Moderator Powers?

[mkors]

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Hi, I'm totally new to this, so please bear with me...

I'm thinking of creating a message board (yet another ), but I had some concerns about allowing others to help me and my personal liability for their actions. Obviously you need to trust your moderators to help run your page well, but.... My question is - just what kind of abilities will they have? Do they have access to the personal profiles of the regular members? Would I, as an administrator? I'm chiefly concerned about email addresses and passwords/secret questions/answers either being hacked or misused. Do they have the ability to block a questionable user by IP address or is that something I have to do? Thanks for any insight, or if you can point me to a site with all the answers, that'd be great too >

[Peter Duggan]

Do they have access to the personal profiles of the regular members? Would I, as an administrator? I'm chiefly concerned about email addresses and passwords/secret questions/answers either being hacked or misused. Do they have the ability to block a questionable user by IP address or is that something I have to do?

Only admins can mess with most of the things you mention!

Everyone can read profiles, but only admins and the profiles' owners can alter them. Members can hide their email address from the public if they're concerned about misuse. Passwords are encrypted and not even available to admins, but admins can change users' passwords to something new. Secret questions/answers are secret, but they're stored in the database and can be seen by anyone with the power to run phpMyAdmin on it (probably just you). Blocking is another admin job.

Basically, moderators moderate, not administrate! So they can move, merge, split, delete, lock or sticky posts on 'their' boards, and that's about it.