Community Roles and Moderators
Your 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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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