Moderation and roles

Two separate ideas decide what someone can do and see:

• Permission decides what a member may do: owner, admin, moderator or member.
• Roles decide which text channels a member can see. Roles never change what someone may do.

Permissions

Rank goes owner > admin > moderator > member. Nobody acts on someone of equal or higher rank.

To change someone's permission, open Community settings, then Members.

Hand over ownership

Sblurp has no button to hand over ownership, so nobody can take a community by mistake or by trickery. The only way is to edit the server's database directly. You need shell access to the computer that runs the community server, and the sqlite3 tool.

1. Stop the community server.

2. Make a copy of sblurp.db in the server's data folder.

3. Run this command in the data folder. Change newowner and oldowner to the two usernames.

   sqlite3 sblurp.db "UPDATE members SET role = CASE username WHEN 'newowner' THEN 4 ELSE 3 END WHERE username IN ('newowner', 'oldowner');"
   

4. Start the server again. The new owner has every permission, and the old owner is now an admin.

Do not edit the database while the server runs.

Reports

Members report messages from the message menu, with an optional note. Moderators, admins and the owner open Reports from the community menu. Each report shows who wrote the message, where it is, who reported it and when, the note, and a copy of the text.

• You see reports about members with a lower permission than yours. The owner sees every report.
• Choose Go to message to open it in its channel. Then delete it, or Kick the author from the report.
• A report from a direct message holds only that message. Moderators cannot open the conversation.
• Choose Resolve when you are done. This deletes every report of that message, with its copy of the text.

Kick and ban

• Kick removes someone. They leave every channel and lose their roles. They may join again.
• Ban does the same and stops their account from joining again.

Their messages stay. Their member record stays too, so if they come back they keep the same member id, as a plain member. Lift a ban on the Bans tab.

Bots are removed by deleting them on the Bots tab, not by kicking.

Roles

Admins make roles on the Roles tab. A role has a name, an optional color and a place in the list.

To limit a text channel to some roles, open Channels and pick the roles. Members with one of those roles can see it, and so can admins and the owner. A channel with no roles is open to every member. A role cannot be deleted while it still limits a channel, so deleting a role never opens a channel to everyone.

Channel modes

A community is in one of two modes. Switch at any time in Community settings.

Private channels and DMs keep their own member lists in both modes.

Message history

By default a community keeps every message forever. An admin can change this under Community settings, then About, then Message history: delete messages after 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, or after any number of days up to 3,650.

• The server checks every hour and deletes messages older than the limit, in small batches. Thread replies, reactions, attached files and search results go with them.
• A thread goes with its first message, even replies that are newer than the limit.
• No message is exempt. Every message older than the limit is deleted.
• Apps hide expired messages at once, before the server deletes them.
• Deleted messages cannot be brought back. Making the limit shorter deletes older messages within the hour.

Private channels

Any member of a private channel may add others to it. Anyone may leave. Removing someone else needs moderator or higher, and a higher rank than theirs.

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