Moderate the community
Workspace owner, admins · Safeguard the work
Your team decides
Buzz gives you the moderation machinery; it deliberately does not give you the standards or the judgement. Both land on a named person — the workspace owner. The mechanics below are how the system works; the decisions are yours to make and write down before the workspace opens to people outside your team.
What we know today
- Any member can report a message, choosing a category and adding a note. Reports go to a private queue, not to the channel — the reporter is not exposed, and a report is a signal, never an automatic trigger.
- Owners and admins see the queue. There are only two privileged roles; there is no automated moderation, and nothing is actioned without a human deciding.
- The available enforcement actions are: dismiss, delete the message, kick, timeout, ban, or escalate.
- Escalate goes to the relay operator. Platform safety — illegal content, network abuse, legal reporting obligations — is a separate layer that community admins never own. Buzz stated the ownership plainly in v0.5.18: it belongs to whoever operates the relay. Hosted, that is the hosting platform's safety process; self-hosted, it is you, because the party hosting the content carries the legal accountability. Escalation writes a durable record; the platform-side inbox that consumes it is still a separate build.
- Enforcement produces an audit record and notices.
- Buzz enforces no default standards. A community's rules are whatever its owner says they are — and nothing at all if unstated.
- In a workspace that includes external stakeholders and invited specialists, moderation is a duty of care, not an optional extra.
What are this community's standards?
Write what is and is not acceptable in this workspace. For a professional workspace containing external parties, this is short and mostly obvious. Write it anyway; it is what every enforcement decision refers back to.
How do you choose between the responses?
Agree the guidance for choosing between dismiss, delete, kick, timeout, ban and escalate in your context. When is a conversation the right answer rather than an action? What would warrant removing a client's staff member from a workspace, and who is told before it happens?
Escalate needs its own answer, because it is the one action whose destination depends on your hosting model. On a self-hosted relay, escalation arrives back at your own desk — so decide now what your organization does with an escalated report, and whether anyone outside the workspace needs to be involved.
What is recorded and communicated beyond the system?
The system keeps its own audit record. Decide what happens beyond it: who is informed of an enforcement action, whether an external sponsor is told when it involves their people, and what your organization records outside Buzz.
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026