# Moderation

## The queue

**Content → Questions / Answers / Comments / Topics** filtered by `pending` is the moderation queue. **Community → Reports** is the abuse queue. The Overview dashboard shows both counts and links to them.

## What lands in the queue

1. **Policy** — when question moderation is set to hold new questions, everything new arrives pending.
2. **Risk** — the spam assessment can route an individual post to moderation regardless of the global policy.
3. **Reports** — a member reporting existing content opens a report; the content stays visible until a moderator acts.

## Reports

A report records the target (question, answer, comment, topic), the reporter, a reason, and a timestamp.

A moderator can:

- **Review** — mark as under review
- **Resolve** — the report was valid and has been acted on
- **Dismiss** — the report was not valid

Moderator notes are stored with the report so the next moderator sees why a decision was made.

Reporting requires an active signed-in account, POST, and a CSRF token. The same member cannot spam the same target with duplicate reports.

## Acting on content

| Action | Effect |
|---|---|
| Publish | The content becomes visible and counts towards its parent's counters |
| Hide | It disappears from public view; nothing is deleted |
| Delete | The record and its children are removed |
| Lock (topics) | Replies close; existing content stays |
| Pin (topics) | The topic stays at the top of the listing |

Prefer **hide** over **delete** when a decision might be revisited. Deletion is not reversible from the panel.

## The audit log

**System → Audit** records administrative and moderation actions with the actor, the action, the target, and the time. Use it to answer "who hid this and when", which is the question that actually gets asked after a dispute.

## Rate limits

Posting, reporting and voting are rate limited per account and per address. Limits are configurable under Settings → Community. Rate limiting is a throttle, not a ban system — see [Anti-spam](../03-configuration/ANTI-SPAM.md) for the layered model.

## What moderation deliberately does not do

- It does not hard-reject on a single signal such as an address match.
- It does not silently discard content. A held post is visible to its author as pending.
- It does not delete anything automatically.
