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

Zulip has many features designed to simplify moderation by preventing problematic behavior:

• Disallow disposable email addresses or require users to log in via GitHub or GitLab.
• Restrict who can create streams, create bots, send private messages, or add custom emoji.
• Link to a code of conduct in your organization description (displayed on the registration page).
• Create a default stream for announcements where only admins can post.
• Add a waiting period before new users can take disruptive actions.
• Restrict visibility of email addresses to prevent off-platform spam.
• Restrict wildcard mentions so only moderators can mention everyone in your organization.

Response

The following features are an important part of an organization's playbook when responding to abuse or spam that is not prevented by the organization's policy choices.

• Individual users can mute abusive users to stop harassment that moderators have not yet addressed, or collapse individual messages that they don't want to see.
• Ban (deactivate) users acting in bad faith. You can reactivate them later if they repent.
• Investigate behavior using the streams:public sender:user@example.com search operators to find all messages sent by a user.
• Delete messages, archive streams, and unsubscribe users from streams.
• Move topics, including between streams, when users start conversations in the wrong place.
• Change users' names (e.g. to "Name (Spammer)") for users who sent spam private messages to many community members.
• Deactivate bots or delete custom emoji.

In the works

• Delete spammer. This will wipe the user from your Zulip, by deleting all their messages and reactions, banning them, etc.
• 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.