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Community Oversight

Status: Complete

Instance administrators have elevated visibility and control over all communities on the server, even those they have not explicitly joined.

Permission Required: Instance Admin or Instance Owner

Overview

While communities are primarily managed by their own owners, admins, and moderators, instance administrators need the ability to oversee all communities for safety, compliance, and conflict resolution. Chatalot provides this through the instance admin bypass -- instance owners (and, in community context, admins acting as instance_admin) can access any community without being a member.

Instance Owner Bypass

The instance owner has a "god role" that bypasses all community membership and ban checks. When an instance owner accesses a community's API endpoints, the community gate middleware assigns them the instance_admin role, which grants full access:

Permission Level Roles with Access
can_manage Community owner, community admin, instance admin
can_moderate Community owner, community admin, community moderator, instance admin
is_owner Community owner, instance admin

This means the instance owner can:

  • View any community and its channels
  • Manage community settings
  • Moderate content in any community
  • Remove or ban members
  • Delete communities

Viewing Communities Through the User List

The User Management tab shows each user's community and group memberships. This provides a cross-reference view of which users belong to which communities, including their roles (displayed as tooltips on the membership badges).

Community memberships are shown as purple badges, and group memberships as blue badges.

Managing Communities

Instance admins can take the following actions on communities:

Through the Admin Panel

  • Suspend community owners -- If a community owner is violating instance rules, suspending their account effectively disables their ability to manage the community. See User Management.
  • Purge community content -- Use the Security Settings purge tools to delete all messages in a channel belonging to a community.
  • Review reports -- Community-related reports appear in the Reports tab alongside all other reports.

Through the Community Interface

Instance owners can navigate to any community in the regular chat interface and use the standard community management tools (settings, member management, channel management) as if they were the community owner.

Community Creation Control

The COMMUNITY_CREATION_MODE environment variable controls who can create new communities:

Mode Behavior
admin_only (default) Only instance admins and owners can create communities
open Any registered user can create communities

This setting is configured in the server's .env file or Docker Compose environment:

COMMUNITY_CREATION_MODE=admin_only

Best Practices

  • Respect community autonomy. Use instance-level intervention only when community-level moderation has failed or when instance-wide rules are violated.
  • Document interventions. When taking action on a community, add notes to reports and use the audit log to maintain a paper trail.
  • Communicate with community owners. Before taking drastic action (deleting a community, suspending its owner), reach out to the community owner when possible.

Next Step

Continue to Registration Settings to learn about configuring registration modes.