stays healthy without every report and every off-topic thread landing on one person.
Why use it
A community with one owner and a few hundred members does not scale. You cannot read every post, clear every report, and answer every join request yourself. Promoting a trusted member to moderator hands them the day-to-day work - clearing the moderation queue, removing spam, pinning the posts that matter - while the decisions that should stay with you, like changing what each role is allowed to do, stay with you and your admins.
These roles are community-wide. A moderator here can moderate anywhere in the community, not just one space. (Spaces have their own separate owner / moderator / member roles for running a single space - see Roles, Moderators, and Permissions.)
The three roles
Each role can do everything the role below it can, plus more. The table lists the community-wide abilities each role adds.
| Ability | Member | Moderator | Admin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Post, comment, react, and join spaces | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Report content and appeal decisions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Review the moderation queue | No | Yes | Yes |
| Remove any post and pin posts | No | Yes | Yes |
| Issue strikes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Moderate, manage, and delete any space | No | Yes | Yes |
| Suspend a member | No | Yes | Yes |
| Edit any member's profile | No | No | Yes |
| Promote members to moderator or admin | No | No | Yes |
Above all three sits the site administrator - the WordPress admin who installed BuddyNext. The site administrator can do everything an admin can, and two things no one else can: grant the top admin role to someone, and change what each role is allowed to do (see Settings, below).
These are the defaults. If you have adjusted the Roles & Capabilities settings, your community's abilities may differ from the table above.
How to promote someone
There are two places to change a member's community role. Both write the same role, so use whichever you have open.
From the front end - open the Community Admin panel (under Settings in the left menu, or your community admin link), go to Members, and pick a new role from the dropdown next to the person. The change saves immediately.
From the WordPress admin - go to Users, find the person, and set their role in the Community role column. Save the row.
A few rules keep this safe:
- Only an admin or the site administrator can change roles. Moderators see the roles but cannot change them.
- You cannot change your own role.
- Granting the top admin role is reserved for the site administrator.
Tune what each role can do
The table above is the starting point, not a fixed rule. Open Members > Roles & Capabilities to change the minimum role each ability needs - for example, letting members create spaces, or requiring admin to pin a post. Every ability in the community reads from this one place, so a change here applies everywhere at once.
For the full list of abilities and how to override them in code, see Roles and Capabilities in the developer guide.
Related
- Roles and Permissions - tuning what each community role may do
- Moderation Queue - the queue moderators are promoted to work
- Moderating a Member - the enforcement actions a moderator can take