Moderating open organizations

An open organization is one where anyone can join without an invitation. Moderation is a big part of making an open community work.

Prevention

• Disallow disposable email addresses or require users to log in via GitHub.
• Restrict who can create streams, create bots or add custom emoji.
• Link to a code of conduct in your organization description (displayed on the registration page).
• Create at least one default stream where only admins can post.
• Add a waiting period before new users can take disruptive actions.
• Restrict email visibility to reduce the likelihood of off-platform spam.

Response

• Ban (deactivate) users acting in bad faith. You can reactivate them later if they repent.
• Use the streams:public sender:user@example.com search operators to find all messages sent by a user.
• Delete messages, delete streams, and unsubscribe users from streams.
• Rename topics.
• Change users' names (e.g. to "Spammer")
• Deactivate bots or delete custom emoji.
• Instruct users to collapse messages that they don't want to see.

In the works

• Delete spammer. This will wipe the user from your Zulip, by deleting all their messages and reactions, banning them, etc.
• Mute user. This will allow an individual user to hide the messages of another individual user.
• New users join as guests. This will allow users joining via open registration to have extremely limited permissions by default, but still enough permissions to ask the core team a question or to get a feel for your community.
• Public archive. This will give a read-only view of selected streams, removing the need in some organizations for having open registration.