Moderation

Everything here is under Moderation in the menu, for people whose role allows it, and every action is recorded in the moderation log with who did it and why.

The approval queue

When New uploads wait for approval is ticked (Admin → Settings), uploads by people without Upload without approval are pending: only their uploader and staff see them. Approve them, or reject them with a reason, from Moderation → Approval queue, or under Moderate on the post’s own page. The queue leaves out your own uploads; find those with status:pending user:yourname and approve them from their page.

An approver can also disapprove a post: pass on it without rejecting it, saying whether it breaks the rules, is of poor quality, or just isn’t for them, with an optional note. The post stays pending and leaves that approver’s queue, while other approvers see the disapprovals (and the post page lists them). The queue holds the posts found by status:unmoderated: pending posts the approver didn’t upload and hasn’t disapproved. A user’s moderation record counts the posts they disapproved.

The queue has a search box, which takes the usual search syntax (tags, user:name, rating:e and so on, but not status:), and a choice of order: oldest first (the default), newest first, score, favorites, fewest tags or size. Tick posts to approve or reject them together (up to 100 at once, with one reason for the rejections); any that someone else dealt with meanwhile are skipped.

Flags

Members flag posts that should go, with a reason. Flagged posts stay visible, marked flagged, and appear under Moderation → Flags. Dismiss the flags to keep the post, or delete it, which upholds them. Each person can flag posts and report comments about ten times at once, then once a minute.

Comments

Members report comments, with a reason; reported comments appear under Moderation → Reported comments. Staff with Hide comments can hide any comment (which upholds its reports) and restore it later, or dismiss the reports. Hidden comments, and those their authors deleted, stay visible to staff, marked deleted. Comments voted down to −5 or lower are collapsed for everyone.

Reasons

Deleting, rejecting and flagging a post offer the site’s preset reasons (Duplicate, Poor quality, Off-topic, Breaks the rules to begin with), so reasons stay consistent, with a box for details or a reason of one’s own (Other). A preset with details is recorded as “Poor quality: blurry”. Change the lists under Admin → Settings → Moderation reasons, one per line; empty lists leave just the box. The API and Danbooru clients send free text as before.

Deleting, restoring, purging

Deleting a post (with a reason, which is required and shown on the post) hides it from everyone without See deleted posts, except its uploader, who still sees the post and why it went, but can’t change it. It can be restored. Purging a deleted post removes it, its files and its history for good, in the background.

Purging in bulk

Staff with Purge posts (admins, by default) purge many deleted posts at once under Moderation → Purge. Search the deleted posts with the usual search syntax, such as user:name for a spam account’s leftovers (status:deleted is implied, and other statuses are refused), or leave the search empty for every deleted post. The preview says how many posts match and shows the first of them; tick some and Purge ticked (up to 500 at once), or Purge all to purge every match. Either way, tick the box confirming the posts, their files and their history go for good.

A background job then purges the posts one by one, just as purging each would, logging each purge as yours; starting the purge is logged too, with its search or the posts ticked. Posts are checked again as the job gets to them, so one restored meanwhile is skipped. A post whose files can’t be removed is counted as failed and left deleted (purge it again later); if several in a row fail, the job stops and is retried later, carrying on where it stopped rather than starting over. The page lists recent purges with how many posts were purged, skipped and failed. The API has the same operation (POST /api/v1/moderation/purge with a query or post_ids, followed with GET /api/v1/moderation/post-batches/{id}).

Locks

Staff with Lock posts (moderators, by default) lock a post’s rating, tags, notes or status under Moderate on the post page, for instance to end an edit war. The post says what’s locked, and locking and unlocking show in its history and the log. For everyone without Lock posts:

• a locked rating or tags can’t be changed: not by editing the post (on the site, through the API, Danbooru apps or tag scripts), nor by reverting to an earlier version;
• locked notes can’t be added, changed or deleted;
• a locked status means the post can’t be flagged, approved, rejected, deleted, restored or appealed.

Mass tag edits leave posts with locked tags alone, and the tagger doesn’t touch locked tags or ratings. Tag aliases and implications still apply to every post, so a renamed tag stays renamed.

Appeals

The uploader of a deleted post (and anyone who can see deleted posts), if their role can flag posts, can appeal it from the post page with a reason. A post has one open appeal at a time, and each person can appeal three posts at once, then one more every four hours. Open appeals are listed under Moderation → Appeals (and found with status:appealed) for those who can delete and restore posts: Restore brings the post back and grants the appeal (so does restoring it any other way); Keep deleted turns the appeal down, with an optional reason, in the log. The post page keeps its appeals and how they ended, for staff and the uploader.

Bans

Ban a user from their profile, for a set time or until lifted, with a reason. Banned users can still log in and look around as visitors do, see why they’re banned, and can’t change anything; their API keys are limited the same way. Banning someone who’s already banned replaces their ban with the new reason and length. Timed bans last up to 3650 days.

Networks (an address or a CIDR range such as 203.0.113.0/24, or 2001:db8::/64 for IPv6, where one household usually has a whole /64) are banned under Moderation → Bans, partly or fully:

• a partial ban lets requests from the network read, but not register, log in or change anything;
• a full ban keeps the network from seeing the site at all: every page and API call answers that the network is banned, with the reason.

The range may not include your own address, or be wider than a /8 (IPv4) or /16 (IPv6). Network bans are kept in memory on every node, so checking them costs nothing per request; changes reach other nodes within moments.

A user’s record

Staff who can ban users or read the log see a Moderation record link on each profile (and the log’s user names lead there too). The page puts a user’s history in one place: their role, status, when they joined and were last seen, whether two-factor login is on and whether they’re kept from automatic promotion; their bans, with controls to ban or lift the ban; their uploads by status and the recent deletions with reasons; the flags on their uploads, and the flags they filed with how many were upheld or dismissed; reports about their comments and their hidden comments; and, for those who read the log, what was logged about them and what they did themselves.

Deleting all of a user’s uploads

To clean up after a spam account, staff with Delete posts can delete every upload of a user ranked below them at once: Delete all uploads under Uploads on the record says how many posts that is, and asks for a reason (the same presets as deleting one post) and a tick to confirm. A background job then deletes the user’s active, flagged and pending posts in batches, just as deleting each one would: the posts show the reason, open flags on them are upheld, tag counts drop, each deletion is logged as yours, and every post can still be restored (webhooks aren’t sent a post.deleted event for each, though). Posts already deleted are left out; those whose status is locked are skipped unless you have Lock posts. The record shows the progress: how many posts were deleted, skipped (dealt with meanwhile, or locked) and failed. Only one such deletion runs per user at a time, and the account itself stays; ban it separately. The API has the same operation (POST /api/v1/users/{name}/delete-uploads, followed with GET /api/v1/moderation/post-batches/{id}).

Staff notes

The same staff keep private notes about users, on the profile and the record: who wrote each and when, in the same markup as comments. Only staff see them, not the user. Authors delete their own notes; those who can ban users delete anyone’s.

Addresses

For staff who can ban users, the record also lists the addresses the account used, when each was first and last seen, and the other accounts seen on the same addresses, which is how ban evaders usually show. Each address has shortcuts to ban it, or its /24 (IPv4) or /64 (IPv6) network, under Moderation → Bans.

What’s stored, for your privacy policy: for each account, each address it logged in or changed something from (posting, editing, voting, changing settings and so on; merely reading pages isn’t recorded), with the first and last time it was seen, at most hourly. Addresses are kept for 365 days after they were last seen, then forgotten by a daily job; change that under Admin → Settings (Keep the addresses accounts use), where 0 keeps none and stops recording them. Deleting an account deletes its addresses. Sessions separately keep the address they were started from until they end.

Spam accounts

Besides rate limits, email confirmation and approval of new accounts (Admin → Settings → Registration), two settings under Admin → Settings → Spam keep spam accounts out:

• Email domains: a list of domains whose addresses are refused (such as disposable-mail services), or the only ones accepted (such as a school’s). Each domain covers its subdomains. It applies when signing up and changing an address; accounts made through single sign-on simply don’t take a refused address.
• Captcha: with a service set up (see [auth.captcha]), ask for it when signing up, and on comments by accounts younger than a number of days.

Tag aliases and implications

Members request them under Tags → Aliases or Implications; people who can manage tags approve or reject them (their own requests apply at once). See Tags.

Mass tag edits

Moderation → Mass edit (for those with Mass edit tags) adds and removes tags on every post a search finds: cat_ears → add animal_ears, remove cat_ears. Preview shows how many posts match and the first of them; Change starts a background job. The page lists recent mass edits with their progress. Changes show in each post’s history, credited to whoever started the edit, and added tags bring the tags they imply. The tags to add can also take -tag and rating:e to set every post’s rating; locked tags and ratings are left alone. Deleted posts are only changed if the search asks for them (status:deleted or status:any).

Bulk update requests (Tags → Requests) bundle several alias, implication, category and mass edit changes; approving one applies them in order, and approving or rejecting it is logged. See Tags.

Post changes and undoing vandalism

Moderation → Post changes (/post_versions, also linked from each post’s history and each profile) lists every change to posts across the site, newest first, for anyone: tags added and removed, rating, source, parent, description and locks. Filter it by who made the change, the post, a tag added or removed, and a range of days. Changes to tags, wiki pages, pools and notes have lists of their own (/tag_versions, /wiki_page_versions, /pool_versions, /note_versions), filtered by user the same way and linked from each user’s moderation page.

Filtered to one user, it offers those with Undo a user’s post edits (moderators, by default) Undo their edits, for users ranked below them: in the background, every post edit the user made in the range is taken back. Tags they added come off and tags they removed go back; a rating, source, description or parent they set is put back where nobody changed it since, and locked tags and ratings are left alone. Uploads aren’t edits and stay. Each post’s history credits whoever started the undo, and the log records it.

The moderation log

Moderation → Log lists every staff action: approvals, deletions, purges, flag decisions, bans, tag and relation changes, role and setting changes (including those made from the shell). Filter it by action, moderator, post, the user acted on, or a range of days. Role, status and setting changes show what they changed from.